Kosher isn’t a style of food like Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Italian. Kosher is a way of making food that is in accordance to the laws dictated by the Jewish faith. This means that culturally diverse foods can be made in such a way as to be kosher. You can have kosher Chinese, kosher Japanese, kosher Thai, or kosher Italian food which means you can have kosher pizza. This is great news for people who have recently converted and may have thought their food choices were going to be extremely limited.
Kosher Pizza Aventure Guidelines
To be truly kosher all components of a dish need to adhere to kosher guidelines.
Dough
According to Jewish law the grain used to make the flour that will make the dough had to have taken root prior to Passover in order to be used. This means the flour must be certified kosher in order to be used to create the dough. This one is a little tricky, however, as many people outside of Israel do not adhere to this particular law. If you want to make sure that the meal is kosher for even the most stringent practitioners you will need to ask if the flour used to make the dough was kosher.
Cheese
Cheese is possibly even more important to a pizza than dough. After all, types of dough vary but all pizza needs cheese! Historically the only way for cheese to be considered kosher was to have a Jewish person make the cheese entirely but that’s virtually impossible with the automation of cheese processing plants. Rules have been modified to say a Jewish person can oversee the machines but still needs to be who adds the rennet. As the rennet is an animal byproduct its origin is also important and the place where it is procured needs to follow kosher slaughter laws.
Ingredients
Not only do the ingredients themselves need to be kosher but the way in which they are combined also must abide by kosher law. For instance, meat and dairy cannot be combined and so a kosher pizza may have vegetables but no meat atop a traditional dairy cheese. However, this opens up the option of using vegan cheeses with meat toppings as long as those cheeses were made in accordance to kosher law.
Is it difficult to make traditional ethnic foods kosher? Yes. But it is absolutely worth the time and effort invested if you truly want to experience a variety of foods, especially a food as perennially popular as pizza.
Contact our Kosher pizza Aventure professionals today.