THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 11, 2011 17

Glatt Gone Gourmet

Daniella Cheslow

Tiny truffles, big dreams: a revolution is brewing in the ultra-Orthodox kitchen

WALKING ALONG THE MAIN ROAD OF THEultra-Orthodox moshav of Beit Chelkiya where theonly pedestrians are black-hatted men chattering inYiddish, it is difficult to imagine this as a seat of aculinary revolution. But at the edge of town is Miri

Zorger’s two-story home, fitted with an oversized freezer and a pantryoverflowing with bars of chocolate, gold flecks and the tiny white namecards that poke out of each of her signature chocolate truffles.

At 43, Zorger has emerged as a coveted caterer and a celebrity evan-gelist for a new ethos of kosher cooking that refuses to see tradition asa restriction in the kitchen. In a cookbook and weekly radio show,Zorger urges her followers to use fresh herbs and bake French breads.And Zorger’s rising star reflects a culinary awakening reaching full

bloom that has ultra-Orthodox Israelis enrolling in pastry schools, snap-ping up premium kosher French chocolate, and poring through pages ofglossy new cookbooks devoted to improving kosher cuisine. Israelibusinesses are happy to accommodate them, offering the better productsand services necessary for glatt (strictly kosher) gone gourmet.

On a Sunday evening in Bnei Brak, Zorger bustles around a flood-lit stage while mixing dough for a focaccia, a fluffy flat bread reminis-cent of pizza crust. Her brown hair (a wig) falls just above her shoul-ders. Every now and then Zorger shakes her thick straight bangs fromin front of her eyes. Her black skirt reaches her calves, her black but-toned shirt falls just as loosely. Without the stage makeup and clip-onmicrophone, Zorger would look like the thousands of women who havecrowded the event hall, all wearing long skirts and wigs or hats.

MIRI ZORGER: Coveted caterer

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“Write quickly!” she shouts, her hands deep in a glass bowl ofdough. “A kilogram of flour, 3/4 cups of oil, ten grams of yeast, a halfliter of water and salt and pepper!”

Zorger is on stage as the culinary advisor to “Balabusta” (a Yiddishterm for housewife), a 13-hour marathon of gourmet kosher cookingthat includes sales of appliances, knives, cookbooks and pastry ingredi-ents. But the centerpiece of “Balabusta” is the ongoing cooking demon-strations by Zorger along with a challa baker, a wine specialist and anAmerican celebrity kosher chef, Jamie Geller. The evening’s crowningevent is a food cookoff, shown live on giant overhead screens. For thenearly 10,000 women who attend the festival throughout the day,watching cooking shows on a screen is a novelty because they do notown televisions.

In the front row, Yael Nahari and Batsheva Cohen furiously scribbleZorger’s list of ingredients. They rode for more than two hours fromTiberias to land front-row seats.

“We can’t leave our chairs,” says Cohen, 40, who works in a kinder-garten. She points to a thick, blue cutting board and new chef’s knifepeeking out of a plastic bag at her feet. “You can’t get these in Tiberias.”

ZORGER BEGAN HER COOKING CAREER LATE. SHEgrew up in Bnei Brak and wed an arranged husband, Yehezkel,at age 18. They had four children. Zorger grew up observant but

always had an eye for design. After her children were born, she beganstudying fashion at Tel Aviv’s Shenkar School of Design. A near-fatalcar accident pushed her to reconsider her plans and enroll in cookingschool at age 36.

Zorger took a year-long chef’s course at the Bishulim school in TelAviv, followed by another year of pastry. It is the only non-kosher cook-ing school in Israel, but she wanted to study at the highest level possi-ble. For the two years, Zorger did not taste a thing. Every day she wouldrush home after class and recreate the dishes in her kitchen, switchingout treif (non-kosher) ingredients like pork, shrimp and gelatin andusing kosher substitutes like other meats or agar agar, a messy kosheralternative to pork-based gelatin.

“It was not simple at all,” she says. Afterward, Zorger apprenticed with the Israel-based German pastry

chef Hans Bertele, and took more lessons with a French pastry chef inEilat. As her confidence grew, Zorger baked desserts for friends andneighbors. Gradually, she began getting requests for catering. Her firstevent was catering a sushi dinner for a contractor in Israel. Soon after,a Swiss hotel hired her to bake kosher cakes for Passover. Outside thekitchen, Zorger wrote recipes for the Tnuva dairy company, and herreach grew further nearly four years ago when she became the host of aweekly cooking program on Kol Hai, the leading Orthodox-friendlyradio station. She developed a loyal following. Zorger introduced herbsby name and instituted an annual recipe competition called “HashefitHaba’a” – the next [female] chef.

