Whether you call it matzo toffee, crunch, brittle, or bark, you’ll know upon first bite why this salty-sweet, crunchy, chocolaty delight has become a Passover dessert staple for many Jewish families.
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Matzo is permitted during Passover, an eight-day holiday during which leavened foods and those made of specific grains are avoided, so desserts using it are common. Matzo toffee—made with matzo, butter, brown sugar, and chocolate—is quick and easy and can be made ahead (welcome traits during a busy holiday week).
Making Matzo in America
Matzo is a thin flatbread made with flour and water. It’s the only bread product permitted during Passover. By Jewish law, matzo dough must be baked within 18 minutes of mixing to ensure that the dough doesn’t begin to ferment and therefore remains unleavened.
The French invention of a matzo-rolling machine in 1838 made matzo mass production possible. In 1888, the first American matzo factory opened in Cincinnati. Lithuanian immigrant Dov Behr named his factory after the deceased man whose passport he purchased to enter the United States: Manischewitz.
Behr transformed matzo production, creating machines that produced square matzo instead of the traditional rounds. Cutting a sheet of matzo into squares eliminated the possibility of trimmings being reincorporated into a new batch of dough and violating the 18-minute rule.
By the 1920s, Manischewitz had become the worldwide leader in matzo production, cranking out 1.25 million matzo sheets daily. Manischewitz remains the most popular matzo brand in the world. The company is now located in Jersey City, New Jersey, and its production averages more than 100,000 pounds of matzo a day. –Jessica Rudolph
Montreal-based pastry chef Marcy Goldman is credited with creating “matzoh crunch” in the mid-1980s. While looking for a Passover-friendly dessert to appease her toddler, she took inspiration from saltine toffee, swapping matzo sheets for saltines and topping them with a bubbling mixture of brown sugar and butter and a layer of chocolate. Baking the matzo and sugar mixture made a crumbly-crunchy layer.
Goldman’s original recipe (published in her 1998 cookbook A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking) soon found a life of its own, appearing in magazines and newspapers; on seder tables; and, now, on social media. Later iterations stayed largely true to the original but often varied the toppings (toasted nuts, rose petals, sprinkles, candied ginger . . . ) and the name.
For our own version, we wanted the same ingredients; a similarly easy method; and a snappy, buttery, luscious toffee, something that reminded us of a Heath bar.
Rather than starting the toffee on the stove and finishing it in the oven, we simply cooked brown sugar, butter, water, and salt on the stove. This gave us more control over the toffee’s temperature, as well as its finished texture (and left the oven free for other holiday cooking).
Stirring the bubbling mixture evened out hot spots and prevented it from separating, creating a toffee that was crisp and crunchy, not crumbly or sticky. Instead of coating sheets of matzo (which can be warped and uneven), we broke them into small pieces and spread them over a baking sheet. Then we poured the toffee over top, quickly spreading it to coat the matzo as evenly as possible.
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Buy NowFor a finishing touch, we drizzled the glistening toffee with chocolate (which we first tempered to ensure that the chocolate remained shiny and snappy) and sprinkled it with flake sea salt. Then we broke it into large pieces, which were perfect for setting out on a holiday table or gifting.
