As Passover comes to a close, here’s my fast and tasty way of making Matzo Ball Soup. There are other methods where you make chicken stock from scratch. By all means, you should do it. Take the bones from a whole chicken and bowl them with some onion, celery, carrots, garlic, parsley, salt and pepper. Mine starts with buying premade chicken stock. Sorry about the picture…right now we are still under shelter-in-place from COVID19 and I wasn’t able to get carrots, dill, and chicken before this shot.

INGREDIENTS

• 32 oz chicken stock (low sodium and a brand you like)
• 3 cups of water
• 1 carrot sliced
• 1 stick of celery sliced
• Few sprigs of dill for decoration
• 1 cup cooked chicken meat (also optional)
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup matzo meal
• ¼ cup chicken fat or 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons club soda
• 1 teaspoon salt

METHOD

First thing, make your Matzo balls.

Mix the eggs, matzo meal, club soda, chicken fat or olive oil in a bowl. The mixture will end up looking like a slurry. Don’t worry, it will absorb and get more manageable. Cover and put it in the refrigerator for a few hours.

Now for the broth…combine the chicken stock, water, carrots, celery into a pot and bring to a simmer.

As your broth is simmering, well, there are 2 ways of doing this…cooking the matzo balls in your broth or cooking them separately. For me, I like to cook them in the same broth to absorb that yummy broth.

If you don’t want to cook the matzo balls in the same pot, start another pot (you can see that I don’t like taking out more pots) of boiling water. Add about 3 tablespoons of salt to the mix and then bring to a simmer.

Portion out your matzo balls. Personally, I’ve seen ice cream sized balls and I’ve also seen mini-balls out there. I have a variety of ice cream scoops. For me, I think a 1.5 oz scoop is perfect. Most people will do about 2 tablespoons but I think they take longer to cook.

Just so you know, the matzo balls you portion out will double in size after being cooked and absorbing some of the liquid.

Either in the chicken stock or your simmering water…add the matzo balls. Cover it and cook for about 15 minutes (for the smaller balls) or 20-25 minutes for the larger balls. After 15 minutes, take one of the balls and cut them in half. It is not done if you still have a hard dry core. A cooked Matzo ball is one where the liquid has gone entirely through.

Now for assembly…but before that, add the cooked chicken meat to the simmering broth to heat up.

Pour some soup into a bowl, add some chicken, carrots, and celery from your broth.

Add matzo balls and top with dill, if you want, and some freshly ground pepper.

Enjoy!

TIPS

Since I didn’t make it to the store in time, I made my own matzo meal from crackers where I knew they did not add any leavening agents. I took a bunch of crackers, hopefully not salted, and ran them through my food processor until I got about a cupful.

Broth from scratch is great. Use some of those bones if you have them laying around.