How I Make My Matzo Ball Soup

When Houston had a very rare “snow day” on January 21st, I made a Facebook post that I would be making matzo ball soup to warm us up during the cold front that came through. After getting such an overwhelming positive response to my post from my friends and in the Facebook food groups I follow, I decided that I need to write down how I make my chicken vegetable soup with carrots, celery, mushrooms, leeks, matzo balls, rice and noodles. This won’t be a regular recipe. It is going to be more of a step-by-step tutorial with pictures and commentary…and, of course, a back story.

Which is where I will start.

Matzo ball soup does more than just please.

It has mystical healing properties…

And your pronunciation

Can develop this variation…

You could start to pronounce “W’s” like “V’s.”……

And “S’s” like “SH” and talk with your hands and answer a question with a question……

First, I am Jewish, and I was raised eating traditional Jewish food, for which I have an acquired taste. I was also lucky when it came to eating this wonderful food because my mother was a great cook. I grew up eating her matzo ball soup, chopped liver, blintzes, stuffed cabbage, latkas, kugels and many more delicious dishes that are essential to the Jewish food culture. She taught me how to cook and I would be her helper when she was getting down in the kitchen. I am so grateful to her for that. I have one of her chef’s coats and I will put it on when I am making something that she taught me how to cook so that I can feel her there with me.

I grew up in a very Jewish place. I went to a public high school where the student body was 90% Jewish. Knowing that the real world was nothing like that, I went to a college where I could see what it would be like to live in the real world where the percentage would be what it really is - 2%. Where I went to college, Clemson University in Northwest South Carolina, it was actually less. Now, my college days were some of the best times of my life. I made great friends there that I am still close with today. But it was a welcome to the real-world experience for me. When I entered Clemson University in the fall of 1970, there were more Jewish members of the faculty than there were Jewish students. And I am sure that I met kids while I was there that had never seen a Jew before. Seriously, girls would try to look for my horns. My guess is that they had been warned about horny Jewish boys. Sorry, couldn’t pass up a shot at a dumb joke. I did get both a great formal and practical education there, but it came at a price. Challah was replaced by cornbread. Corned Beef was replaced by pulled pork. At an Easter dinner at my girlfriend’s house, I mistook mustard greens for spinach and gagged. Not a good look. We broke up shortly after that. Hey, I loved/love Clemson. …BUT I MISSED MY JEW FOOD. So, I clicked my ruby slippers and said the magic words, “There’s no place like home where I can get my mother’s great Jewish home cooking,” and I went home to work in the family business. That was “the plan,” a plan that my father and my uncle had made for me and my brother. And life was moving along nicely according to plan. I courted and married the girl that my mother found for me at a Brith Emeth bingo night. She was everything a nice Jewish boy could ever hope for – good looking, smart, funny, a sports fan and A GREAT COOK. She learned from her mother who was a great cook and taught her how to make all of the wonderful Jewish dishes for Shabbat and the Jewish holidays that all are celebrated with special foods specific to that holiday with many cross overs like, of course, matzo ball soup. Some of my best memories are of us potchke-ing in the kitchen together. She was one of only a very few women that I have been able to work well with in the kitchen.

However, being back in Cleveland did not work out for me according to “the plan.”, My dad’s untimely death four and a half years after I came back home left our family business in disarray. (Is there such a thing as a “timely death?) Long story short, eleven years after I left the business and twenty-one years after I came home, I decided to leave Cleveland and move to Houston to pursue a business opportunity. My wife and daughter decided to take a “wait and see” position before committing to moving and leaving family and friends. I was on my own when I got to Houston.

This is when I began making matzo ball soup. In Cleveland, that had been in the very capable hands of my wife who could take a box of Manischewitz matzo ball soup mix, add some boneless-skinless chicken breast, carrots and celery and make a nice pot of matzo ball soup. Now, at this point, I have to tell you that had I known that it was that easy to make one of my favorite foods, I might have never gotten married. I’m joking.

