Hunt the Chametz

With Seder night and Pesach nearly upon us, it's time for us Jews to banish all leavened products from our homes.

First of all, and the most noticeable change you'll see in any observant Jew in this eight day period, is the switch to an almost Atkins style diet - very few carbohydrates for reasons I'll explain shortly. That's what it looks like, and that's the easiest way to explain the diet. Of course, as I've learnt in the past, using a simplification to aid understanding sometimes comes back to haunt, so bear with me whilst I elucidate.

We can't consume anything with leavening in it because way back in the day when our ancestors left Egypt following the culmination of the plagues visited on Pharaoh, we left in an awful hurry and couldn't even wait for the bread to rise before abandoning Egypt and going into the desert. So, it's out with bread, pasta, cereals, rice; in fact anything containing grain and water and which has been allowed to ferment or rise. No beer. And no pulses - because these could conceivably be made into some form of bready-type substance (by a better cook than me). "Chametz" is what this stuff is known as. And it's only a problem during the festival of Pesach.

Not all Jews do this - Sephardim (those originating from Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean) actually do eat rice and pulses, because, I gather, these items were such a staple food that there was never an ability to avoid them for 8 days. There aren't so many Sephardim around at the moment and (although I pronounce my Hebrew in the modern, Sephardic way) I'm going Ashkenaz for this one. That's the other main group of Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe.

But I digress. We can't eat anything with grain and water. We can eat interesting crackers called matzos which have been baked but for less than 11 minutes (and are supervised to ensure this is the case) and are "kosher le pesach" which means kosher for passover, and as they have only been baked such a short time, they aren't considered chametz.

We can't even have any of this chametz stuff in the house. We can box it up and leave it in the car boot (I've not yet told the future Mr Me I'm turning the car into a mobile baker wholesale store), we can sell it to a gentile which the rabbi can arrange. I'm not sure whether we can do the same as Christians and eat it all up in a Shrove Tuesday finale of pizza/ pasta/ rice/ hummus, but that sounds appealing. We are going to do what many of our friends do, which is put all the chametz into a cupboard and apply a liberal coat of masking tape. We are taping up the freezer because we've got bread in it, and we're putting all the unfrozen bread, pasta, non-kosher le pesach ketchup, krisprolls (hungry?), baked beans, chickpeas and cereal into a cupboard then we're going to close that cupboard up with masking tape too.

It's not enough to just remove the packets of flour and pasta and cereal - you have to spring clean the place - removing items from cupboards and wiping them down (both items and cupboards) to ensure no pesky chametz is lurking in corners or cracks. We did the bedroom and the bathroom (I kid you not - well we've recently redecorated and thoroughly cleaned so that's fortuitous!) and now have the kitchen left. Which could be a bit of a pain. The toaster has to go and hide in a bin bag. In an hermetically sealed bin bag. In a bin bag in the car boot.

The "no chametz" thing is an absolute. When cooking, for example, the usual laws of 1/60 don't apply. These laws are the ones applicable to dairy and meat foods in non-pesach time. Basically if you're cooking a meat dish and you happen to be waving some milk over the pan and some milk gets into the meat dish - you can still eat the food IF the amount of milk is less than 1/60 the amount of the content of the pan before the milk contaminated it - and that obviously works the other way around too. I'm not quite sure how one would guesstimate this, because I have problems working out anything smaller than 1/8, but the rule does exist. It does not however exist on pesach. If you contaminate your food, even with less than 1/60, then that's it – you have to go and start again, and (now this is where my knowledge gets *slightly* hazy) re-kasher your pots and pans and anything that was contaminated.

So that's a whirlwind tour of the practicalities of removing chametz, ensuring none is left behind, and the stricter than usual dietary rules. Now, what you must get hold of. Everything must be kosher le pesach. So all the kosher beths din which supervise the "hecksher" (kosher stamp on foods) now have an even less than zero percent tolerance. And it's not like they were relaxed to start with! Things which would normally be fine are now forbidden. Salt? Buy new, kosher le pesach. Tea? Ditto. Ketchup. Mayonnaise? Hell yes. Get the idea?

Whilst you can buy kosher le pesach pretty much anything if you go to the right places with enough cash (and a big enough larder and appetite - remember this only lasts for 8 days, folks), everyone has different standards.

Most people would agree you buy a new packet of something that can't be chametz, and start it on pesach. If you buy a new packet it can't have been sitting on your shelf with flour dripping into it unnoticed over the past few months. So I'm off to buy salt and tea this evening. But when it comes to mayonnaise, ketchup, in fact anything with vinegar in it, you have to buy kosher le pesach or avoid that item for pesach. Vinegar is one of those dodgy areas (like limitation of liability in a contract) as it's made from wine, and I’ll not go into it here but suffice it to say that Judaism has some very strict rules on wine.

I decided not to buy ketchup during pesach because I don't think I can eat (a) non Heinz and (b) about a kilo of the stuff in 8 days. But I'll be eating mayonnaise and all kinds of goodies off our brand new kosher le pesach crockery, with our brand new kosher le pesach cutlery, having prepared it in our steamcleaned kosher le pesach kitchen. And then falling asleep and dreaming of bread.