Passover Puffs that taste good

Every Jewish cookbook has a recipe for Passover puffs or muffins. The method of making these muffins is awfully like making cream puffs with two exceptions. The flour is replaced with matza meal or a mix of matza and cake meal and the fat in the recipe is oil rather than butter.
The result is a nice alternative to eating matza, but it is a bit heavy and often an unfortunate grey color.
This year I have made cream puffs several times using the method laid out by Michael Ruhlman in his excellent cookbook, Ratio. I kept thinking that the Passover puffs might be improved if I just followed rhulman’s recipe but substituted cake meal for the flour.
My hunch was right. Clearly these are for dairy meals only and they are quite delicious. The three puffs pictured above were all that was left after last night’s batch were devoured .

Good Passover Puffs

8 oz eggs

1 stick butter

1/2 tsp salt

1 Tbs sugar

scant cup matza cake meal

4 eggs

Pre heat oven to 425. Bring the water butter salt & sugar to a boil in a medium sized pot. Reduce heat to medium and add cake meal stirring rapidly. cook for a few minutes until the bough pulls away from the sides of the pan and some of the water has evaporated 9 another minute or two after the flour has been incorprated.

Remove pan from the heat and allow to cool.

Transfer mixture to a bowl. Add eggs one at a time and mix well. A fork will work, an electric mixer is better. until the 3rd egg is added this will look like an ugly mess. Don’t worry. continue mixing until you have a smooth shiny thick batter.

drop glops of the batter into greased muffin tins or onto a sheet of parchment paper placed on a cookie sheet ( I don’t own a cookie sheet for Passover thus the muffin tin)

put baking sheet/muffin tin into the oven

after 10 minutes reduce heat to 375.

Bake until done( puffy and golden brown)

you can also top with a cinnamon/sugar mix before baking

Comments

מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים

וְנֶאֱמָן אַתָּה לְהַחֲיוֹת מֵתִים: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה מְחַיֵּה הַמֵּתִים You are faithful to restore the dead to life. Blessed are You, Adonoy, Resurrector of the dead. That particular line is recited at every single prayer service every day three times a day, unless you use a Reform or Reconstructionist prayer book . In those liturgies instead of praising God for resurrecting the dead God is praised for giving life to all. I am enough of a modern woman, a modern thinker, to not actually believe in the actual resurrection of the dead. I don't actually expect all of the residents of the Workmen's Circle section of Mount Hebron cemetery in Queens to get up and get back to work at their sewing machines. I don't expect the young children buried here or the babies buried here to one day get up and frolic. Yet, every single time I get up to lead services I say those words about the reanimating of the dead with every fiber of my being. Yesterday, I e...

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

Food friday - your grandmother's food processor

My grandmother bought my mother this wooden bowl and a chopping knife, known in Yiddish as a hock-messer, soon after my parents got married. Yes, she also got them a dairy set as well. these wooden bowls and chopping knives were a big part of food prep when I was growing up. meatloaf and meat balls were mixed in this bowl. Chopped liver was made in this bowl as well. Sundays we often made chicken salad for lunch made out of chicken left over from Shabbat chopped with vegetables and mayo. That too, was made in this bowl. When I was in college my parents got their first food processor and the chopping bowls were not used as much. Several years ago, my father asked if i would like the bowls and the hock-messers. I was happy to have them. I like the sheer physicality of chopping up a big bowl of stuff into teeny pieces. While the wooden bowls have stood up well to the years of use, the hock-messers had not. The bladed which were bolted into their handles, wobbled. The blades wouldn't ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog