Holy Macaroons and More!

Last year we wrote a couple of times about a line of delightful new products, Matzel Toff. This brand specializes in covering matzah with toffee and an excellent chocolate. While chocolate covered matzah is far from being a new idea, the way Matzel Toff executes it is more than worthy of even a very sophisticated palate.

About six weeks ago, we got their latest offerings Matzel Bits! and Holy Macaroon!. While both SYR and I felt it was a great product, we never got around to post it (a serious oversight, we are thoroughly ashamed of!!!).

Matzel Bits! is made with Parve dark chocolate (kosher for Passover). Starting with Streit’s finest matzah, they cover it with a layer of delicious toffee and the whole confection is then covered with dark chocolate (made from Passover sugar, Passover chocolate liquor, and Passover chocolate cocoa butter.

Holy Macaroon! is a very good, dairy, coconut macaroon covered in dark chocolate and topped with dried cranberries. Frankly, I do not much like traditional macaroons, even as a kid I couldn’t stand them. These macaroons, however, are quite good and make for an interesting variation of a traditional Passover sweet.

You can order the items online at http://matzeltoff.com/ or you can pick it up at a variety of stores. In the New York area you can find these products at Pomegranate in Brooklyn, Zabar’s and Eli’s in Manhattan and many more.

Enjoy, gentle reader, enjoy!

CS

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Matzel Toff

Matzel Toff – Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt

Matzel Toff – Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt

Just when I thought nothing could top the taste of Matzel Toff‘s Milk Chocolate covered matzah, I found out how grievously wrong I was. Matzel Toff‘s Dark Chocolate With Salt covered matzah is even better yet! Sea salt and chocolate?!?!? Sounds strange, right?  Try it, you’ll love it.

I just came across this delicacy and couldn’t wait to taste it.

Matzel Toff's Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt

I wasn’t disappointed, an amalgam of contrasting and complimenting flavors, this was a great exotic treat. Covered with toffee (which immediately sets this bar miles ahead of other plain chocolate covered matzah), followed by a thick layer of dark chocolate sprinkled with sea salt, it combines the complex mineral taste of sea salt with dark chocolate (less sweet than its full milk sibling) and a rich toffee that gives it that extra crunch.

This is truly a gourmet treat. Like the last bars we tried, this one also barely lasted a few minutes. Neither SYR nor I could resist it! Phillip Guttman and Abigail Levy, Matzel Toff‘s owners/partners, have done it again!

We’ve received quite a few inquiries as to where it’s available, having contacted the company I was assured that their products will be available at a number of places in the five boroughs and in various states in March, with various products being introduced specifically for Pesach. Meanwhile, starting in March also, you may order from their current stock or pre-order the Passover products at their website.

Enjoy, gentle reader, enjoy!

CS

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Matzel Toff

Ethnogastropolitics

Well, the New Year is finally upon us. Some of my favorite moments are those great end of the year stories. Here are a few food related ones that caught my eye. While we’re obsessed with e-coli and mad cow disease breakout, we have developed some new twists on ‘when pigs fly.’ Like the web designer who’s suing a NYC Scandinavian themed restaurant for the 150 pound decorative moose head with 3-foot-wide antlers that fell off the wall and hit her; got to love that one. Or, how about the rights of farshtoppte katchkas? We now have a politically correct foie gras being produced. Ducks and geese no longer have to suffer forced feeding and the resulting engorged livers sustained to indulge a connoisseur’s palate.

This year, on a more serious note, we were forced to take a look at our own production standards. Aside from the Madoff driven stock market fall, we had the tremendous fall from grace of one of our own primary meat processing plants. It’s kind of ironic that this year we have witnessed record numbers at food banks and soup kitchens around the nation, and that that same meat producer had fed thousands with his charitable food bank work.

On another note, Raymond Sokolov, of the Wall Street Journal, in a piece entitled Exceptional Food Moments of 2009, described “Mr. Obama continued his foray into ethnogastropolitics by engaging New York-based, Ethiopian-Swedish chef Marcus Samuelsson to cook the administration’s first state dinner, an Indian-fusion meal for the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.” A vegetarian dish, by the way, “which included roasted potato dumplings with tomato chutney, chickpeas and okra or green curry prawns, caramelized salsify with smoked collard greens and coconut-aged basmati rice.” Yum yum! Who would have ever thought that we would move from glasnost to ethnogastropolitics with Swedish Ethiopian chefs preparing dishes at the White House for a black president of the United States of America? Truly Moshiach is on his way! When you think about it, the ethnogastropolitics concept has been a bona-fide component of our Jewish history and our accompanying tales of persecution. From libels of blood mixed with matzo to kashrus on the run from one pogrom to another, our very make-up is a testament to surviving that particular political combination.

Wishing all our readers a happy, productive and successful secular New Year 2010! May the fiscal New Year be Madoff free, swine flu free, ethnogastropolically correct, and may no moose heads fall upon us.

Best Wishes,

SYR