House Chai Kosher Kitchen
Hi! Welcome to our kitchen. Thank you so much for respecting us enough to read and follow this (occasionally entertaining, but somewhat lengthy) documentation on how to keep our kitchen kosher. Note: in addition to this document, we have some other kitchen policies that may be of interest.
What are the basics?
The first thing of importance to realize is that every Jew who observes the kosher laws observes them differently and interprets them (to the best of their ability) in a variety of ways. The basics of keeping kosher are that we Jews eat only animals with cloven hooves that eat their cud (cows and sheep, most commonly) or birds that aren’t birds of prey (ducks, turkeys, chicken, etc.). We don’t mix meat products with milk products – no cheeseburgers, unless the burger is veggie and/or the cheese is fake. With seafood, we only eat fish that have fins and scales and aren’t scavengers – salmon and halibut and others are fine, sharks and eels and catfish are not.
Kosher food is divided into three basic categories: meat, dairy, and pareve (neither meat nor dairy). Pareve foods include eggs and fish, but the category is mainly fruits and vegetables. Pareve food can be combined with either dairy or meat. Scrambled eggs with cheese, fish topped with a cream sauce, meatloaf made with eggs, and some sort of meat with fish dish – all of those are fine dishes to make separately, so long as you’re not also combining meat and dairy categories.
We know that may already sound like a lot. No pork, no rabbit, no lobster, no clams, etc. Reptiles, amphibians, worms, and insects are also not kosher (and bugs are often used for red dye in fake fruit juice, believe it or not!). But as much as Crystal sometimes misses lobster, it’s really important to both of us that we keep the kitchen kosher. So we appreciate your help in making sure that the things that touch our dishes, pots, etc. are kosher-friendly.
What to buy?
It’s often difficult to figure out what to buy for use in a kosher kitchen. Every WikiPedia:Jew keeps a different level of kashrut (observance of kosher laws), so what’s okay in our kitchen may not be okay in someone else’s, and vice versa. We’ll try to cover the basics, and if anything needs further clarification, please let us know!
Food products are often marked with a hechsher – a little symbol by an agency that certifies the product is kosher. The most common of these is the OU symbol, a U inside a circle. There are plenty of others – Circle K (K inside a circle), Star K (K inside a star), Triangle K (K inside a triangle), Tablet K (K inside a tablet symbol), COR (the letters COR inside a circle, with numbers underneath denoting which site the product was certified from), etc. There are over 400 of these symbols. Just about the only one we don’t accept as kosher is the little R with a circle on it – that’s a trademark symbol, nothing to do with kosherness. (Don’t laugh. When we first started observing kosher laws, Crystal thought everything was kosher because of this trademark symbol!) Some people worry about which organizations are “valid†hechsher marks for their kitchen. To be honest, we prefer things with an OU, but we don’t want to be too confusing for our roommates, so anything that has a hechsher on it is fine.
What about food that doesn’t have a hechsher on it? Lots of things don’t even need hechshers to be used in our kitchen. Fresh fruits, vegetables, and plain things that come from the earth (nuts, herbs, etc.) don’t need a hechsher in our kitchen. We also don’t require a hechsher for canned food such as beans or pineapple, so long as that’s all that’s in the can. Here’s where we start to run into some potential minefields, though – canned beans are sometimes pre-cooked in vats with bits of pork for flavor. That’s never okay to mix with a kosher kitchen.
So if it doesn’t have a hechsher, look at the ingredient list. Stay away from things that list meat as an ingredient -- anything that has meat in it either has a prominent heksher on it or it's just not kosher. The only other potential landmine is gelatin -- it's made of animal hooves, usually pig or cow, and it is very much not kosher. So look at the ingredients, and if you don't see meat or gelatin, it's probably good. Feel free to ask us about things if you're not sure. There are almost always kosher options for things, unless there’s a good reason (like marshmallows made with gelatin).
Dairy foods are a laxity in our house. We accept hechshers that other Jews don’t, and we use some cheeses that don’t have a hechsher at all, especially if they’re made with vegetable rennet. (WikiPedia:Rennet is a product usually made of cow parts, so the fact that it’s used to make cheese is problematic. Sometimes. It’s confusing, and even the rabbis don't agree on it. You don’t want or need to know the particulars about rennet, probably, so don’t worry too much about it. Cheeses made with vegetable rennet are prominently marked for the convenience of vegetarians.) Cheese made in kosher factories is, by and large, icky stuff. We don't usually like it. So we accept the leniencies of our community and eat cheese so long as it doesn't have bits of meat in it or something like that.
