Are you cheating if you use baking powder or soda on Passover?

by Sarah J. Gim, Posted Apr 10th 2006 @ 1:15PM

With Passover starting in a couple of days, many households are preparing for the eight day "Festival on Matzos" that is completely free of leavened breads, crackers, cakes, cookies.

However, many rabbis of some of the most orthodox associations and Jewish food historians say that the holiday has become overly complicated. Jews avoid grain altogether for fear that even without yeast, leavening may have occurred. Jewish people today have been overly cautious and have misunderstood the term for "leavening," simply excluding any ingredient, not just natural yeast, that causes dough to rise.

But the leavening that is mentioned in the Torah as "chametz," according to one author, is natural yeast, which causes leavening by fermentation, and does not refer to baking powder or baking soda.

Now, I'm not a strictly observant Jew. I didn't have to suffer with leaden cakes made of nut flours and matzoh meal for eight days every year, but I still have to wonder that "allowing" this and that and lifting restrictions takes away from one of the points of the holiday, which is to appreciate the suffering of ancestors.

On the other hand, perhaps there has just been too much focus on the rules themselves rather than on what they mean.

Source

Filed Under: Newspapers, How To
Tags: baking, jewish cooking, jewish food, passover