Have I mentioned that I love matzoh balls? Fluffy, hard, small, big – it doesn’t matter. If it’s spherical, made of matzoh meal and floating in broth I’ll eat it. So when I saw Isa Moskowitz’ recipe for vegan matzoh balls I thought, “cool. I should try this out and then post about it on JCarrot.”

So here you go – dueling vegan Matzoh ball recipes: tofu versus flax. Yes, she has not one, but two vegan matzoh ball recipes. The flax one is new to help address the tofu/kitniot debate. (Click here for the flax recipe – you have to scroll down to the comments section).

I tackled the tofu matzoh balls first. I blended the silken tofu with broth and olive oil, then mixed that with the matzoh meal, salt and pepper. I put the whole thing into the fridge for 2 hours. Easy enough.

Then I mixed up the flax recipe. It was a bit dry, so I added a tiny amount of water and put that in the fridge as well.

After a couple hours I put two pots of water on to boil. I formed my dough into firm, walnut sized balls according to the directions. I’d halved the recipe but I realized that the flax version makes about half of the tofu version, even though you use the same amount of matzoh meal. A couple table spoons of ground flax just doesn’t have the same volume as six ounces of tofu. It’s pretty obvious, but I didn’t think about it until I saw my ten little flax matzoh balls next to the twenty or so tofu balls. (And I still had some tofu mixture reserved).

So I dropped my balls one by one into their respective pots of boiling water. Turned down the heat, put back on the lid, and set the timer for 40 minutes.

When the time was up, I excitedly lifted the lid on my tofu matzoh balls. They had risen to the top, and when I took the lid off they did little somersaults before sinking back down. So cute! I then lifted the lid on the flax matzoh balls. Sadly, they had completely fallen apart. I was glad I had only made half the recipe. My guess is that the dough was too dry.  I may try the recipe again, though, because I do like the taste of flax and have recently started substituting half of the flour in pancake and waffle recipes with flax meal. Yum! The tofu matzoh balls, which I added to some excellent home made broth, tasted like… well, tofu and matzoh. That is to say, bland. But not bad. I was able to eat a serving of two with some cilantro, salt and pepper added.

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