Smell that, Liz? I do, it smells really good. It smells like Shabbat or Passover holidays. It smells like my grandmother’s house, holidays, yeah.

What are we going to make? We're making chicken soup and matzo balls. Yeah. And we've got chicken soup. It's been going for about three hours now. So this kitchen smells amazing. Yeah. I think that that smell is creeping into every corner of the house, finds its way into every closet and nook and cranny.

You know, it's Passover. You know, it's Shabbat because of that chicken soup smell.

So. All right. So we've got the soup going. We'll get to that. But maybe let's make, let's make matzo balls. Let's make the classic. Let's make let's make knaidel.

Listen, I love making matzo balls - Kneidlach. I find that often we use matzo ball soup mixes or you use the matzo meal from the store. But one of the interesting things about matzo meal is that it's a modern innovation. It's a by-product of the Matzo industry. And you have all this cracked matzo, leftover matzo, you can turn it into a meal. But I like to make my own matzo meal, and it's really easy to do.

Yeah, it's fun, too. So let's make it. Let's do it.

So we're going to smash our matzos up. Now, let's get them. Nicely packed here.

And, rock and roll, yeah. You wanna do the first one? Yeah, I want to do the first smash. Ok, so we've got this, our malet and we just got about three matzos. Yeah, yeah, all right.

Oh, it's very satisfying actually. So this is, this feels great. Yeah, go for it. Thank you. That's fun.

Break it up nice. One of the nice things about making your own matzo meal is that you can get some nice texture in the matzo ball as well, and it doesn't have to be the same, the same consistency as the typical matzo ball.

Yeah. And it's a nice little touch of home. And I just always like to just go through. Yeah. So. All right. I think it looks, I think it's good. Pretty fresh. Let's see what's going on in there.

Oh, wow, look, here's our Matzo meal a little bit more like a matzo farfel, depending on the sizes.

Nice, we can keep crushing it, yeah and I like that texture, so I'm going to make it a little bit smaller. I love it. And then let's use this. Let's do it.

Ok, great. And so that one matzo is about a quarter cup of matzo meal.

Yeah. So if you're doing your substitutions, and something I’m going to do with my hand and just crunch a few big ones, yeah.

Now another way of doing this that's maybe a little bit better for getting smaller pieces is using the food processor.

Right.

And so we'll just put a whole, you know, a whole matzo, a whole piece of matzo into the food processor, run it for about 20 seconds, and you've got yourself your homemade matzo meal, so, you never have to buy matzo meal again. Ok, so you've got your matzo meal. What else? You know, I think I'm going to put a little more matzo meal in.

You know, I always have a little bit left of matzo meal at home, too, and I always, for good measure, I just put a little bit of a finer matzo meal into my mixture.

Yep. And so we're going to add that. Of course we want to add some salt, some kosher salt, do some matzo ball mix. You guys get a little more. We have some more of that salt. Yeah. Great. OK, and then. … well, this is a big question, this is a baking powder, and it's a “do we want a sinker or a floater” ? I mean, that's kind of one of those big binaries within the Jewish food spectrum. You know, where do you fall on that?

Well, you know, I certainly grew up with more floater matzo balls. But as I started crushing my own matzo, liking a little bit more texture in my matzo ball, I started to get really into the sinkers, you know, so I can go either way.

This was a big debate in my home. My grandmother made a dense sinker matzo ball. My mother made a floater, a fluffier matzo ball. And, frankly, I tend to go with my grandmother's cooking, but my mother's matzo balls were pretty good too. So I like to do something, a hedge, somewhere in between.

Yeah, I'm going to put a little bit of baking powder in, and a little bit goes a long way. And people will say that you put seltzer or egg whites.

But I'd say, in our experience, you know, baking powder is sort of - the kind of magic. Yeah, it's sort of the easiest. I've never found seltzer to really make a difference, but I'm sure I'll get angry letters about that.

And I'm going to mix this together and mix it nice. And one of the things I will say about the seltzer piece is like, you know, it's never a bad idea to put seltzer in anything because seltzer is so wonderful. So if you want to try it, great. But frankly, I don't think it's necessary also. Yeah. So we mix that too. Great.

