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Happy Passover!

So here is a story about matzah:

Yeast is everywhere! That's the whole idea behind sourdough, right? When we make bread, we add yeast because baker's yeast has been cultivated particularly to rise well, predictably, and add good flavor to the bread, but we could just leave water mixed with flour out on the counter and it would ferment because of wild yeast in the air, and wild yeast in the flour.

So the key to bread not leavening is keeping the flour from touching water, because as soon as you have water and flour, wild yeast will start doing its thing. Fine, that makes sense. Of course, the Rabbis didn't know microbiology, they just knew this observable fact, and so the halacha is based on observation and inference, not scientific delineations of fermentation. So the halacha of making matzah is that you need to protect your flour to make sure that it does not become exposed to water at all until you start making dough. What is flour, though? It's wheat seeds that have been ground up into a powder. So one might reasonably ask if wheat seeds touch water, does yeast start doing its thing there, too? Logically and observationally, the answer is probably not, because the wheat in seed form has a cover on its so the water can't get in, and also since it's not ground it's not really in a form that can really become a dough that rises. But if we're really being careful about this, because avoiding chametz is the central mitzvah of Passover and the Torah goes so far as to say "Guard your matzah", maybe we would ask what if there's a hole in the wheat seed's cover and so water can get in, and it'll start fermenting too early.

So there's a stricter form of creation of matzah, resulting in so-called Shmurah Matzah ("guarded matzah"), where you watch the wheat seeds from the moment they are harvested, to make sure no water comes in contact with them. Not before the harvest, obviously, because rainfall is obviously going to happen and the wheat plants need it. So the Rabbis' understand that the moment of harvest is a transformational one where a thing that was an appendage of the plant becomes a new thing on its own, and from that point on it's considered potentially susceptible to fermentation. (This is a total side tangent, but this idea of the moment of harvest as transformational makes a lot more sense with respect to questions of ineffability like tumah, as compared to physical processes like fermentation. I totally get the idea that a plant is not susceptible to tumah when wet but after you harvest a fruit it can now become susceptible to tumah. But fermentation? The Rabbis clearly know that fermentation can still happen on the plant, there's discussion of grapes fermented on the vine at various places in the Gemara, though I guess it's possible they don't connect grape fermentation to wheat fermentation? I don't know. Sometimes the answer is that Rabbinic distinctions are a thing unto themselves and don't need to be entirely logically consistent.) I haven't really found a detailed description of the practical details of the guarding process, but my general assumption is that this is comparable to other forms of hashgacha, where it's not like you actually have to physically watch the wheat at all times, you just need to make sure that when you're not watching it, it's in sealed containers that can't get water in them, and access to the storage facility is limited only to trustworthy individuals, and so on. But maybe you really need actual eyes on the wheat 24/7, I could be wrong here. Matzah made from such flour is called shmurah matzah. Many Jews make a point to only eat shmurah matzah, or at least to only eat shmurah matzah at the seder. But non-shmurah matzah is perfectly kosher.

We still have a mitzvah of "guard your matzvah", though, even with non-shmurah matzah. Non-shmurah matzah is matzah where you only care about the exposure of the flour to water after it's actually become flour. Which makes a lot more sense. But it still needs to be watched from that point on. So you can't typically actually buy matzah flour, either shmurah or not, in any store, because making sure it meets the requirements of not being exposed to water in accordance with halacha is too logistically intensive. I figured this out back in 2020 when I had all this pandemic bread-baking energy and I wanted to figure out if I could make matzah myself. I decided I couldn't because of the flour problem.

