PHOTO: This image from "The Hebrew-Marathi Haggadah," published in India in 1874, depicts the process fo making matzah for Passover. 

By DR. YOSEF ROSEN
The Jewish Review
Jews worldwide bake their own challah, fry latkes, and stuff hamantaschen, but, with rare exception, purchase matzah from factories. Why is matzah different from these other classical Jewish food items? Why do most contemporary Jews never make their own matzah? This reluctance is particularly surprising given matzah’s minimal ingredients and straightforward preparation—mix flour and water, roll, perforate, and bake. Simplicity isn’t even incidental to matzah’s meaning; it’s central to its symbolism on Passover. Matzah represents the bare-bones food of slavery—food made hastily by those without the time or resources for more elaborate preparations. Since Passover commemorates our liberation from slavery, we eat matzah to remind us of the food our ancestors would have eaten. Why then are Jews so reticent today to make the simplest of Jewish foods and instead rely on commercially produced “poor man’s bread”? 
This wasn’t always so. For countless generations, Jews made their own matzah, and it looked nothing like today’s version. It was thick, soft, and round—more like flatbread than the crisp crackers we now recognize. It also wasn’t something a Jew bought before Passover—it was something they made each day of Passover as needed. Yemenite Jews, to this day, still make matzah in this manner. How we got from the majority of world-Jewry baking soft flatbreads before and throughout Passover to us prebuying boxes of Manischewitz matzah is a story of rabbinic risk management, Jewish-American entrepreneurship, and the modern outsourcing of religious precision to technology. 
Matzah became crunchy in the 19th century as Jews shifted from continuously baking matzah throughout Passover to exclusively making them before Passover began. Soft matzah grows stale quickly; if you can’t make matzah during Passover, the thin matzah we’re familiar with is more likely to last seven days mold-free and stay crunchy (I’ve eaten matzah months after Passover, and it still tastes great). Why then did Jews mostly stop making matzah on Passover over the past two centuries? 
This recent shift was highlighted by Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein in his influential legal code, the Arukh ha-Shulhan (1884): “It is common knowledge that in earlier times they would not bake all of the matzot (plural of matzah) before Passover. Rather they would bake every day of Passover for that day.” Over the preceding few centuries, Ashkenazi rabbinical authorities grew increasingly concerned about the possibility of dough fermenting during the baking process, thereby becoming chametz (forbidden leaven). If your matzah baking goes awry before Passover, you can throw it away, or renounce ownership of your carbs. During Passover, the stakes of a bad bake are a lot higher. Unlike a bad latke fry, or a hamantaschen whose jelly spills outside the borders of its triangle, baking matzah is more precarious. The Jewish stakes are higher. 
These religious concerns created the perfect conditions for industrialization and an embrace of the exactness of the machine. In 1838, a French Jew named Isaac Singer invented the first machine for rolling matzah dough. These and subsequent matzah machines won over rabbinic authorities in France, Germany, England, and America by working more quickly and consistently than human hands. 
Not everyone embraced this transformation. In 1859, Rabbi Solomon Kluger of Brody issued a scathing denunciation of machine-made matzah, arguing that “it has always been Jewish practice to bake round matzot, and Jewish custom may not be changed. Square matzot copy non-Jewish practice, since they resemble the wafers used by the non-Jews on their holidays.” He further worried that machines would harm the livelihoods of the poor who depended on seasonal matzah-baking income. 
The debate largely split along geographic and cultural lines. Eastern European rabbis typically resisted mechanization, while their Western European counterparts proved more accommodating. Rabbi Ya’akov Ettlinger, an Orthodox Rabbi who studied philosophy at the University of Wurzburg while completing his rabbinical training, argued: “That which was innovated by craftsmen in natural matters—why should we not accept what is good in them?” Just like the invention of the railroad shouldn’t be rejected just because it was novel, so too the matzah machine should be embraced for offering a new solution to the age old needs to bake kosher matzah for Passover. 
In America, however, the confluence of industrialization and standardization proved irresistible and fewer rabbis resisted the advent of machine matzah. “B. Manischewitz: Fine Matzos Bakery” read the sign of America’s first matzah factory, opened in Cincinnati in 1888. Manischewitz became synonymous with matzah in America not only because by the 1920s they  patented machinery that could produce 1.2 million matzot a day; but because he pitched his product as solving a religious dilemma. A box of Manischewitz promised perfectly standardized, rabbinically supervised matzah that eliminated all risk of accidental chametz. 
By mid-twentieth-century, machine-made matzah had completely supplanted traditional varieties in most Jewish households. Manischewitz advertisements proudly declared that “No human hand touches these matzos in their manufacture.” The irony of course is that what was once valued as handmade was now marketed as superior because it was untouched by hands. Standardization and the supervision that afforded (of hygienics and halakhah) had become more appealing than the messy authenticity of home-based religious practice. 
This year, if you are hosting or attending a seder, consider making your own matzah for it—traditionally three matzot. Seder matzah plays a different role than the matzah we munch on all Passover long. During most of the holiday, we interact with matzah primarily as convenience food, as the quintessential bread substitute. The crisp, cracker sheets become the practical alternative to off-limits leavened products during the eight days of Passover. Matzah gets us through the week without our usual carbs; it’s the sandwich base, the pizza crust, the edible spoon for all the Passover dips. 
During the seder, though, Matzah is a star. There’s a specific mitzvah, a ritual, centered around its consumption. Right before the long-awaited dinner begins (after all the storytelling, questioning, kibitzing, and noshing) the haggadah asks us to silently crunch away on large portions of matzah, to take our time to experience every sensation of this ritual food: the uneven texture, the occasional charred spots, the deliberate blandness. 
Making your own matzah for the seder has long been recognized as a beautiful and significant way to connect to the ritual of matzah-eating. Eating the bread of affliction hits differently when you baked it a few hours earlier. Rabbi Yosef Karo (1499-1575), one of the more influential Jewish legal minds, encouraged every person to make their own ritual matzah for the seder. 
Recent decades have witnessed lay and rabbinic-led efforts to reclaim home matzah-making. The 1973 publication of The First Jewish Catalog encouraged readers to try making their own, suggesting it could be “a rewarding way of preparing for Passover.” More recently, journalist Johanna Ginsberg suggested that the “rising profile of DIY matzah” reflects broader trends toward hands-on Judaism and slow food, part of what she calls the “Take-Back-This-Mitzvah movement.” 
A recent initiative to encourage and enable more Jews to make their own matzah recently emerged out of Providence, Rhode Island. Mitzvah Matzot, founded by Rabbi Barry Dolinger and his wife Naomi Baine, sells organic shmura wheat flour, which it calls “Flour to Empower.” One of the main hurdles facing anyone trying to bake matzah and keep a Kosher-for-Passover kitchen is the type of flour used. Since most white flours are tempered in factories (a process that whets the wheat kernel to help sift the bran) it presents a potential problem of chametz. “Shmura” flour is flour that has never been tempered and has been guarded throughout the process to ensure that the wheat never becomes chametz. Until Dollinger and Baine started their new initiative, it was nearly impossible for an individual to buy shmura flour; you could only buy shmura matzah, hand-made in a factory. Now anyone can have five pounds of %u201CFlour to Empower%u201D shipped to their home (for $60), enough to make 12-18 matzot. 
This Passover, consider taking the risk of making your own matzah. It may not be perfectly square or uniformly thin. It may require more effort than opening a box. Yet these “flaws” are precisely what connect your experience to our ancestors  who fled Egypt with hastily made bread that certainly wasn’t factory-perfect. In choosing the messy authenticity of handmade matzah over the convenience of mass production, you enact the holiday’s fundamental message: that meaningful freedom requires both courage and participation. Engaging with these profound themes of Passover might require us to get flour on our hands once again.  

