Can you eat pita on passover

In recent years, restaurants have been catering more to Passover-observant Jews by preparing imitation bread products. Restaurants serve rolls. Sandwich places serve sandwiches. The secret ingredient in the pizza is potato starch. I tasted a slice; it was like a really deep dish pizza. The same goes for imitation crepes. The ice cream parlor across the street served French crepes that were kosher for Passover, made of potato starch and eggs instead of the usual flour batter. Chametz becomes the term for what we do not eat on the holiday.

Chametz is defined as food containing any amount of leavened product derived from five types of grain: wheat, barley, oats, spelt and rye. What is "leavened? Why 18 minutes? Just as water has a boiling point, flour has a fermentation point - 18 minutes. After 18 minutes, the dough created by the mixture of flour and water begins to ferment and rise, creating "leavened bread". This flour, when baked, becomes a flat cake of matzah bread because the dough was not allowed to rise.

The hurried nature of baking matzah before the minute point is what reminds us of the hurried flight of the Israelites from Egypt during the Exodus. Let's get specific: What do we eat? Here's a list that runs from fresh vegetables to potato chips and in between.

Why would ice cream or yogurt or plain peanut butter even be considered chametz? Another set of restricted foods is called kitniot-legumes. Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern European origin do not eat vegetables such as beans, rice, corn, and peas because they can be ground into a kind of flour and made into foodstuffs which might appear to be chametz.

So, to guard against the possibility of confusion, legumes were forbidden. This explains the restrictions placed on the use of processed food which contain flour, grain, or legume products. Unless the product has been prepared for Passover, we don't know if the flour or grain used reached the fermentation point. So now we have a request. But as the journalism we do is costly, we invite readers for whom The Times of Israel has become important to help support our work by joining The Times of Israel Community.

Pita bread, not kosher for Passover. The difference? Rabbinic supervision to ensure that any matzo made for Passover is untainted by any leavening agents. There is also a debate over whether egg matzo is allowed. While clearly being verboten for the Passover seder another Torah passage states that only the flour and water version may be used during the ritual , eating egg matzo during the rest of the week is left up to the observant.

The New York Times had a good wrap-up of the quinoa loophole, which is rather ingenious. Ashkenazic rabbis never had the chance to exclude it from the holiday, and so by default it became kosher for Passover. Now concerns are being raised over whether the manufacturing process is clean of any of the banned grains. The Orthodox Union, the authority on such matters, has declared quinoa allowable for consumption during the holiday.

The story of how they came to that decision, from NPR:. Another plus for quinoa, says Elefant: "Many rabbis are of the opinion that anything that wasn't part of the original custom is not included in the custom. All that was left for the rabbis was inspection of factories that package quinoa to see if forbidden grains are processed on the same equipment that processes it.

And some passed. Those factories that got the all-clear now produce quinoa that will bear the OU-P symbol, meaning they're kosher for Passover.