Homemade Matzo

My kitchen often feels like a chemistry lab: bottles of acid, cans of base,  containers of coloring agents… Almost like back in college except that I enjoy my home lab a lot more.

This new kitchen experiment is pretty basic. Mix flour, water and oil, roll out the dough, rush into the oven and…. try not to finish all the matzo at once (been there, done that. Not a pretty sight. Had to live on fiber and water for the next few days.)

Just FYI, homemade matzo tastes nothing like the boxed variety. It is also a bit thicker (unless you use the pasta machine to flatten the dough) but both me and my kids prefer the texture. In fact, I am now being asked to stack our snack cabinet with matzo on regular basis. We use it as crackers with brie, hummus, pate and dips.

Matzo

Adapted from The Mile End Cookbook

Ingredients

• 4 ½ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. kosher salt (plus more to top the matzo optionally)
• 2 tbsp. canola or olive oil
• ¾ cups plus 1 tbsp.  warm water

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 500 F and place a pizza stone on the bottom rack
2. In a large bowl, mix together all the ingredients until they come together to form dough. If the dough is sticky, add a bit more flour.
3. Divide the dough into 8 pieces. Flatten each piece slightly and roll as thinly as possible with a rolling pin.
4. Use a form to prick holes in the surface of the dough. For slated matzo, brush or spray the dough surface with water and sprinkle with salt
5. Carefully slide the pieces of dough onto the pizza stone. Bake until the surface of the matzo is golden brown and bubbly, 30 secs to 2 mins, depending on your oven. Using tongs, flip the matzo and continue to bake until the other side is browned and lightly blistered.

Drink pairing

Tea (if you are under 21) or anything stronger, like this Pinot, that I have served time and time again and have already blogged about in my Latkes post