How to make your own matzah

Buy flour: Matzah can be made from flour of five grains: wheat, spelt, barley, rye, or oat. If you are keeping a kosher-for-Passover kitchen, the gold standard is shmura flour, which you can purchase from www.mitzvahmatzos.org. Rye and spelt flours are typically not tempered (and whole-wheat flour is minimally tempered) and can provide a more accessible alternative. 
Prepare your oven: If you keep a kosher home, clean out any gunk inside it and run it through a self-cleaning cycle (a feature on most ovens). Before you begin the next steps, preheat the oven to its maximum heat (ideally above 500 degrees Farenheit).  
Mix with water: 5 tablespoons of water per cup of flour is a good starting point. Knead thoroughly. You want dry but pliable dough. 
Start an 18-minute timer: Once you are finished kneading, the rabbinic rule is that you have 18 minutes till all kneaded dough must be baking in the oven and the scraps are completely removed from the home/down the garbage disposal (if you are baking on the eve of or during Passover).  
Roll and Perforate: Roll to the desired consistency and poke plenty of holes so that the oven can quickly cook the matzah on its insides as well as its crust. 
Bake: With an oven fully heated to its maximum heat, the matzah should be ready after 5 minutes. 
Save for the seder: While you may be tempted to eat one while it’s still piping hot, there is a long Jewish tradition of refraining from eating matzah in the days before Passover, so that it is fully appreciated when it’s first eaten during the seder.