Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Food

Passover popovers will help you make it through the holiday

If you can’t deal with any more matzo, there is an alternative

Before my mother-in-law Ruth Levy introduced me to Passover popovers, the eight-day holiday seemed to stretch for months. All the avocado, cream cheese, melted Muenster, peanut butter or butter toffee in the world can’t cover up matzo’s cardboard-like flavor. And matzo, like the Dude, abides. It’s well-known that Imodium is nothing more than capsules of finely ground matzo. How much matzo can one Jew eat?

Ruth’s answer was popovers. Many years ago, Naomi and I were visiting Ruth in Brookline, Massachusetts, during the holiday and planned to make a picnic. I envisioned my usual Passover picnic — tuna salad between crumbled shards of matzo. But Ruth mixed matzo meal into a boiling mixture of oil and water, then beat in eggs, and after a few minutes in the oven, she pulled out popovers.

Popovers are Passover pita. They puff up, which shouldn’t be a shock since the technique to make them is the same as for making cream puffs or eclairs. Unlike matzo, they hold sandwich ingredients together: lox and cream cheese, a poached egg and avocado, tuna salad. Warm from the oven, they make a nice dinner roll. Or you can make a double batch, freeze them, and have some on hand until the very end of the holiday.

The only addition I’ve made to Ruth’s recipe is to process the matzo meal a bit in a food processor to make it finer (you can also use matzo meal cake flour) and I add some turmeric, which deepens their color — and maybe even mutes the flavor of matzo.

Passover Popovers

2 cups water

1 cup oil

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon salt

2 cups matzo meal

1 teaspoon turmeric

7 large eggs

  1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Grease a 12-16 cup muffin tin.
  2. In a medium saucepan, combine water, oil, sugar, salt and turmeric. Bring to a rolling boil.
  3. Add matzo meal all at once. Turn off heat and beat well with a spoon or whisk. Beat until the mixture comes away from the sides as you stir. If the mixture looks too soupy, turn on the heat to medium and stir to evaporate some liquid.
  4. Remove from heat and let cool for about 10-15 minutes. Beat in one egg at a time, making sure each egg is incorporated until you add the next.
  5. When all the eggs are incorporated, spoon into muffin tins. Each should be about ¾ full. Don’t worry if some are near the top.
  6. Bake for 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 325 degrees and bake for 30 minutes. Turn off the oven and leave for another 10 minutes undisturbed.
  7. Remove and unmold.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.