What Is Matzo Meal? The Ground Cracker Behind Matzo Balls and Latkes

Part of our Heritage Kitchen Glossary – short guides to the ingredients and techniques behind Eastern European cooking.

What it is

Matzo meal is matzo crackers ground to crumbs. That is the whole ingredient list.

Matzo is unleavened bread made from flour and water and baked before the dough can rise. The speed is the point: anything slower would turn into chametz, the leavened food forbidden on Passover. Grind a baked sheet of it and you get something that handles like coarse breadcrumbs and is still permitted during the holiday.

Why anyone grinds up crackers

For eight days a year, an Ashkenazi cook loses flour. Not only bread, but the binder in a fish ball, the thickener in a batter, the body of a dumpling. Matzo solved that, because a matzo has already been baked and can no longer become chametz.

The first matzo meal was salvage: crumbs left from baking matzo before the holiday, or broken sheets left after it. Today it works the other way round. Matzos are baked specifically to be pulverized, and the boxes sit on the shelf all year.

Meal, cake meal, farfel

Three grinds, three jobs. Plain matzo meal is the medium grind, the one a recipe means when it says matzo meal and nothing else. Cake meal is ground finer and stands in for flour in Passover baking. Farfel goes the other way: bite-sized pieces no bigger than an aspirin tablet, which took over the role of the egg-noodle farfel that was never kosher for the holiday. Farfel goes into soups, stuffings and kugels.

What it does in a bowl

Mostly two jobs. The first is structure. In kneidlach, matzo meal is not an addition to the dumpling, it is the dumpling: crumbs mixed with eggs, a fat and a little liquid, chilled, then simmered until they swell. The dumpling itself is a nineteenth-century invention, an adaptation of the Central European Knödel for a holiday that forbids bread. Our Traditional Matzo Ball Soup covers the method and the history.

The second job is binding. Three or four tablespoons hold a latke batter together, and the batter then rests ten minutes so the crumbs can swell and soak up the water the potatoes keep giving off. Plain flour does the same work; our latke article puts the difference at a slightly heartier crumb and nothing more. In gefilte fish, matzo meal is what keeps the ground fish from falling apart in the poaching broth.

The thing worth knowing before a seder

Matzo meal mixed with liquid is gebrokts, wetted matzo. Some families, Chabad among them, avoid it for the first seven days of Passover, on the reasoning that a badly kneaded pocket of flour inside the matzo could still rise on contact with water. Those same families often make a point of eating matzo balls on the eighth and final day. Worth asking before you plan the menu.

Lighter versions and substitutes

Whole wheat matzo meal keeps the bran and germ that the standard kind loses in milling, so it adds a little fiber and a nuttier taste. It is a specialty item rather than the default, and it is easiest to find around Passover; our Healthy Matzo Ball Soup is built on it.

Outside the holiday, matzo meal has no special claim on any of these dishes. Breadcrumbs or flour do the same work, and plenty of cooks use whichever is already open. Our lighter latkes lean on whole wheat flour instead, which soaks up a little more moisture than matzo meal does, so that batter may want a spoonful of water to loosen it.

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Further Reading & Sources

This entry draws on the sources below and on the recipes it links to elsewhere on this site. They are listed for readers who want to go further.

1. “What Is Matzah (Matzo)?” Chabad.org. chabad.org — matzo as flour and water baked before the dough can rise, and why that timing matters.
2. “How Traditional Are Matzo Balls?” Chabad.org. chabad.org — how matzo crumbs became a manufactured ingredient, and the gebrokts custom behind the eighth-day matzo ball.
3. “What Is Matzah?” My Jewish Learning. myjewishlearning.com — the Exodus story behind unleavened bread and its double meaning at the seder table.
4. “Why Matzah Farfel Is Your Secret Weapon for Passover Cooking.” The Nosher, My Jewish Learning. myjewishlearning.com — what farfel is, how coarse it runs, and the egg-noodle pasta it replaced.