Today, Zorger caters about four events a month. She moved fromBnei Brak to Beit Chelkiya in the southern coastal plain six months agofor the bigger kitchen and for some quiet away from the bustle of herpublic cooking life.

“Gourmet comes from kosher because it is meticulous food,” shesays. “Who is as meticulous as haredim when it comes to things likeremoving insects, or making sure everything is clean?”

That attention to detail translates into precisely formed miniaturechocolates, which Zorger dusts with gold powder, or dressing she servesin test tubes inside delicate, tiny salad bowls.

“I like everything in cups with small forks,” Zorger says. “It’s impor-tant that the table should be clean, that the buffet not look like a warzone, and that the food be good.”

Zorger’s growing name was enough to convince haredi publisherMalchut Waxberger to invest in its first cookbook, “Simply Gourmet,”released in 2010 in Hebrew. Co-owner Yoel Waxberger says the bookwas timed for Rosh Hashana; more than 7,000 of the first 10,000 copieshave sold. Waxberger says Zorger’s exacting style grabbed him fromtheir first meeting, when she brought a tray of cakes.

“She put them on the table and no one touched them, they lookedlike plastic,” he says. “Little desserts, pralines with chocolate and a bitof pomegranates and pistachio. We thought it was just decoration untilshe told us to eat it.”

The kosher kitchen is the ideal place for a revolution, Waxbergersays.

“There are no problems with the rabbis. Everything is kosher, andthe photographs are of food,” he says.

PASTRY CHEF ILAN NIV IS TRADITIONAL, NOT HAREDI,but he worked in Jerusalem’s Sheraton Plaza hotel, now calledLeonardo, which keeps the strictest kosher certificate. He says

kosher hotels fueled demand for specialty products, including balsamicvinegar. Now observant cooks can buy organic flour or specially groundflours for pasta, bread and cake.

“The amount of products and variety of raw ingredients is justastounding,” he says. “Today, the kosher kitchen is absolutely not arestriction. Ten or 15 years ago, there was a shortage in good qualityingredients with the right kosher seal.”

Those new ingredients feature in a growing body of new recipes. Tenyears ago, the haredi daily “Mishpacha” [Family] newspaper beganrunning a small food section in its weekend edition. Marketing VicePresident Tzipi Amitai says that after readers raved about the section inthe newspaper’s audience polls, “Mishpacha” launched a food maga-zine called “Teimot” [Tastes] two years ago. Now the magazine deliv-ers 8,000 copies to its regular newspaper subscribers, along with anoth-er 4,000-7,000 customers who buy it separately.

Amitai says three ultra-Orthodox chefs run the magazine. February’sedition focused on fresh fruit in time for the Tu Bishvat holiday; thecover featured a luscious tart with sliced kiwi. Other issues have cov-ered wine pairings and how to make hearty bean soups.

“As the world advances, haredi women are developing careers,”Amitai says. “But for a haredi woman, one of the main measures of awoman, how good a housewife and mother she is, is her cooking.”

‘Women in the sector really invest in decorating their meals, if it’s for the holidays, or a Friday night, or even just for the kids’

– marketing director Rachel Adler

Magazines are just one resource. There is also a growing list of glatt-kosher gourmet cookbooks, according to Moshe Erlanger, marketingdirector for Feldheim Publishing. Feldheim publishes about a dozenHebrew cookbooks and another 20 in English. Last year they sold morethan 20,000 Hebrew cookbooks in Israel, and the number is on the rise.

“The cookbook buyer can be a woman who wants to spoil herself, itcan be a husband buying a gift for his wife or a bride getting the bookas a wedding present,” Erlanger says. “It was always like this, but in thepast there was only one book.”

Erlanger says in the last ten years the publishing house has begunpouring investment into photography and formatting for its books,when in the past they were black and white. The cookbooks show tight-ly packed sushi rolled alongside glistening Yiddish classics like jelliedcalf’s foot. The best-selling author is Jamie Geller with her simplerecipes for vegetable quiches and chocolate-covered matza.

In February, Feldheim released its latest offering, the Hebrew “EfratMegisha” (Efrat Serves), penned by ultra-Orthodox Israeli pastry chefEfrat Libfroind. It will soon be translated into English for distribution inNorth America, where she frequently tours. Libfroind, 38, teaches bak-ing and cooking courses for about 200 women a week and writes regu-larly for the American haredi press.

“I was at an exhibition in Paris last year,” she says. “They showedall kind of different things made by a gentile chef. I said, ‘Listen, we donicer things. The frum [ultra-Orthodox] ladies do not do anything dif-ferently from the very good chefs.”

