close
close

Mondor Festival

News with a Local Lens

Instant Matzo Balls for the Busy Home Cook – The Forward
minsta

Instant Matzo Balls for the Busy Home Cook – The Forward

(JTA) — For most of Jewish culinary history, anyone looking to prepare matzah balls faced a major choice: weights or floats?

In the 20th century, with the advent of the convenience of home cooking, another decision was added to that of density: from scratch or from a box?

Today, in the age of niche foods, home cooks have a new set of matzah ball options: freeze-dried, frozen, and speckled with furikake, the Japanese seasoning blend comprising seaweed and sesame seeds.

As soup season approaches, a growing number of new efforts are underway to recreate Jewish culture’s most iconic comfort dish for the busy home cook. Legacy brands and new startups are getting into the matzah ball game, aiming to simplify production so that a steaming bowl of flavorful soup can always be just minutes away.

Nooish, released in September, is a hot water option, presented in a paper ramen container, adorned with iconography and lettering indicating that According to its designer, it subtly reflects American Jewish visual culture.

Shalom Japan, the Jewish-Japanese fusion restaurant in Brooklyn, recently launched a mail-order matzah ball ramen kit that allows home cooks to replicate its signature dish.

And even Manischewitz, the famous kosher brand launched in 1888 as a matzah producer, has innovated with its long-standing line of boxed mixes. Now Manischewitz matzah balls can be found in the freezer sections of many supermarkets.

“I don’t know if everyone is ready or able to make a matzah ball, especially younger people,” said Shani Seidman, chief marketing officer for Kayco, Manischewitz’s owner and distributor. “But if you have it readily available in the freezer, you can put it in any soup.”

This trend has sparked debate among Jewish culinary icons, many of whom have their own recipes and traditions for the soup that is a mainstay of Shabbat and holiday tables from the start of the pleasant season until Passover in the spring.

Calling matzah balls “the ultimate Jewish comfort food,” Joan Nathan, the matriarch of the Jewish food world, said she thinks ready-made options are unnecessary and probably subpar. (Her own recipe calls for fresh ginger and nutmeg and yields balls that are neither too dense nor particularly light.)

“Matzah balls are so easy to make. They don’t take any time at all,” she said. “It probably takes less time to make them than to buy them.”

But Adeena Sussman, author of the cookbooks “Sababa” and “Shabbat,” says she understands why some cooks turn to ready-made meals. Her own family is divided: Her mother, Steffi, was firmly ensconced in prep-a-box camp as she prepared food for 60 people at two Passover seders each year. As an adult, Sussman began making his own family’s matzah balls from scratch, shares a recipe from collaborator Chrissy Teigen’s cookbook this calls for seltzer and black pepper.

“Not everyone has a good matzah ball recipe or the means to make matzah balls,” Sussman said. “It’s a difficult time for a Jew. Even a little Jewish comfort, adding hot water to a matzah ball mixture, I’m all for. I think it’s great.

Some of the new products offer a twist on the classic dish.

Shalom Japan’s mail order kit includes two sachets of soup along with matzah balls, sachets of noodles, green onions, soup mandels and spicy sauce. Consumers simply boil water, stick the soup packets in to heat them, remove the packets and put the noodles in the same boiling water to generate their own version of matzah ball ramen . (Add your own furikake.)

“This dish is the dish people think of most when they think of our restaurant,” said Aaron Israel, co-founder of Shalom Japan with his wife Sawako Okochi. “It helps define us.”

Sarah Nathan, the creator of Nooish, for her part, praises the “clean” ingredients of her product: no MSG, less salt than other instant soups on the market and high-end flavors of Burlap and Barrel, the Jewish spice startup.

As a busy executive at food brands like Chobani and Just Date, Nathan, 37, often found herself turning to instant soup when she didn’t have time to cook from scratch. But after helping plan a virtual Jewish food festival during the pandemic, she realized that none of her favorite brands reflected her own culture.

“Why can’t I get instant matzah ball soup? Why does this have to take more than an hour? » Nathan remembers thinking. “It’s very difficult to make, difficult to obtain and it’s expensive. But it is also a language of love.

This fall, after years of testing and product development, it released Nooish to the market. The vegetarian and kosher-certified soups are sold in packages of four for $40 or 18 for $125. His name is a mix of “new,” “Jew,” and a dose of advice from a successful entrepreneur.

“Gwyneth Paltrow said brands with two o’s — like Goop — sell better,” said Nathan, who worked at American Jewish University early in his career and now lives in Chicago.

Sussman tasted the soup and said she was initially skeptical because of its appearance — until she added hot water.

“They’re like space food, freeze-dried. When you look at it, it’s dry and powdery with flecks of dried grass. Until it’s rehydrated, you have no idea what’s going to happen,” she said. “I was pleasantly surprised by the matzah ball. It was better than I thought.

In the first week after launching Nooish, Nathan said she sold primarily to friends and family. In the second case, she said, orders poured in from all over the world, including from places where cooking is impractical or impossible, including on a military ship. Today, she touts its usefulness for organizations that want to send soup to their constituents but want to avoid ordering costly restaurant deliveries or setting up temporary distribution centers from their own kitchens.

The company’s social networks highlight a comment from a Hillel employee who wrote: “Our Hillel sends soup to students who are not feeling well. Nooish has revolutionized the way we do things: no more freezers, no more defrosting, no more complicated requests from campus restaurants.

For Sussman, this type of experience is perhaps the biggest appeal of at-home matzah innovations like Nooish.

“A prepared meal that is tied to memories and associations of very comforting foods can fill a void for people,” Sussman said. “Don’t you see all the mothers sending this to their child in their college dorm?” I would like it.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Before we go, I’d like to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other editorial offices are closing or reducing their staff, the Before removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground, from Israel and the United States, on the impact of the war, the rise of anti-Semitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Before Become a member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.