[Avodah] Soft Matza

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Meir Rabi wrote:
> Why and when did Matza become hard? Matza used to be a home-baked,
> soft product. It was baked daily during Pesach. However, Matza
> production eventually moved out of our homes. We also stopped
> baking it during Pesach. It was all manufactured prior to Pesach.
> That is when, in order to prolong its "shelf-life" and prevent it
> from becoming mouldy, it became necessary to bake it dry.

Is this really the only reason? For a very long time, the reason I
learned was that this is just another in a long line of chumros adopted
for chametz and matza.

It is no different than our not doing chalita nowadays, which (IIRC)
is a sort of "flash-boiling" of grain, which totally cooks the grain
before it has a chance to become chometz. In theory it works, but we
worry that we might not do it correctly, rendering the grain chometz.

Similarly, our practice is to never let the matza dough rest at all, AND
to get it into the oven within 18 minutes. The actual halacha is that
EITHER of these would be enough, but because we worry that the dough's
internal heat (caused by the kneading) might cause it to become chometz
immediately if we'd let it sit at all.

Similarly, I was taught that although the halacha is to allow matza even
up to a tefach thick, our practice (please note that I am not using the
word "minhag") is to minimize the possibility of chometz by baking the
matzos very thin.

> Halacha (ShO Siman 461) tells us that Matza is baked when there are
> no stringy doughy threads stretched between pieces of a Matza that
> has been torn apart. Alternatively, we see if any dough sticks to a
> skewer poked into the Matza. Try poking a hard Matza with a skewer.
> Clearly, these tests apply to soft Matza only and were applied to
> Exodus soft Matza.

My experience seems to be different than RMR's.

When I was in yeshiva, and our chabura went to bake our hand matzas,
I was assigned the job of being one of the checkers. The fresh matzos
came out of the oven, and the Rosh Yeshiva taught us what to look for,
and what to do with the problematic ones. In many cases, most of the
matza was okay, but a certain area needed to be removed, along with a
one-etzba radius around that area.

If the matzos would have been as crispy as RMR describes, it would have
been very difficult to break the matza efficiently. But my experience
was that in the first couple of minutes after the matza leaves the oven,
it was still soft enough that it was very easy to poke a hole in it,
and then tear away those parts which needed to be discarded.

I suspect that this ease was *not* due to the matza still being warm,
but due to it still being slightly *moist*, and in those first couple
of minutes, the residual moisture evaporated. In any case, the skewer
test described by RMR would not have been difficult to do. (In fact,
I have vague memories of tearing off a problematic piece of the matza,
and finding threads of the type he describes.)


R' Meir Rabi mentioned the website http://www.realmatza.com
One of the pages on that site
(http://www.realmatza.com/coconut-shell.html) says the following:

> ... Such large volumes required that manufacturing begin many
> weeks before Passover. How was the Matza to be prevented from
> becoming mouldy?

> The solution was dehydration; simply bake it dry, employing an
> age old method of preserving foods without refrigeration. It was
> a compromise, but seen as being the best outcome, considering the
> circumstances.

> And that, my friends, is the story of, How Matza Became a Brick.

Several words here -- like dehydration and preserving -- made me think
of hardtack. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardtack for a description
and several photos of this food, whose ingredients are almost the same
as matzah, and which lasts a very long time because it is so dry.

But when I look at the pictures (try Google Images for even more photos),
it seems to me that hardtack is considerably thinker than matzah. It's
not nearly the tefach thick which halacha allows, but still, it seems
to be a good 5-10 mm or so -- much thicker than matza wafers.

To me, this is good evidence that preservation is NOT the main reason
we've switched from soft matza to hard wafers. If preservation WAS the
main reason, it would not need to be quite this thin. Then what IS the
reason for making it so thin? I suggest that the thinness is primarily
for chometz-prevention, enabling the dough to be baked very quickly.

Akiva Miller