Salted peanut and caramel matzo brittle recipe: A matzo-based brittle for the modern age

By Joan Nathan, The New York Times

Like so many others, I, for years, drizzled chocolate over matzo for my children at Passover, so I was no stranger to matzo treats. But somehow, I missed the creation of caramel matzo crunch, also called “matzo buttercrunch” or “matzo brittle,” its many incarnations found in cookbooks, on blogs and on websites. Sometimes the provenance is recognized, but mostly not.

Being the food detective that I am, though, I thought I would set the record straight. The earliest recipe I could find comes from Marcy Goldman, author of “A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking,” first published in 1998. In the book, she includes a recipe she calls “My Trademark, Most Requested, Absolutely Magnificent Caramel Matzoh Crunch.”

In 1986, Goldman was searching for a Passover dessert to pitch to newspapers in the United States and Canada and spotted a recipe for “Easy Toffee Bars” in a 1978 copy of “Farm Journal’s Choice Chocolate Recipes” by Elise W. Manning. In it, they used saltine crackers as a base for the treats.

“A light bulb went off,” Goldman, 67, said over Zoom from her home in Montreal. “If you could use saltines, why not swap them for matzo?”

She did just that, and the recipe took off from there.

Occasionally, guests have brought Goldman’s crunch to my Passover Seder, never straying too far from the original.

This year, though, I updated her recipe: I included a topping of peanuts and swapped the chocolate for protein-rich peanut butter. The crunchy peanuts and a sprinkle of fleur de sel counteract the sweetness of the caramel, which acts as a binder.