Passover, the Original Gluten-Free Holiday

I’ve finally given up any hope of baking giant discs of handmade matzo, in the shmura style, at home — after more than a decade of giving it my best shot. 

Matzo is very simple, with only three ingredients (flour, water, salt) — but the method of preparing it is so exacting and difficult, it’s almost like a challenge you’d see on a television cooking show. 

We eat matzo to remind us of the flight of the Jews from Egypt: There was no time for the flour and water to do that magical thing they do when they’re combined, which is to become alive and ingest air bubbles and become leavened.

To make authentic handmade matzo, you have to exactly count the seconds that your flour is exposed to your water, so that no leavening can occur. It’s like a challenge you might see on a television cooking show (“The clock is ticking!”).

Then you have to perforate the dough, which is not impossible. What is impossible for most home cooks, however, is the baking. I finally learned this week that the reason my homemade matzo tastes nothing like an authentic delicious shmura  matzo made by professionals is that I can’t crank my oven up to between 600 and 800 degrees.

I accept defeat. And in this year where Amazon has been able to get nearly everything I order to my doorstep in two or three days, I went ahead and ordered some shmura matzo (which is very hard to find outside of Brooklyn). I am not observant, so it won’t matter to me if I don’t get an unbroken crisp circle of shmura matzo, which is needed for the Passover seder. I’m ordering it simply because I like the way it tastes, and you can only get it once a year.

But enough about what we can’t cook. What can we make for the High Holidays, while observing the rule that we can’t eat leavened grain products?

I don’t know enough to instruct you on dietary dos and don’ts but one thing I know is that coconut macaroons are a Passover tradition. These are not to be confused with the light, delicate French macarons cookies, although they’re also wheat free and in theory qualify as a Passover treat. They’re fairly challenging to make, however.

But coconut macaroons are wonderfully simple, and can be made by anyone, even a child (with supervision for the part that involves an electric mixer).

The recipe that I used is from Ina Garten and is far from low-calorie, but if you’re going to eat a cookie, you might as well make it a good one. You can find the original of this online from Food Network.

Ina Garten’s coconut macaroons

Adapted from the Food Network recipe

Makes about 24 cookies

Whites from two large eggs, at room temperature (an excellent way to use fresh, local farm eggs)

1/4 teaspoon good table salt such as Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt

14 ounces of moist, tender shredded coconut from the baking aisle, not the harder coconut flakes you’d buy to snack on

14 ounces of sweetened condensed milk (one can; be sure not to get evaporated milk by mistake)

1 teaspoon good-quality vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper (it’s easier to drop your cook batter onto the paper if you trim it to fit the baking sheets; otherwise the edges blow into the air as you’re trying to work). 

To whip up the egg whites, you’ll want your mixer bowl and beaters to be perfectly clean, with no grease or residual butter on them. The best way to super clean them is with a wipe of vinegar.

Your eggs should be at room temperature. Use large but not “jumbo” eggs, which tend to have a higher risk of salmonella (again, farm eggs are easy to find around here and give you beautiful whipped whites).

Add the salt to the whites.

The mistake most of us make when whipping egg whites is to treat them with kid gloves and to underbeat them. The longer you beat your whites, at high speed, the stronger they’ll become (up to a point, of course). 

For this reason, if you can, you want to use a stand mixer not a hand mixer. If you beat them for about 20 minutes, you’ll get glossy whites that are smooth and creamy; when you turn the beater upside down, the whites should droop nicely into a little elf cap.  

While the whites are beating and the oven is heating, combine in a very large bowl (I used my favorite extra wide ceramic salad bowl) the coconut, condensed milk and vanilla. 

After your whites are nice and glossy and strong, gently add them to the coconut mixer and gently fold them together, using a sturdy spatula to reach under the mixture and fold it up and over, repeatedly, turning the bowl after each turn.

Then take two large spoons, or one big spoon and an ice cream scoop. My ice cream scoop doesn’t have an auto eject feature, it’s just a deep spoon, but it worked fine. The trick to making nice scoops, which I learned from Dave Cadwell from the former Cadwell’s Corner in Cornwall, is that you have to tamp down the ingredients in the one spoon before scooping them out with the other spoon. This gives you nice sturdy cookies. 

Don’t delay unduly in getting your cookies onto the sheet and into the oven, or the liquids will start to separate and leave a milky residue around your cookies.

Each cookie should be about the size of a golf ball.

Bake them for about 25 minutes, until they’re lightly browned on top. Take them out and let them cool completely before you try to move them or they’ll break apart.

If you want to top them with chocolate sauce, wait until they’re cool. Put the warm or room temperature chocolate sauce in a bowl and dunk the top of the cookie into the sauce and turn it until you get as much coverage as you’d like.

Refrigerate them quickly so the chocolate “sets.”

You can store these in a plastic container at room temperature for a week or so.