A few methods to cooking for Passover

I have 3 primary strategies to cooking for Passover, and all of them abide by the holiday’s nutritional legal guidelines: No wheat, oats, barley, spelt or rye, and no fermented foodstuff. (Some persons also really do not try to eat legumes, rice or corn, but I’m not one particular of them.)

One: Cook the way I generally do, but swap out the flour, pasta, bread crumbs and the like for matzo food and other pesadic (kosher for Passover) products.

Two: Celebrate the “holiday of matzo” concept and prepare dinner with it outright, flaunting it entire and in large parts.

3: Use recipes that really do not have to have forbidden components. I are inclined to do a tiny of each, relying on the circumstance.

I lean toward the initially solution for day to day eating: when I just want a bite or need to toss collectively lunch or a weeknight supper. (I attempt to have enough leftovers from the Seder food to feed myself at lunch for the 7 days, but they in some cases really do not final that very long.) A standout in this class is the “Passover roll” — a video game changer when I found it many a long time in the past.

Entirely kosher for Passover, these “rolls” are just cream puff pastry (pâte à choux) built with matzo cake meal — a much more finely floor matzo food — relatively than flour. I like to make a batch at the beginning of the vacation (this calendar year, it’s March 27-April 4) to have on hand for speedy sandwiches. They are a particularly good stand-in for bagels, slathered with product cheese and piled with lox, tomatoes, purple onions and capers. Cookbook author Faye Levy incorporates cheese into the dough to make gougères and then fills them with savory mixtures of veggies and herbs. She also uses them for desserts like espresso product puffs and profiteroles.

The next strategy (the “holiday of matzo” notion), making use of complete sheets of matzo straight from the box, has turn out to be my default. The getaway is a celebration of matzo — why contort it to appear, style and really feel like a little something else? I make no-bake cakes and savory casseroles with levels of full matzos and, of course, I make lots of matzo brei. I like to give the matzo crackers a long soak before frying them up to a gentle crunchiness with a creamy chew.

The third strategy has very long been my go-to for Passover desserts. Flourless chocolate cake is easy and divine, and now that the gluten-free pattern has taken maintain, it is less complicated than ever to discover Passover-appropriate dessert recipes. One of my individual favorites is the sour cherry-almond cookies from Bartavelle Coffee & Wine Bar in Berkeley.

Nevertheless I decide on to approach cooking for the getaway, I adore how it forces me to request resourceful methods to some of the dilemmas its nutritional constraints can current.

Get the recipes:

Time
1 hour 50 minutes

Yields
Would make about 2 dozen puffs

Time
1 hour 15 minutes

Yields
Makes about 2½ dozen cookies