Meat is of special concern for kosher kitchens everywhere. It’s easy to find dairy kosher items, because they’re easy to make. Meat, however, is something that many people disagree on. The essence of what type of meat kosher is described above – cloven hooves and chewing of cud. But what we buy for meat is more complicated than that. It has to be killed in a certain (humane) way, drained of blood, salted, and otherwise made kosher under trained slaughter specialists called shochets. We buy only certified kosher meat for our kitchen, and we are quite strict about this. Shaw's often carries Empire chicken and turkey or Aaron’s Best (Rubashkin's) kosher beef and chicken. There’s a small kosher section in the meat department, and it has been growing larger over the past year or more. This is the most easily accessible way to get meat that can be cooked in the house. You can also go to Brookline, where there are kosher butchers and such. We make periodic forays into Brookline for good steak, duck, and other options that aren’t usually available locally. Online, Kosher.com or Aaron's Gourmet are two reliable sites that we sometimes get meat from. The basic thing about meat, though, is that we always require a hechsher for meat products. Because meat is usually the most expensive thing to get for a kosher kitchen, and the most problematic, Steve and Crystal are usually the ones who procure the meat for the household. We have a small chest freezer in the basement for storing it, too, so we can buy it less expensively by buying it in bulk.
There is also the question of grape products. Traditionally, grape products required a hechsher because people feared that wine would be sanctified to someone else’s god before being sold to Jews. This isn’t exactly at the top of our concerns, these days, and while we were converting, it was very insulting to be told that we couldn’t handle certain wines unless they’d been pre-boiled because we might cause the wine to become treyfe (non-kosher). For this reason, we accept any wine or grape juice into the house, although we do prefer to have kosher-certified balsamic vinegar because it’s easier to use when cooking for others who do not hold similar opinions. We also tend to keep a bottle or two of kosher wine in the house for this reason. If you drink the last one, please replace it (and not with Manischewitz!) – there’s a liquor store in Porter Square that has a small kosher section.
For non-food items, we don’t require a hechsher. This includes ziplocks, tin foil, plastic wrap, etc. Some people do put hechshers on them, but since we’re not eating them, they don’t fall into our area of concern. Disposable leftover containers from restaurants or other friends’ houses, unfortunately, usually need to be thrown out. We do put leftover containers in with whatever dish set we used them with if the leftover container was originally from a kosher kitchen.
But … I don’t keep kosher, personally!
You don’t need to keep kosher in order to use our kitchen happily. If you want to keep something in the refrigerator that doesn’t follow the guidelines listed above (such as non-kosher meat, leftovers from a non-kosher restaurant, etc.), that is truly fine with us. We ask that you follow a couple of basic guidelines. Kosher laws treat treyfe-ness as if it were a germ. We ask that you separate non-kosher food in a plastic bag (preferably a labeled ziplock) so that nothing leaks into the fridge and potentially onto the kosher food and tupperware. If it needs to be reheated, we ask that you use the microwave (not the toaster oven), which can be rekashered in a very simple manner. After you’re done heating something non-kosher in the microwave, if it wasn’t completely sealed (or if it spilled, or whatever), please do a basic cleanup of the microwave. It gets cleaned a few times a month, anyway, so it shouldn’t be terribly dirty. When it’s clean, take one of the glass mugs and fill it with water. Pop that into the microwave and heat until it boils over, usually 4 or 5 minutes with our model. Presto! The microwave is kosher again.
When eating non-kosher food in the house, please don’t eat it on the kosher dishes or utensils. There’s an entire cabinet devoted to plasticware and paper plates, napkins, and other disposable useful things. It’s the lower cabinet to the right of the stove. We keep this for the occasional times when we have too many guests for our sets of plates, or for when someone wants to have treyfe take-out. It’s wasteful, but necessary.
Okay, now how do I use the kitchen for cooking?
Most of the kitchen has little white labels on it for what’s where. The cabinets are labeled with their contents. The pantry (to the right of the basement door) shelves are labeled, too. Things should be reasonably easy to find.
When cooking a meal, figure out ahead of time whether it’s going to have meat or dairy in it. (If it’s going to have both, cook the two categories separately and combine onto paper or plastic plates, treating it like treyfe food as soon as the combination has been made.) When cooking a dairy meal, use only dairy utensils, dairy plates, dairy pots, dairy or pareve ingredients, etc. After you’re done, wipe down the countertops if you spilled anything. Then check the sink for a plastic tub – blue means the sink is currently dairy, green means the sink is currently meat. If there’s no tub in the sink but there are dishes, check to see whether any of the dishes are labeled or obviously from one set or the other, and treat the sink as though it’s got that tub in it.
If the sink is currently the opposite category from your dirty dishes, you can do one of two things. You can either rekasher the sink, or you can set aside your dirty dishes in the appropriately-colored tub and deal with them later. To make the sink pareve again, boil a kettle full of water and scrub the sink while the water is heating. Clear everything out of the sink and off the edges. After the sink is clean and the water is boiling, pour water over everything – the faucet, the handles, the rim, and the middle of the sink. This makes the sink (which is wholly metal) revert back to “neutral†– in this case, pareve. Now you can put whichever set of dishes you like in there. And mop up the hot water that spilled over the edges.
