Ruth Reingold, creator and owner of Ruth’s Kitchen, shares her kosher cooking secrets and must-have tips on keeping kosher in America.  Get expert advice on converting traditional non-kosher recipes into tasty kosher versions, and take an inside look into a kosher cook’s life at home and on the road.

1. Could you please tell us a bit about your culinary background?
 
I grew up in a very close family where my mother and her mother were always in our kitchen. Both of these amazing women were great cooks, and my mother was a dietician who worked on developing the very earliest cake mixes for Quaker Oats. As a little girl I was making bread, cakes, and cookies. Before I left for college, I remember thinking about menus and how to put together interesting and really tasty meals.

When I got married, I decided that we needed full menus for months at a time. We lived in Ithaca, New York -- there were no kosher stores, the closest kosher meat was hours away, and planning was essential. Of course we didn’t have to have four course meals every night, but I thought it was a necessity. I also thought that every meal had to be new and tasty and beautifully presented. This was all decades before food TV! Many extra pounds heavier and many experimental recipes and menus later, we decided to cut back, but I kept up my interest in finding great recipes and figuring out wonderful ways to make mealtime a delight.

From Ithaca, we moved to Urbana, Illinois. Again we were hours from kosher sources. This was before the large food producers were selling kosher bread, pasta, cheese, and meat in small towns across America. I also wanted to make our Shabbat experience very, very special. So I began baking all the bread we ate. I focused on superb challah and Shabbat food, but I also wanted to duplicate, to the extent possible, the fast foods that our kids would hear about and see with their friends – there were only a handful of religious Jewish families in Urbana/Champaign, Illinois, and certainly no kosher restaurants. I started making all kinds of pizza, hamburger and hotdog buns, bagels, pita, and even homemade marshmallows. We amassed a huge collection of cook books, I watched Julia Child on TV and tried to copy everything I could. I was a chemist, so I used whatever knowledge I could muster to make our meals top quality and kosher. As we traveled, we saw and smelled all kinds of new foods. We tried to buy ingredients to make these somewhat exotic (at least to us), and we brought many items back to Urbana. After a while we were bringing cheese, paté, wine, special mustards, and spices from France; cheese, kosher gelatin, and spice mixtures from Israel; and we were ordering wild rice, kosher maple syrup, coffee, dried fruit, and other ingredients from vendors across the US.

2. What is it like keeping kosher in the United States?
 
We’ve lived mostly in the United States, but we spent three years in Israel and lived for months at a time in France and England. Keeping kosher in the US depends a lot on where you live. I’d say that keeping kosher in most parts of New York City is as easy and can be, and is at least as interesting as keeping kosher in Israel. That’s because everything is available in New York; it’s just more expensive, however keeping kosher in much of the US can be a challenge. Chicago and Los Angeles have many kosher stores, a range of kosher restaurants, schools, mikvaot, synagogues, etc. However it is just not easy without the wide range of high quality resources that you have in Israel or in New York, Paris, and London. When you get to a place like Urbana/Champaign, Illinois, with about 1000 Jews, and only a handful of religious families, there are no restaurants, no bakeries, no full range kosher stores. The grocery stores carry a tiny selection of Manishewitz products and then all the usual items that have kosher certification as a matter of course – catsup, mayonnaise, most pasta, baking ingredients, many canned and frozen items. There are many kosher breads and pastries, both fresh and frozen, but nothing of the quality available in Israel or New York.

In the larger cities, all ethnic communities tend to be more insular. So schools, social gatherings, and other food-related interactions are easy for kashruth – you just spend most of your time with other religious Jews. Kashruth is taken for granted.

In the smaller cities and towns, though, every eating experience requires forethought. There is a lot of mixing of all ethnic groups. For example, in Urbana, Illinois, our girls were often the only religious Jewish children in the school system. In such cities, either you eat at home, or if you are eating away form home, you bring your own food, you make special arrangements, you look around for something with certification or you make do with a coke and a carrot stick.

3.  What are your top five tips for converting non-kosher recipes to accommodate a kosher diet?

1.    Choose recipes that are intrinsically kosher, that don’t require substitutions. Don’t limit yourself to your own experience – start with a web and choose something new every night.

2.    Stay away from artificial creamers, pareve cheese substitutes, and other artificial ingredients. These usually impart bad overtones to the food or ruin the texture as well. Rice milk (not soy milk) is sometimes a reasonable substitute for milk or cream in baking. Crisco is acceptable in baking to substitute for butter, but only in small quantities. Olive oil is best to use for savory dishes as a substitute for butter. Canola oil can also be used for savory dishes and in some cakes.

3.    If you are converting a baked good from dairy to pareve, use a recipe that does not focus on the flavor of butter or cream. Stay away from pound cakes, scones, butter cookies, cream-filled items. Save these recipes for your dairy meals. Instead choose recipes that have strong spices or flavors to provide an interesting addition to the otherwise bland or flavorless pareve shortening. Better yet, choose recipes for which oil is the fat.

4.    Be very careful to choose beef recipes that do not depend on the texture, fat, and tenderness of non-kosher cuts. Long-simmered stews, pot roasts, short-ribs, ground beef, and elegant rib eye recipes are the most successful. Also, finely trimmed and carefully cut beef for Asian recipes works just fine. Stay away from large pieces of poorly trimmed, tough, chuck or shoulder beef.

