Hand Made Matzot (Article# 80) 4/10/2008

As we entered into full Pesach cleaning mode, I took a week off last week. It isn’t as if you missed much.

Although Larry Gordon doesn’t really believe me when I tell him this, office business slows down for almost a month and a half through Pesach. Beginning a week before Purim, as people begin to make their preparations for the chagim, it becomes harder and harder to get them to sit down and do business.

The tourist industry is busy ramping up for a jam packed 10-14 days of Pesach visitors. Yeshivot and seminaries are either in Purim mode or vacation mode as the students all disappear either to their homes or to wherever they plan to be for the chagim. If you are in the non-profit or tourist industry (technically I am in both), this is a slower time of year.

We had a 7th birthday party in our backyard for Mordechai. We usually do an in-school celebration and this is only the third at-home party we have ever had. He really wanted the party, and Chaya decided that she would organize it so we said OK. With a class full of Hebrew speakers, we left it to Chaya and her friend Sarah Fuchs to run things for us. I am amazed by Chaya’s growth in the language and also in her confidence in speaking with the kids and being able to organize them and run the party.

Mordechai is of an age where he doesn’t really remember that much of America. It is kind of weird. We send him for special English lessons, but he prefers to read Hebrew if given the choice. He plays soccer all the time outside and when the kids of our block play together, they speak Hebrew even when the entire group is made up of English speakers.

With the party out of the way, we started gearing up for Pesach. With Goldie’s parents arriving the day before Yom Tov, we want to maximize their visit by having everything prepared by the time they get here. So Goldie has begun to list and plan everything we do.

We got the usual emails from shul asking about our wine and hand made matza order for this year. While we ordered the wine (it really isn’t cheaper but definitely more convenient), I decided that I wanted to try something different this year for the matza.

Twenty three years ago, as a student in Yeshiva, my cousin asked me to join him in making his hand made matzot. He had ordered a specific amount from a specific bakery that he uses along with a group of other families in his neighborhood. In order to keep the price down, he was required to put in a certain amount “sweat equity” labor in the manufacturing process and was short a few hours. So he asked me if I could come help.

Thinking it would be an interesting to do, I agreed and met him at the appropriate time and place. The chareidi foreman took one look at me and said, “You can switch the poles after the matza is baked.” Translation: we ain’t letting you anywhere NEAR the actual production line.

Since then, making my own matzot was definitely on my “to do” list. I therefore sent an email to the local Bet Shemesh email list asking if anyone knew of a matza bakery that allowed people to come bake their own matzot. Lo and behold, I immediately got flooded with replies that the Feigenson shul in Nofei Aviv, a 2 minute drive from my house has a matza bakery in their basement every year.

Within hours, Avrumie Weiss (one of our neighbors) called me up to tell me that he had been trying to put together a group to go to the shul and buy a 3 hour baking slot and our two families combined would fill the labor squad if we would go into it with them. We booked the time slot and excitedly prepared for the day.

We were allowed to bring anyone over bar or bat mitzvah with us, so our older kids came too (Aliza had a math test she couldn’t miss – so she missed out this year) and we baked our own matzot this week. It was very hard work, especially the kneading which is a lot of intense action in a short period of time (the longer it takes to knead, the less time you have to roll and puncture the dough and then get it into the oven before the time is up). Of course, with each cycle we also had to clean, clean, clean everything before it became chometz as well, so we felt afterward like we had all had a good workout.

My job was taking the rolled and perforated dough and getting it (flat with no folds) into the oven. I can definitely tell you that the oven is hot and the dough seems to naturally want to fold itself over no matter how hard you try to avoid it. I was also in charge of blowtorching several of the metal implements every cycle to completely clean them from the dough.

At the end of our shift, the mashgiach told us that he was amazed at how many kosher matzot we were able to produce. We had several cycles in which less than 2 matzot were unusable for Pesach and the end result was about 160 or so matzot. Of course, they were not nearly the size or shape of the ones that come from the professional matzo bakeries, but they are definitely the only matzot that we personally had a hand in making and that fact will definitely make them taste better at the Seder.

We had to take them home in special garbage bags because we didn’t think to bring any boxes with us beforehand and I am definitely nervous that they will break (since they aren’t actually totally flat) during the seder, but I guess I will just have to ask a Rabbi what to do if……