Thinking Allowed: Ready, Set ... Matzah!

Matzah is quintessentially Jewish. It’s soooo bland and dry, and yet every year 14.6 million people constipate themselves by bingeing on it for eight days. It’s a tradition to commemorate the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt: we fled the Pharaoh in such a hurry that the bread didn’t have time to rise. I’ve always thought that a sort of random detail to focus on from such a whizbang story, but I suppose it’s better than, say, re-enacting the ten plagues, or wandering around a small desert for forty years.

Anyway, one endearing detail is that, to be considered properly kosher, matzah has to be made in under 18 minutes, from raw ingredients to finished baking. Today, for the first time, our family tried making matzah and it was intense. We set up a production line in the kitchen, and Tova started the timer (an analog Scrabble clock) as we all shouted “GO!” Aurora mixed flour, water, oil and salt furiously while Tamar wedged and kneaded dough like her life depended on it. Then Sophia and Aurora valiantly rolled out chunks of dough, but it was much tougher than most doughs and stayed a bit thick. Tova and Zadie tentatively poked holes in the flattened dough with forks, until Tamar shouted “Faster! Faster!” upon which Tova went absolutely berserk with the fork and just whaled on the dough like Brutus on Caesar, I estimated 6 stabs per second at one point. As the managing director, I mostly tossed balls of dough to the rollers, drank coffee and took selfies.

The first matzot hit the oven at about 8 minutes, but took an alarmingly long time to bake, more than twice as long as expected. In the final minutes we switched to ‘broil’ but the clock was running out. As time expired, we had only managed two pasty-white discs and everyone moaned. But as we rerolled the others flatter and baked them on broil, they started coming out nicer and nicer. The girls brushed some with olive oil and sprinkled (or, in Zadie’s case, dumped) them with sea salt and that worked well too.

In the end, we had a big pile of not-at-all-kosher, golden brown, absolutely delicious matzah. My parents joined for the tasting and it was declared a success. Still, we can’t shake the feeling that we’d make pretty lousy refugees; if we’d fled Egypt, it would have been with exactly two half-baked crackers and a lot of flour on our tunics.