So you've got the dry ingredients there. I'm going to get into the wet ingredients here. So we of course, we've got some schmaltz and this is key. And I think that, you know, when I grew up, we didn't necessarily have schmaltz in our matzo balls. We didn't have that rendered poultry fat flavour in our matzo balls. But you and I both know this is obviously key to a very tasty matzo ball. So if you're making vegetarian matzo ball soup, obviously don't use schmaltz. You can swap for an oil, a vegetable oil, very simple, less flavourful vegetable oil, like a grape seed oil. But if you are going for schmaltz, go for schmaltz. I mean, this is duck schmaltz here and not just for flavour,

it really does change the texture of the matzo ball as well. And it also adds a richness to the soup. And you're going to have some of that fat ooze into the soup as you cut up your matzo ball. No doubt. Really nice.

Great. So we've got our schmaltz.

We've also got something that we like to do, which is to pull a little of the stock out of the matzo ball soup, the soup itself that we're making, and pour that into our matzo balls instead of using water.

Again, we want to add that flavour. We could just use water or seltzer, but we want  a rich matzo ball to stand on its own. Yeah. And of course, we've got some eggs, so I'm just going to whip all that up. Yeah.

And then we can combine these two.

So when you're mixing your dry ingredients into the wet, you want to make sure not to over mix.

If you over stir, if you work at too much, your matzo ball mixture will likely come apart when you're trying to make your matzo balls. Or it can be really dense.

I mean, it's like too much gluten. Yes. Something I love to do is actually chop up a bunch of herbs, fresh herbs like fresh parsley, dill, very, very small, very fine, totally minced and actually put that into the mixture so that I have colour, extra colour, extra flavour in my matzo ball.

So that's one of my favorite things to do. I don't think we're not doing it today. We're going more traditional, but that's sort of something I've been doing for a long time now. And it's always a real hit because, you know, you have that colour popping out in the bowl.

I'll just say when I was a kid, I was not allowed to do much in the kitchen, but I formed the matzo balls and I used to stick all the bits of soup chicken into the matzo ball. I love doing that. It's a really nice little trick that I still use today. Just roll it in, roll it in, love it. Ok, so let's do it.

Let’s add this here slowly. Great, and you're going to mix.

I think you should do it all at once. Ok, and I'm just going to try and mix it as little as possible. Ok, great. Ok, so essentially we want to fold this, and once this is fully stirred, we're actually going to put this in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes or so. And that is an important step. If you don't let this mixture sit and soak up you, know, all of the egg in the liquid into the matzo ball, into the actual matzo, it will fall apart. You're not going to form as successfully matzo balls.

And this is great for planning ahead. You can make the matso mixture in the morning and then you can make your matzo balls later. Of course, you can have matzo balls made well in advance as well. Well, but this is just a, it's a nice way to, you know, plan your cooking strategy for the Shabbat or for the Passover or for whatever meal you're using matzo balls for. All right.

We're ready to go. Let's put this in the fridge, OK?

Ok, so let's, let's talk about the soup, because to me, the soup is … I think it's the real star of the show.

That's what I think, you know. OK, so what do we have in here? We've got a whole chicken that we put in. We've got carrots, we've got celery, we've got onion. Very classic combination. We put some black peppercorns in there and obviously salt, we've been salting over the course of time, over the course of the three hours, and about an hour ago, we threw in some thyme, some fresh thyme. Some people like to put in fresh dill. We also put in some parsley. So it's really flavourful, it's aromatic, it's audacious, and it's getting kind of dark because we you know, we've been going for a while and we do have some onion skins on there as well.

Yeah. Which helps browning out and a lot of flavour, too. And the other thing I think is something that I know is a big important part of chicken soup in my family's tradition is chicken feet.

Oh, wow. Look at that. Yeah. Oh yeah. There's some, that is a chicken foot right there. We've got a lot of those in there.

Yeah. And that that's not just flavour that's coloured into the broth. It is going to be a really nice addition. I know a lot of people who add flunking, beef flunk, in their chicken soup as well for the depth of flavour and other chicken necks as well. And this is really part of that resourceful Ashkenazy tradition of using all parts of the chicken, all parts of the bird. And it's really one of the things that inspires us most about Ashkenazic cooking.

