Homemade Matzoh for Passover

An easy recipe for fantastic crispy matzoh!

I bought this box of commercially made Israeli mazoh at Safeway in Lihue, Hawaii.

Passover, also known as Pesach, begins at sundown on Saturday, April 12th, and ends at nightfall on Sunday, April 20th.

I just love eating matzoh. The crispiness and crunch get me every time.

Commercially manufactured mazoh is square in shape and each piece bears lines of browned areas that look quite appealing. The mazohs are crisp and addictive. I like spreading them with some softened butter or peanut butter or just layering some sliced cheese on top. This is something I do today and have done for most of my life. I grew up eating matzoh, and it was always store bought.

Homemade matzoh is an entirely different thing. The dough is rolled paper thin, docked with a fork, and slid onto a preheated baking stone in a 450˚F oven. In two to three minutes, you’ll get a puffy, bubbly homemade matzoh that becomes shatteringly crisp as it cools. One bite will hook you.

Here’s what home-baked mazoh looks like:

See how thin they are? And those bubbles! The dough is incredibly easy to make and to roll out on a floured cloth.

Where I Learned How to Make Matzoh

About twenty years ago, when I was seeking recipes for my cookbook, “A Baker’s Odyssey,”(Wiley, 2007) Cindy Klotz answered my call for help. I did not know that people actually made mazoh at home, but Cindy does it every year at passover. She makes batch after batch and works so fast she sometimes becomes a blur.

One thing about passover: Rabbinical law says that when flour and water meet, you have 18 minutes to get what you’re making into the oven before fermentation starts. When the Jews fled Egypt during their exodus from slavery, they had no time to bake. So any bread they ate had to be unleavened. Matzoh dough takes little time to make—it’s just flour and water—and it’s rolled so thin that it could bake quickly in the desert heat.

When I was growing up in Shanghai, and the youngest person at the seder, I was given the honor of having matzoh dough wrapped in cloth and strapped to my back to symbolize how matzoh was believed to have been baked during the long journey out of Egypt. Those seders lasted for hours, and all I wanted was some food.

Making Matzoh: The Steps

Move an oven rack to the lowest position and remove the second rack or place it in the highest position. Preheat the oven to 450˚F about 45 minutes before you actually roll out the first matzoh.

Mix flour and water together in a large bowl. Put 8 3/4 ounces (247 grams) of unbleached all-purpose flour into the bowl and, with a fork, gradually stir in 6 ounces (170 grams) of room temperature water to make a shaggy, slightly sticky lump of dough. Do not beat the dough. If you only have dry and liquid measuring cups, use the dip and sweep method to measure 1 3/4 cups flour and a glass measure for 3/4 cup water.

The dough is moist and holds together. Do not knead it or it will be very difficult to roll out. Shape the dough into a ball and coat it lightly with extra flour.

The ball of dough weighs 405 grams. Divide it into 10 equal pieces weighing 40 grams each and roll each piece between your palms into balls.

Each dough ball is a scant 2 inches in diameter.

On a lightly floured pastry cloth, pat a dough ball into a disk about 4-inches in diameter. Work quickly. Then roll the dough from the center out in all directions until the dough is very, very, thin and 9 to 10 inches in diameter. Check often to make sure the dough is not sticking to the cloth. Add flour as necessary. See the dough ball on the right for a size comparison.

Rapidly, with a dinner fork, prick the dough all over. The matzoh is ready to be baked.

Transfer the dough round to a baker’s peel or rimless cookie sheet. To do that, working quickly, fold the dough in half, move it to your sliding surface, and unfold it so it’s a round again.

Slide the matzoh onto the baking stone, and bake for 2 to 3 minutes, sometimes a bit longer depending on your oven, until the matzoh is browned in spots, bubbly looking, with areas that are mostly clear. With tongs, transfer the matzoh to a cooling rack.

Repeat the rolling, pricking, and baking with the remaining matzoh balls.

Once you get a rhythm going, you can all the baking done in 30 to 40 minutes.

When completely cool, store the matzohs in a large ziptop bag where they’ll stay crisp for 4 to 5 days.

Have fun with this. This is a great recipe to make with kids. There’s no rushing around. And you’ll all have so much fun!