But eventually I realized that if I mill my own flour then I can make non-shmurah matzah. So I bought an inexpensive hand flour mill. And then a few weeks ago I bought wheat berries. So the plan was to very carefully mill the flour and seal it up very well until I was ready to bake with it. I live alone so I think that milling it myself, sealing it myself, and keeping it in a place that only I can access it should qualify completely for watching the flour. At least by my standards and the standards of my family, and I don't really care what other people think. The milling was kind of chaotic- I clamped the mill to my table, but my table's not that stable, so in order to crank the mill effectively I needed to steady it with my other hand. But I kept forgetting the correct place to hold it and grabbing it by the feeding hopper, which wasn't very well secured to the mill body (because the manufacturer wanted to make it easy to change out for a different sized hopper) so I kept yanking off the hopper and throwing wheat berries all over my floor. But in the end I managed to get some flour- some whole wheat and some sifted. More whole wheat than sifted, because my yield from sifting was extremely low.

That left me with one remaining significant problem, which is that my oven, a normal domestic oven, only goes to 525F. Most matzah seems to be baked at higher temperatures, at least 600F, I think because there's a concern that if the temperature isn't hot enough, rising will happen while the dough is heating up initially in the oven before it reaches 'baking temperatures'. We can consider as an extreme example the weird bread I make in my slow cooker where you don't need to pre-rise it because when the slow cooker is first warming up that is effectively a very efficient pre-rise. That said, I don't think 525F is necessarily a problem, especially if I turn on my broiler too. The cutoff temperature is not some absolute number, given that the Rabbis were writing at a time before thermometers were a thing, and it may in fact be that 525F is fine. Stack Exchange cites the Igros Moshe as saying the temperature should be 'when straw will burn', which seems to be probably in the 500-600F range. The risk was that if I determined that the result is chametz, I'd need to re-kasher my oven before Pesach. In any case, to settle this problem I did a testbake in my oven with normal chametz flour a few weeks ago and it seemed to make reasonable matzah. I set the temperature to 525 and then turned on the broiler and it seems to be good enough.

There is sort of a third problem, which I have kind of alluded to, but it's not a particularly unknown problem. Equipment and material issues aside, making kosher matzah is tricky. You have only eighteen minutes from when you start mixing water and flour to when you put it in the oven, and you need to be continually working the dough and keeping track of it to make sure you don't allow any of it to sit and start rising, and there are a variety of other technical details to get right of water to flour ratio and dough shape and size and exposure to sunlight and all sorts of weird halachic rules to make it properly. These are the reasons why typically people leave making matzah to the experts. But this can be managed, My strategy was to make one matzah at a time. I set my timer for eighteen minutes, mixed the water with the flour, then started kneading the dough. After I was happy with the dough, I rolled it out into a thin sheet, then docked it with small holes. Then it went into the oven onto a pre-heated baking steel. While it baked, I clean my mixing bowl and my workspace and get ready to make the next piece. It's extremely inefficient, but it works. Maybe if I do this again, I'll get some helpers so we can do more than one matzah at a time.


I was describing my plans to ghost_lingering and she asked me a good question: Why are you doing this? I don't have a great answer. I got nerdsniped during 2020 and couldn't shake it until I tried? That's probably the honest answer. I wanted a deeper understanding of what matzah means, maybe, is a better answer. Matzah is Lechem Oni, which might be translated most commonly as the 'bread of affliction', but is perhaps more literally the "bread of poverty". I think this process taught me that it lies somewhere in the middle of those two axes. On the one hand, as practiced now it's not exactly a bread of poverty, in that the complicated, labor intensive process makes it expensive to produce. But it's made from the simplest possible ingredients (just bread and water, no other ingredients allowed) in a simple baking process, so it has the Form of a bread of poverty. This is not crazy or paradoxical to me, the idea of putting a lot of effort into creating a bread which formally represents the bread of poverty in a pure form makes logical sense to me as part of a ritual of contemplating slavery and freedom.

But in terms of the bread of affliction, I think there's something very powerful in making it yourself because what matzah is supposed to represent narratively is the bread made in haste as part of the escape. It conjures up the fear, the stress, the danger of the Exodus, and the sacrifices that had to be made. So actually re-enacting making bread in haste feels like a substantial and significant connection back to the Exodus that we are supposed to relive at the Seder. I'm very much looking forward to eating my matzah tonight.

Chag sameach!