Yeah. And I love when you have, you know, when you use a lot of chicken feet and you cool the broth and then it jiggles. You know, that that is an awesome thing.

You want that gel, that's when you know you've done it correctly, and people might call it bone broth today, and, you know, charge you an arm and a leg for it.

It's true. That's what it is.

Cool. So that's going and I think it's pretty much done. So we'll turn it off and we will strain it out.

We'll strain out all. We'll strain out the vegetables. But some people actually cook it for a little bit less time and they use the vegetables that they put in the soup and they actually serve those vegetables. But I know you and I really like to strain it out really well and cook some vegetables.

We want to get rid of all the flavour from the vegetables we use and then we'll add some fresher tasting vegetables in our soup. Oh, there's so many ways of making chicken soup. It's one of the most versatile Jewish foods. And that's what's so amazing about getting to make chicken soup together, is we both bring some of our own family traditions to bear. Yeah.

So I turned that off and that's hanging out. Let's throw some matzo balls into the pot. Fantastic.

Ok, so we have our salted water and our chilled matzo ball mix and let's form some matzo balls. Let's do it. So I always have a bowl of water, cold water next to me.

So I'm going to wet my hands. And I'm going to form a ball. Beautiful.

And I'm just going to do medium sized matzo ball. This is definitely something that's a big debate … right size. Liz, you grew up going to a deli with a matzo ball, like these giant matzo balls, and I love those giant matzo.

I still, every time I go home, which is pretty frequently, I still get that matzo ball, pretty much every time. I prefer, I like to have a few different matzo balls.

So I always want to have three or four in my bowl. It just makes my holiday experience. So I like to make them a little bit smaller. But I think we're going to hedge again today and do a medium sized matzo ball. Yeah, sure.

It feels good.  These are forming nicely. Great. You're going to get a matzo ball, Yeah. No, I can tell these are going to be awesome.

And one little trick that I know people do when they're making matzo balls on a large scale, delis do this a lot as they form matzo balls with ice cream scoops.

Yes. Then you get a uniform size. That's a great thing. And the other thing is you can also make your matzo balls in advance and we would always freeze them in in broth and then you just defrost the whole thing. But there's other people that just freeze them on their own and it's fine, you know, so you can make matzo balls in advance. And, you know, it's worth saying that if you do have a lot of broth, you can actually, you know, you can cook your matzo balls in broth or in stock. We just generally cook them separately because you will get some pieces that fall off. So you don't necessarily want to eat the same liquid that you've cooked them in. So we're just using salted water. But certainly if you've got a lot of stock hanging around, go for it, cook them in there.

Ok, so beautiful. We're going to put the lid on.

Well, we're going to let it boil and we're going to put the lid on and let it simmer and cook for about 20, 30 minutes till they're cooked.

Great. Our matzo balls are ready.

Let's build our soup. Let's do it. And you've got two matzo balls per your preference. Know, I like to have a lot of matzo balls. Yeah, no, that's great.

That's great. OK, so, all right. We've got our matzo balls. We've got some chicken that we pulled from the soup. A good amount of chicken. Yeah, I like that. Great. And then we've got the vegetables that we cooked separately. So they're nice and fresh. Just some extra carrots and celery.

Nice.

Great. And then one of our favourite delis and one of the places I used to go to a lot as a child was the Second Avenue Deli, and they would bring you a matzo ball, they'd bring you everything that you need in a soup, and then they'd come and they pour the broth into the soup at the table. And it was just something about the ceremony, the ritual of it, the theatre of it all. It just that really told you that you're at the Jewish deli, you're at the, what a lot of people refer to as the secular synagogue.

And it was sort of like an opening ceremony of sorts. All right, let's do it.

Just again. I can see that texture, you know, a little bit. Yeah, that's what's fun, you know.

Awesome. That's great. That's everything you want, that's Jewish comfort food. There it is… distilled into this form. Totally. Amazing. Just Jewish penicillin right there. That's it.