MEIR DANON IS THE PROFESSIONAL DIRECTOR OFBishulim, the school where Zorger studied. He says that fiveof the 300 pastry chef students each year at his school are

ultra-Orthodox. Unlike Bishulim’s regular cooking courses, which fea-ture pork and mix meat with dairy, pastry school tendsto feature kosher ingredients. Danon says that in the lastdecade, kosher top-notch thick French butter and vel-vety, world-renowned French Valrhona chocolate havebecome available. Fish gelatin, rather than the old porkversion, has also become prevalent, even in France.Bishulim teaches pastry on separate dishes to encour-age more observant students to enroll, but Danon saysthere are few haredi students because in other class-rooms students work with pork steaks. Danon says hisschool is launching a three-day workshop for professional pastry chefsfor making high-end pareve desserts, which are neither meat nor dairyand can be eaten after a Friday evening roast chicken.

“This is the latest demand in the area,” he says. “This doesn’t existin Israel, and it doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.”

Other cooking schools are seeing a more pronounced rise in hare-di interest. At Dan Gourmet in Haifa, marketing manager Roni Bernatsays that since 2008, the cooking school has offered three women-only courses a year, each lasting for two and a half months with about15 students.

“There is a big demand, especially among haredi women,” Bernatsays. “They really love it because it gives them a chance to learn moreprofessional cooking than what they were doing at home.”

Dan Gourmet plans to open a Tel Aviv branch by the end of theyear, and Bernat says this school will also try to open haredi-friendlycourses. Bernat says the school will also soon offer a professional 10-month haredi men’s chef course funded by the Ministry of Industry,Trade and Labor.

Besides cooking schools, other Israeli businesses are taking note.Dov Lublinsky & Sons has sold imported knives in Israel since 1940,and always had a stable of haredi men buying blades for circumcisionand slaughter. But in the past six years, ultra-Orthodox women havecome to Lublinsky’s knife skills and food décor workshops held in TelAviv, says marketing director Rachel Adler. These women urgedLublinsky to open a stand at “Balabusta.”

As dozens of women watched, Adler plunged a metal skewer whoseend was wrapped in a thin curled blade into a potato at the exhibition.She turned it, and the potato core emerged in a spiral. She estimates halfthe attendees bought potato curlers. Now the company is consultingfocus groups and planning to directly market knives and high-endkitchen equipment to Haredim.

“Women in the sector really invest in decorating their meals, if it’sfor the holidays, or a Friday night, or even just for the kids,” Adler says.“We are taking polls, conducting focus groups and looking for the bestways to reach them.”

The Osem industrial food giant is also eyeing the Haredi kitchen. Forthe last three months Zorger has been the face of Osem in the haredipublic; even her mobile phone answering machine announces, “If youwanted to ask what kind of soup powder I use, yes, I use the onion powdered soup from Osem.”

At “Balabusta,” Zorger used the Osem powdered soup to makefive soups in a half hour. It was a controversial move for the audience.

“Our mothers didn’t use soup powder,” said Dvora Morad, aJerusalem bakery owner. “It doesn’t fit tradition.”

But Sara Greynman, a teacher from Bnei Brak, says working meansless time for women to spend in the kitchen.

“There are people who put soup powder into their cholent,” she says,referring to the slow-cooked Sabbath stew of beans,meat and eggs, among other ingredients; Sephardimrefer to it as chamin. “Once, women didn’t work,”says Greynman, 57. “Today, people can’t invest asmuch time in food.”

The ultra-Orthodox food revolution is not com-plete. Home cooks and professionals eagerly waitfor new products to get the kosher seal of approvalas if it were the new iPad. Nahari and Cohen, thetwo women from Tiberias, are waiting for a new

sprayable whipping cream and tubes of powdered milk. Chef Niv, whoruns a meat restaurant in Herzliya, says new kosher salting techniqueshave made for better, less salty meat but that cooks have not caught up.

“There is place for more smoking of meat, of better treatment ofmeat,” Niv says.

Zorger says “Balabusta,” the first exhibition of its kind, will mostlikely become an annual institution with sister events in Jerusalem. Fornow, she is working on her second cookbook, to be released later thisyear. She also hopes eventually to open a restaurant serving vegetablesand herbs grown at home.

For all the innovation, some things never change. Zorger says hermost requested recipes continue to be those of Eastern EuropeanJewish cooking.

“People have good memories from home, and that’s what they areinterested in,” she says. “When a housewife wants to be called a bala-busta, she has to be able to make gefilte fish and potato kugel. Cholentis not a big deal, but for gefilte fish to be exactly right, it turns out there’sa lot of work behind it.” •

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DANIELLA CHESLOW