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Perhaps if enough of us speak up things will change.
Please copy & send in.
Dear [Enter name] Matza Bakery,
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link just as a box of Matza is only as appealing as its least intact piece.
I am paying for fully-formed Matzas, not Matza crumbles.
I don’t buy your product with broken quarters don’t stick me with broken pieces of Matza.
Regards,
Mort Goldman (again)
Quahog, RIMatzah is a fragile product.
Unless bakeries invest heavily in packaging, some breakage is to be expected.
I find that a third to a half of the matzos in each box are broken.
I would rather the situation stay as is than have to pay an extra ten dollars a pound for more protective packaging.BRAVO!!
I paid quite a bit for a one-pound box of Matzos from Eretz Yisroel and not a single one was whole.If you zoche, you will get 3 whole matzas.
If you understand the value of mitzvos and hiddur thereof, you will buy enough boxes to ensure having 4-5 whole matzos.
If you swift as a tzvi you will buy them in tishri and have enough time to return
If you are smart as a fox, you will buy them on amazon and return for frei.If you are an erliche yid, you will do business with other ehriche yidden whose inside of the box is the same as the picture on the outside (3 whole matzas).
To quote Chacham Henrich Heine: it is impossible to live a life without trusting anyone, but you can live a reasonable life if you don’t let the same person to cheat you twice.In New York, I would say 90% of the Matzahs are whole.
It’s probably the interstate (or international) shipping.
Kuvult,
How do you know it was due to the matzah bakery and not the grocery store employee? Did you buy in bulk and that’s how you found it?
Manichewitz (owned by Kedem now) now makes hand made shmurah matzah. Its almost never broken. They claim its all hand made. (is there some loophole where a machine still does part of it? I don’t know. But if fully handmade they are almost all whole)
I ordered 7 boxes of Komemiyus and apart from 4 matzos they were all whole. Original and best.
Simple solution. Next year buy soft matzot. Just keep them in the freezer until the seder, otherwise they may grow moldy. Which was the reason they were replace by the dry, hard ones, in the Ashkanazi communities.
I ordered 6 pounds of Matzah from Montreal. They came in 2 one pound boxes and 2 two pound boxes. I just had enough whole matzos for the 2 sedorim and the required seudos for Yom Tov & Shabbos Chol Hamoed. All the others were broken. Luckily we are only a family of 2. At $46 a pound we deserve better.
The much less expensive machine-made matzos produced by Manischewitz and other companies don’t have this problem.
Are machine-made matzos less fragile? Or does the higher volume of sales enable them to spend more money on packaging?
Interesting thread topic.
I imagine as far as the actual halacha of what’s acceptable there’s a percentage, similar to how much sediment is allowed in a wine or oil barrel, and under which conditions of sale must it be free of sediment.
With hand shmura matza, I expect there may be some broken and even a couple slightly burned, but more than that seems (to me) to be excessive. Also, a box that costs $13.99 a pound I’d expect to have fewer perfect matzos than a premium brand sold for a lot more money. Even the “best” brand of matza is going to have some broken, and the law of averages says someone may end up with a mostly broken box simply because of rough handling by the delivery people, shippers, or other customers handling the box. If matza is sold at a premium with the explicit statement that the only broken pieces will be those included to round the weight up to a pound, that would presumably obligate the seller to replace any shevarim. As far as the bakery deliberately including broken matza, I don’t know what’s OK or how much is OK – that’s a shaila for people more knowledgeable than yours truly.A neighbor of mine told me that he bought 4 lbs of hand matzos. From the 4 lbs, he had a total of 5 matzos that were whole. He had to borrow matzos from someone else just to have enough for lechem mishna during the days and for the sedorim. That’s not ok, not at $40 per lb.
I tried some of the matzos from Ukraine this year. They were significantly cheaper, which was a big draw, as I try to only use hand matzos the entire Yom Tov. They were really thin, nice and crispy, and almost all of them were whole. Next year I’ll likely try to get all my matzos from that brand.
I always expect to have some broken matzos in each box, because they sell by the pound. If the whole matzos come out to 0.9 lbs, they need to add the last 0.1, which may not be a whole matzah. But the majority of each box should be whole.
there is a trade-off here: you can easily make matza thick and hard as cement and totally unbreakable – and inedible!
Maybe, having fragile tasty matzah with some chance of breakage is worth it.I supplied a bunch of people with Montreal Matzohs brought in through the Belzer Kollel here in Monsey. I shlepped 28 pounds down to Florida in my car. I had trouble finding broken ones! Not only were they whole, they tasted great! When I got back all the people who I brought the Matzohs to told me they had the same experience. BTW, the fresh ones were less than $40 a pound.
@kuvult, are you a pharmacist by any chance? 😉
I am amazed that there 19 comments about broken matzah.
As today is Rav Miller zatsal’s yahrtzeit, lzchuso everyone should open an apple and take out the seeds and marvel at the wonders of plan and purpose in creation testifying to their Creator.
Also , a lesson he said from matzah is that just like Kohanim mostly ate matzah in the Beis Hamikdash, so too every Jew is part of Mamleches Kohanim.Kuvult, so maybe as a public service, we should post here which matzos were whole and good. Like mentioned above, I found Ukrainian matzos under R Kamenetsky hashgoha pretty good and almost all whole. On thinner and overdone side.
We were together with family for Pesach, in a group of close to 100 people. As such, we had many, many boxes of matza, from several different brands.
On average, there were about five or six matzos per pound, of which one to three were broken.
We had no problem providing sufficient whole matzos for each family unit to have its own lechem mishneh for all of the meals, including ne’ilas hachag.
Broken matzos are perfectly useful for all other intents and purposes, and so are completely dissimilar to wine glasses and most other products.
Bottom line is, I’d rather get half my matzos broken in the box than pay extra for more secure packaging. There is almost no value lost in a broken matza.
I get it; people like to kvetch. Go ahead and kvetch! I just think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.
At $46/lb, consider getting together with your extended family and chevrah and baking your own next year (unless moishiach comes in the interim)
This year, to my delight and surprise, the pupa-tzhlem matzos were almost all shleimos., in stark contrast to other years. They were transported from the bakery to a home in Lakewood, then each 2 lb box was put into a alrger outer box abs stransported by car over 500 miles.
The KAJ Haddar machine shmura chabura matzos baked in EY, were bought at Gourmet Glatt $13.79/lb. Transported to the same out of town location. Not a single one broken!I have been troubled by the few whole matzhos I salvage from a 2 Lb box. I generally use Pupa, this year I also used Satmar (broadway) which were better!
I buy and pick up directly from the bakery, for those that excuse breakage as a shipping or store issue.
In my opinion the issue is that most matzhos bake with a curved shape rather than flat. The subsequent packing flattens the curve by breaking them. I suspect the solution is a more experienced baker putting the matzhos in the oven flatMatzah baker is a highly specialized job, and all of the big bakeries use only very experienced bakers. Even most private Chaburos hire professionals for that position.
The matzos are laid flat in the oven. The slightly convex shape of your matzah is a result of the intense heat in the oven causing the middle of the dough to rise. I don’t know why this doesn’t happen with machine matzos; I would guess that it has to do with the fact that hand matzos are thinner in middle, while machine matzos have uniform thickness.
I bought matzos and picked them up directly from the Kerestirer Bakery. I bought both whole and shvorim. The whole were just about entirely whole, with a rare slight chipping. The shvorim were all broken as labeled.
@catch yourself
If everyone only uses experienced bakers/shivers, how do new ones ever get experience?
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