April 22, 2008 / New York TIMES It's Passover. Who's Hiding the Matzo? By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
LOS ANGELES — To the lengthening list of comestible problems befalling our nation, add this: a matzo shortage. >From coast to coast, a shortfall of the unleavened flat cracker bread eaten by Jews during the eight days of Passover has sent shoppers scurrying from store to store in search of it. On Monday, Allison Mnookin circled the aisles of her local Whole Foods store in San Mateo, Calif., three times. There was no matzo to be found. "Being out of matzo is like being out of milk," Ms. Mnookin said. So it was on to Safeway. Nothing. Fearing that the box of stale matzo remaining in her pantry from last year would not cut it, she drove nearly 15 miles to Menlo Park. Hypothesis: If the shortage had been on gefilte fish, complaints would have been far fewer. The reasons behind the matzo shortage range from manufacturing problems, decisions by some stores not to carry the product this Passover and vague talk of a possible work stoppage. "It seemed like the whole region had a problem getting it in," said Jason Hodges, a supervisor in the grocery department at a Whole Foods in Miami. A person who answered the phone at a ShopRite in Philadelphia said stores there were sold out, as was the Food Emporium in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., in Westchester County. "We heard there was a strike or something," said the Food Emporium manager, Frantz Baptiste. "The first shipment we had was a month ago, and we never got another one." Phone calls and e-mail messages to the largest suppliers of unleavened bread products, Streit's, Manischewitz and Yehuda, brought no response on Monday, possibly because executives were off for Passover, which began Saturday night. But Manischewitz officials have said that problems with a new state-of-the-art oven in its only New Jersey plant caused it to scrap this Passover's supply of Tam Tam crackers, its little six-sided matzo morsels, as well as some less popular matzo varieties. Trader Joe's stores opted not to sell Passover matzo this year, as did some Costco stores. "It's not a huge item for us," said a Costco spokesman, Bob Nelson. The problem seemed especially acute in the San Francisco Bay Area. In Palo Alto, Amy Kawadler said she had been told there was no matzo at the Mollie Stone's Market, which carries a wide selection of kosher food, but she noticed a lone box making its way down a checkout conveyor. When she inquired about it, the customer "grabbed it and pressed it against his chest and said, 'This is my matzo,' " Ms. Kawadler said. He directed her to the section where one last box, of onion poppy matzo, remained, resting on the back of a bottom shelf. "I ran with my hands in the air, pumping the box in my hand saying, 'I got the last box of matzo!' " Ms. Kawadler said. "It was the talk of our seder." ---- [HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF?] March 31, 1988/New York TIMES Matzoh Handmade In Old Way Is Scarce By ARI L. GOLDMAN LEAD: In Jewish communities all around New York, where preparations for tomorrow night's Passover seder have reached a fever pitch, everybody is talking about the Great Shmura Matzoh Shortage of '88. In Jewish communities all around New York, where preparations for tomorrow night's Passover seder have reached a fever pitch, everybody is talking about the Great Shmura Matzoh Shortage of '88. ''People keep coming in for it, but I can't find another piece,'' said Leibel Bistritzky, who sells Passover goods at his cramped store at 27 1/2 Essex Street on the Lower East Side. ''In 25 years, I've never seen it this bad.'' ''We're turning people away,'' said Duvid Rozenburg, the administrator of the Satmar Shmura Hand-Matzoh Bakery at 427 Broadway in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. ''We can't make it fast enough.'' Baked in Brick Ovens Regular Passover matzoh - the square unleavened bread produced by machines and sold in supermarkets - remains in abundance. But shmura, which is usually round, made by hand and baked in brick ovens, is scarce. Shmura, the Hebrew word for watched, is matzoh that is meticulously supervised by teams of rabbis from the harvest of the grain through the baking process. Various reasons have been offered for the shortage. In part, say those who are familiar with it, it is because Israeli bakers, who in the past have supplied up to 20,000 pounds a year to the American market, have not exported this year. The Israeli shortfall results from the Biblical mandate that the land lie fallow every seven years, which has restricted the harvest of 5747, the latest Jewish calendar year. But the main reason for the shortage is an increase in demand, attributed to a return to tradition among a Jewish population that, in many cases, is not deterred by price. The cost of handmade shmura this year is about $9.25 per pound. Machine-made matzoh is going for $1.39 a pound. There is also a small market in machine shmura at $7 or $8 a pound, but this, too, is scarce this year. Jews eat matzoh at the Passover seder to commemorate the exodus from Egypt some 3,000 years ago. The basic recipe of flour and water that the Israelites improvised as they fled has changed little since that time, although the technology of matzoh baking has. While the machine-made variety is acceptable to most Jews, it lacks what Mr. Bistritzky called ''feeling.'' 'The Real Stuff' ''People see the shmura as the real stuff,'' he said. ''It reminds them of old times. If you want to tell your grandchildren about the exodus, handmade shmura gives a feeling that the machine matzoh cannot.'' For Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox Jews, however, the shmura provides more than authenticity. They will eat no other matzoh, only the handmade shmura, all eight days of Passover, which begins at sundown tomorrow. They rely on a verse from Exodus 12:17 - ''And you shall observe the matzohs'' - and don't trust machines to do the watching for them. For some families this can be a big financial burden. Solomon Schnitzler, a Brooklyn insurance agent with seven children, showed a receipt for $212.75 worth of matzoh from the Satmar bakery. He bought 23 pounds at $9.25 a pound. ''I'm just happy I can get it,'' he said. Not Taking Advantage Rabbi Jacob Twersky, who heads the Chotiner-Bronx Park East Jewish Center, said that months ago he ordered 52 pounds but was told that only 45 pounds would be available to him because of the shortage. He declined to identify the bakery he used, saying that he might be cut off from future supplies if he complained publicly. Rabbi Twersky, who is expecting 15 people around his seder table, said the bakers were not taking advantage of the situation. ''They could get $50 a pound, but they would not take a nickel more'' than the predetermined price, he said. Nearly all of the shmura matzoh made in the United States comes from six or seven bakeries in the New York area. One of the busiest, the Satmar bakery, says it bakes close to 100,000 pounds a year, but estimates for the other bakeries were not available. Shlomo Igel, assistant manager for the Belzer Shmura Matzoh Bakery in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, said he has filled orders for cities as widespread as Seattle, Chicago, San Diego and Las Vegas, Nev. ''We also sent 28 pounds to Australia,'' he said. Other New York bakeries supply Europe and some even send to Israel. Added to the Staff At the Satmar bakery in Williamsburg, rabbinical students and teen-age girls were added to the staff in recent days to meet the demand. As in one of history's first assembly lines, fired more by religious devotion than productivity, the 50 men and 50 women worked feverishly yesterday. A man in a room the size of a closet was handed flour through one window and water through another. He mixed them and handed them out a third window to a woman waiting to divide the dough into small pieces. The pieces were given in turn to women standing with rolling pins at long tables. A man then appeared and gathered the dough on a 10-foot-long stick. He laid the dough down in a red-brick oven heated by coal and wood. Another man turned the dough and took out the finished matzoh. The entire process - from mixing to baking - must be completed in under 18 minutes. Any longer could mean that the dough would rise and become closer to bread than matzoh. As a precaution against a residue of dough rising, the activity stopped periodically and all the employees washed their hands and changed their baker's tools. At Aron Streit Inc., a kosher provisions company that makes regular Passover matzohs by machine, there is no talk of shortage. ''No problem,'' said Muriel Streit Fisher, an executive vice president and granddaughter of the founder. ''Our matzohs are coming out like hotcakes.'' -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