Clear glass is a big exception to the rule of keeping things separate. According to Conservative rulings, you can use glass for anything so long as you wash it in between. When I say “anything,†I mean kosher food – if something glass is used for non-kosher food, we’d still have to try to rekasher it or give it away. But you can cook something in a glass dish and then put it through the dishwasher with the same set of dishes (i.e., wash it with the dairy set if you cooked something cheesy in it). After it comes out of the dishwasher, it magically reverts back to pareve status (as if it had been rekashered, although the dishwasher isn’t a method of rekashering) and gets put back into the cabinet with the pareve things.
You may have noticed that our meat set of dishes is almost entirely made up of glass dishware. This set is to be treated as if it’s not glass, if that makes any sense. We decided to have two separate sets of dishware, and it just so happens that the meat set has glass items in it. Please do keep it separate from anything dairy. This only applies to the frosted glassware with the crinkled edges, which is kept in the meat cabinetry.
A note about the oven – it can only have things of either meat or dairy sets in it at one time. According to kosher laws, steam “transfers†status of meatness to the other things in the oven for as long as the oven is warm, so only meat and pareve things can be cooked at one time, or dairy and pareve things. If the pareve things are cooked at the same time as meat or dairy, though, they are considered to be meat or dairy dishes and should be treated as such if there are leftovers, etc. Only the glass dish reverts to pareve status when cleaned. This is why we try not to cook pareve cake at the same time as brisket, because the cake tins aren’t glass and therefore would become meat dishes instead of pareve.
We try to keep sheets of tin foil on the bottom of the oven to catch small drips from cooking foods – it’s easier to replace the foil lining than rekasher the oven every time something spills. But when something spills directly onto the oven, whether it overflowed the aluminum foil or there wasn’t any there to catch the spill, it needs to be cleaned and rekashered. More than that, though, if the oven was cooking meat or dairy things when dripped upon, the oven stays meat or dairy until it is put through the self-clean cycle. In order to clean the oven and rekasher it, clean up the bottom of the oven to the best of your ability. There should be a bottle of Easy Off underneath the sink. After it’s cleaned up, leave the oven racks inside (to rekasher them as well) and pull out the lever at the top left of the oven door. (The lever sticks out 90 degrees from the front of the oven, to signify that it’s in cleaning mode and can’t be used for other things. The door also shouldn’t be openable at this time.) Press the self-clean button on the top display, and start. It should tell you that it’s going to run for 4 + hours. The oven makes a funny smell when it runs this high, so you might not want to do it when people will be around to sniff the fumes.
On the front of the dishwasher and the oven are little magnet disks with meat and dairy halves. The dishwasher has an additional magnet for clean and dirty status. When the oven is cooled and hasn’t been dripped on, the magnet should be put back to pareve status, with neither meat nor dairy on top. The dishwasher is almost always one or the other, since we always have dirty dishes. We wash dairy dishes separately from meat dishes, and we allow pareve dishes to be washed with whichever set was in use at the time of cooking. We don’t wash wooden items in the dishwasher (except wood-handled knives) because wood doesn’t react well to the high heat. There may also be a few delicate items that don’t get washed in the dishwasher, like the challah plates. For the most part, though, if it can’t be cleaned easily, we don’t tend to own it.
When using one dishwasher for two sets of dishes, some people run a cycle empty in between meat and dairy cycles, but others don’t, so we choose to save the energy and water by not running an empty cycle. There are arguments for both practices, but we choose to go by the one that wastes less resources and money.
This concludes our lecture on the Dish Cycle, featuring the Principle on Conservation of Dishware (with the occasional loss due to breakage).
Crap! What if I made a mistake?
Well, everyone makes mistakes sometimes. It really depends on what mistake was made. Some are fixable – if an item is entirely glass or metal, it’s fairly easy to rekasher it. If it includes wood parts (like a wood-handled knife or wood cutting board) or plastic parts (like plastic handles on pots), there’s simply nothing to be done and it should be given to Goodwill. But in general, set aside anything that has been the victim of a mistake, write a note explaining the circumstances if neither Steve nor I are home, and we’ll deal with it as soon as possible.
Thankfully, the oven can’t have a mistake made to it that isn’t fixable. The dishwasher, so long as it’s never used for non-kosher dishes, is also infallible. Compared to those expenses, losing a dish might be disappointing, but ultimately it’ll be okay. If a pot or pan has been dekashered beyond repair, the truly exemplary roommate would replace the item with something new (and thus, kasherable) of comparable value.
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