A How-to Primer for All Your Pesach Needs

Grocery shopping for Passover pretty much means completely restocking your kitchen for the holiday. Remembering everything you'll need for the weeklong holiday can be a daunting task, especially if you're also hosting a Seder or two!

This guide is designed to help you devise a comprehensive Pesach shopping list (here's a printable one that's ready to go!), and includes lots of tips—along with helpful information about notable foods that do and don't require special kosher for Passover certification.

 When it comes to cooking for Passover, even adventuresome cooks often "go by the book," choosing only the same tried-and-tested recipes year after year. They know that matzo meal and matzo cake meal, for instance, do not behave like regular flour in recipes. Certain ingredients—like baking powder—are available with KFP certification, but often prove hard to find. Others—like certain flavoring extracts— simply don't exist.

When you're doing a lot of cooking from scratch (especially with shoestring kitchen supplies and holiday-imposed time limits to consider) it's hard to embrace the idea of experimenting. The last thing you want is a recipe failure! Still, it is possible to adapt "regular" recipes for Passover or to find reasonable substitutions if you need to tweak an existing Pesach recipe.

The weeklong holiday of Passover presents all sorts of special kosher challenges. Not only do all traces of chametz—leavened foods made from wheat, barley, spelt, rye, or oats—need to be removed from the house, but there are lots of foods that are verboten during the holiday.

For parents or caregivers of fledgling eaters, this can present a special challenge—namely, what on earth can I feed my baby?!

If you live in a thriving Jewish community that boasts a kosher supermarket, you may find some kosher-for-Passover baby food on the shelves. But it's nearly always imported from Israel, and so quite expensive. Do you really need to invest in jarred food for your little one? Probably not.

The Passover Seder is the most widely celebrated festive meal among both devout and ordinarily non-observant Jews. If you're hosting, there's a lot to coordinate on top of all of the other Pesach to-dos, and that can mean big-time stress. But with a little help on the preparation timeline and menu planning fronts, you can relax (at least a little!), while putting together a Seder you and your guests will enjoy. 

As a ritual filled with storytelling, song, prayer, wine, and of course, a festive meal the Seder evening can run long. So how do you keep your guests comfortable and happy—even if it takes a while to make it to mealtime? These 3 easy tips will have everyone praising your Seder hosting skills. 

Charoset—the fruit and nut mixture that symbolizes the mortar used by Israelite slaves in Egypt—is a Passover icon, and may be the most delicious symbolic food enjoyed at the Seder. It's also an amazing snapshot of the Jewish diaspora, as Jewish communities around the world have their own unique takes on charoset, driven by the ingredients that were available to them. Whether you're hosting the Seder, or are a guest tasked with bringing along a dish to share, consider adding an extra charoset or two to the mix, as a culinary connection to Jews around the world.  

Passover may last for only 8 days (or 7, if you live in Israel), but the holiday involves a whole additional layer of kosher observance full of stringent intricacies that aren't a factor during the rest of the year. That means things can get confusing even for people who are quite learned, and strictly kosher observant year round. Add in a centuries-old family or community minhagim (customs) specific to the holiday, and it gets even harder to separate the myths and facts about the whys and hows of keeping kosher on Pesach. You'll find some of the most common myths here, along with explanations about the real deal when it comes to Passover food misconceptions. 

Lots of folks gripe about eating matzo throughout the entire eight-day holiday of Passover, while others profess to love the stuff. Well, here's a news flash—the people in the latter camp are probably just doing a better job in the topping department. Let this collection open-faced matzo sammies inspire your own creative combos, and you may just find yourself craving the stuff year round.