5.    Choose recipes from ethnic collections that are easy to adapt – many Asian or South Asian recipes just don’t have a lot of meat/milk mixtures. You can often substitute veal, or beef for the pork. Many of these cultures have rich and fascinating vegetarian recipes. Also, explore the full range of Mediterranean ethnic recipes. The emphasis here is on olive oil, vegetables, and ingredients that are easy to find in the kosher market.

4. What would you advise for keeping kosher on the road?

While raising our four daughters, we took endless road trips across the US (and Europe and Israel).  So we tried all methods of staying well fed and happy on the road. The best result was bringing homemade special foods – pizza, calzone, quiche, even macaroni and cheese. It was also good to keep everyone away from meat so that when we found the occasional kosher ice cream parlor, we could have a treat. Now that the kids are grown, and it’s only the two of us, we don’t take as many car trips. When we do travel by car, we pack sandwiches, fruit, and water – we’re easier to please.

Traveling in the US, without supplies from home, away from big cities is a bigger challenge. It’s important to arm yourself with information beforehand. Learn which products are already kosher (if you’re not from the US, take a look at the OU, OK, and other certification agency web sites). Then prepare yourself for the visit by looking at web sites for the cities you are visiting. Search for kosher restaurants and grocery stores or bakeries, and definitely call ahead.

If you are traveling with children, always bring some food with you. Don’t forget to try local grocery stores. Yogurt, cereal, tuna, smoked salmon, humus, cream cheese, peanut butter and fruits and vegetables all save the day. Fill this in with crackers, bagels, pita, dried fruit, cookies, and candy, and you might be able to manage with the already certified items in most groceries across the US. The last resort is an ice cream store.

5. What are your favorite adapted recipes (originally non-kosher, converted to fit the laws of kashruth)?

My four favorite adapted recipes, available from Ruth’s Kitchen, are: Meatloaf, Spaghetti with Meat Sauce and Meatballs, Pie Crust, and Brie and Smoked Salmon Quiche. The meatloaf originally had beef, veal, and pork with bacon and a lot of milk in the recipe. I experimented with beef only, adding other binding ingredients – bread dampened with water, eggs, catsup, etc. to get the right texture. It’s delicious! The spaghetti recipe is based on early cooking experiences; I shared an apartment with three non-Jewish roommates one summer in college. They did a lot of cooking, mostly Italian food. I watched their methods and smelled the food constantly. One thing I learned was that the spaghetti sauces all had milk added after browning the meat. Later, I tried different kosher additions to make a tasty, thick, fresh-tasting sauce. The addition of flour after browning the meat, with the immediate addition of wine, makes a marvelous sauce. Pie crust seems like such a simple and common recipe. However, there is a real trick to having a tender and flaky pareve crust. Usually pie crust has a combination of hydrogenated shortening (or lard) and butter. The recipe I adapted from the “Joy of Cooking” solves the shortening problem by creating a paste first with the sifted flour and water. This starts to develop a bit of gluten in the dough before cutting in the hydrogenated shortening. You have to work really quickly and gently so as not to develop any more gluten as this would toughen the dough. Finally, the quiche is a more recent addition. It is based on a quiche with ham and brie in the movie “Waitress”. I created a quiche with smoked salmon and brie. In this case I use a butter-based pie crust, for both the flavor and the texture.

6.  How has kosher cooking enriched your life?

There is no doubt that keeping kosher and deciding to devote myself to having an exceptional kitchen has shaped both our eating and our social life.  Here I use “we” and “us” because this journey has been one that was shared closely with my husband and with my children. We always discussed food at length and worked together to build menus and eating habits.  This has also led to an amazing set of experiences that otherwise we never would have had. If we had not kept kosher, not only would the decision of what to eat but the knowledge of what goes into that food would have become less important and perhaps not important at all. Keeping kosher awakened in us an awareness of what goes into food, how it is prepared, what tastes good, what tastes terrible, and how food should be presented and eaten. Some of this comes directly from the laws of kashruth, but most of it comes from making everything from scratch at home. Our sensitivity to not eating artificial tasting foods or not just diving into a mediocre meal comes from trying to get the highest quality at the same time as we are trying to keep the highest kosher standards.

There is an amazing side benefit to keeping kosher that I think comes from keeping kosher in a small town and traveling extensively. That benefit is that the search for kosher food, whether it was in local groceries and bakeries and restaurants, led us to meeting interesting new friends. This includes new friends who landed in Urbana, Illinois looking for kosher food, or friends in the US, Europe, or Israel who entertained us, helped us find resources, or joined with us in our quest for new kosher food experiences. We enjoy so many relationships with people that began with a meal, a conversation about food, or a phone call asking for help in finding kosher food.

Our daughters also enriched their lives from their experiences growing up in Urbana. Each became seriously involved in the kosher dining facilities in college, becoming. kosher supervisors. My youngest worked a summer as the kosher supervisor at the finest kosher restaurant in Chicago. Each has had an unwavering commitment to kashruth, even when kosher food has been difficult to obtain, because they learned firsthand how to find or make kosher food under a variety of circumstances.  Because they kept kosher when no one around them did, they know how to keep kosher from the ground up.

Ruth Reingold is creator and owner of the online kosher cooking resource Ruth’s Kitchen.