The Flavour

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to tell you this, but if a grocery store has a kosher aisle or aisles, anyone can shop in them. You don’t have to keep kosher or even be Jewish. And in many cases, anyone should shop in them, because the food is really good. When I was growing up secular (not a memoir title that would sell), I didn’t know what the word “kosher” meant and I thought it described a flavour, a really good one, because in our almost-no-Jews part of the world, my parents would exclaim with delight if they found kosher pickles, kosher salami, etc. A lot of these foods hold nostalgic but also gustatory properties for me completely divorced from the ritual, religious, or even community associations they would hold for many Jews—we just bought them at the store, took them home, ate them, and were happy. But that’s not a bad way to enjoy any food—you can enjoy them too! And I’ve found more nice kosher foods since moving to North York, where they are abundant.

To clarify, kosher foods are important to the religious communities who have that as part of their practice and I am not trying to minimize that religious aspect. Some might say that it’s not an aspect, it is the whole point, and who am I to dispute it—I’m just saying, as a person who also shops at No Frills, one is free to purchase these products for any reason, including religion, hunger, deliciousness, or undisclosed. A point of further clarification, a lot of kosher foods just taste like their non-kosher counterparts, or slightly different in a non-interesting way, at least to me. This is a highly subjective list of personal recommendations from one Jewish person who would also be happy to eat a shrimp salad, so you really have to take it for what it’s worth.

Frozen Challah Dough: Challah is braided egg bread; soft, sweet, and usually a nice shade of yellow. It is VERY GOOD, and often a bit hard to find outside of Jewish enclaves, though certainly not impossible. It also goes stale quickly, so when I find a loaf of it, having been shipped to the store and then sat there a while, I often have time to eat only a few slices before it gets stale and then the rest get relegated to French toast (challah French toast is great, though). I discovered that the frozen food case in the kosher section has frozen challah dough, all neatly braided and ready to go—you thaw it, set it to rise, brush it with an egg, and bake it. I’d never had hot challah before and it blew my mind—it’s so much better fresh, and it was already pretty good not fresh. When you bake it the day you want it, you have a lot better margin on the staleness. You can also put whatever seeds you want on it. This is the photo in the header. And it is glorious. You can stop reading this post here and it will have been well worth your time.

Pickles: Kosher pickles are famous and even the most goyish groceries stores actually carry at least one or two varieties of them in the deli case. Our kosher section has a half dozen brands, each with sours, half sours, whole pickles, spears, slices, and chips, plus dill varieties. There’s also something called “kosher style” pickles, and my palate is not refined enough to tell the difference. I’m not even a huge pickle person but I do believe if you are going to get pickles, you should get kosher dill (or something called “summer pickles,” rarely available, which my mother in the 1980s made by leaving the jar in the sun with a rock on it. Many of my childhood photos of backyard summer fun have a jar of pickles in the background). I was completely baffled the first time I encountered a bread and butter pickle, and while by now I can admit that they are good, I still think they are somehow something other than a pickle. Real pickles are kosher, aren’t shelf stable, and don’t have sugar in them.

Snacks: I have been working my way through the chip aisle in the kosher section so that you don’t have to. There are a lot of kosher versions of nonkosher things that are basically the same but slightly more expensive—useful if you can’t eat the nonkosher thing but irrelevant to my interests. Lays makes a kosher variant, there’s a brand called Golden Fluff (really) that does a lot of this, and so on. But there’s usually one little surprise with each brand, something I have never seen before, and even though most of these are not that exciting, my life is limited and so I keep trying them. There were some everything-bagel seasoned pretzels, a kind of onion-ring thing, bbq corn chips, etc. The standout is Bamba, apparently a stalwart of the kosher kid’s life. The underlying structure is the same as a cheesie—a puffed corn curl, but instead of a dusting of orange cheese powder, there is a dusting of brown peanut butter powder. To someone who has never had them before, they are very odd. When I ate the first one, I didn’t like it, but then I ate a couple more and thought, well… Then I kept eating them. Mark had the same reaction. I saw recently that they have brought out a strawberry variety, but I’m not quite ready for that yet. These were originally recommended to me by my cousin in Maine (hi, Jill!), so I guess they get around outside Jewish enclaves, but I had never seen them before my days in North York.

Ground Fish: Kosher butchery is elaborate and important, religion-wise, so kosher meat is expensive and just tastes like meat (to me?), so I don’t typically bother. Kosher processed meats, like salami and hot dogs, have an excellent reputation and I remember them fondly, but I haven’t eaten such things in nearly twenty years and I can’t give a firm recommendation here. The one thing in the protein area I can recommend firmly is fresh ground fish, which appears in the kosher fish case at No Frills in several varieties, I suspect for homecooks to make gefilte fish with, though I don’t actually know for sure why it is there. (There are many prepared gefilte fish options available as well, but as I do not like gefilte fish, we will not be discussing any of that further). The first thing I thought when I saw it is that Mark could use the ground fish to make his Cape Breton family’s fish cakes. It turns out those are traditionally made with salt cod, which we don’t have a way of getting and I have actually only read about in books. So Mark agreed to try to create a variant and he did, and they are fantastic, and the true merging of our cultures.

There’s certainly much more to discuss in the kosher aisle, both that I like and that I haven’t yet tried. If you have recommendations for me to try, please me know!