So here I was living alone in Houston and living on a very tight budget as I sent everything I could back to Cleveland for my girls. Matzo ball soup became a staple for me. It started off with me buying The Big Blue Pot, a sixteen-quart super pot.

I started making it exactly the way that the wife had been making it with some boneless, skinless chicken breasts, carrots and celery. And when I began making it, I learned a cooking hack for making perfect matzo balls from a co-worker who had attended The Culinary Institute of America at Cornell Hospitality School. My associate knew a lot more about cooking than the company’s business. OK, here’s the secret he taught me, and it is so simple – double the oil. The box instructions call for two eggs and two tablespoons of cooking oil. Follow the instructions and you’ll be making golf balls, not matzo balls. Hard little things. I like a firm but fluffy ball myself and this formula works like a charm for me. I have gone on to enhance the flavor of the matzo balls by using two tablespoons of oil and two tablespoons of chicken schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) per half cup of matzo meal. When I make matzo balls, I usually make a triple recipe, one packet from the soup mix box and then a two-packet matzo ball box (each packet is a ½ cup) and I use a tablespoon of Better Than Bouillon roasted chicken bouillon to my egg and oil mixture when I make the triple recipe. This makes them a little bit fluffier and a lot more flavorful.

Once I started making matzo ball soup on a regular basis, I went Mad Scientist altering and adding two the recipe until I came up with the recipe I make today. It is a long drawn out process that takes two day start to finish. It’s worth all the time and effort that goes into it and it also gives you a lot of bang for your buck.

Back in 2007, I made this soup recipe for The Palm restaurant in Houston. A good friend of mine was working there as a waiter. I took a few quarts over to him. He and the manager ate them for lunch. They absolutely loved it. Called it the best bowl of soup they ever ate. The manager called me and asked me if I would come and work as a contract employee and make it for them for the upcoming High Holidays. The Palm had a significant Jewish clientele, and he wanted to be able to offer them something that the other high-profile steakhouses in town could not. I was flattered and happy to do it. After I put everything together for them, I put it into quart containers for easy storage and consistent portions (the matzo balls were in separate containers), I told the head chef that he should be able to get two servings to the quart. He said “no, I’ll be getting three.” I asked him how and he replied, “Shallow bowls.”

There is a little more to the story of my making lots of pots of this incredible soup recipe. When I was married to Mimi, my second wife who tragically died of pancreatic cancer in 2005, we had two of her grandchildren living with us while their mother was serving our country in Iraq. I introduced them to matzo ball soup, and they couldn’t get enough of it. So much so that her granddaughter volunteered to bring a pot to school for a potluck lunch. I didn’t learn this until I got home from working late. I was up most of the night making it happen. I was not going to disappoint her and not make it for her. At least I didn’t have to cool it down and package it. (I kept it in the safe zone above 140 degrees.) The next day, at lunchtime, her grandmother hauled that pot of soup to school, miraculously not dumping it in her car. When I came home from work that day I asked about the leftovers. There were none. It fed two classes of fourth graders and more than a few teachers too.

I hope you have enjoyed this journey into making my complex chicken vegetable soup with matzo balls, noodles and rice. It is an ambitious project, to say the least. I know there are a lot of easier ways to put together a pot of soup, but the complexity delivers a very complex and delicious flavor that cannot be duplicated without the time and effort required to make the recipe this way.

The reason that I wanted to get this written down was for three girls that I love very much – my daughter Margot and my “adopted” daughters Jamie and Shyla. They love this soup and need to be able to make it exactly the same way that I do after I’m gone. Hopefully, I’ll be making them many more pots of soup before that happens. This recipe and about a thousand silly limericks are going to be my legacy.

For the entire story and the complete recipe with a step by step procedure, ingredients and approximate cost and the time it takes to make this real deal better than you bubbe’s chicken soup, check out this link

https://jgkravitz.wordpress.com/how-i-make-my-matzo-ball-soup/