Passover can leave Jews hankering for a carb fix.
During the eight-day celebration starting tonight, many Jews abstain from grains, including most wheat, barley, rye, spelt and oats, as well as rice, corn and legumes. Which is one reason more Jews are embracing a newly popular (yet quite ancient) grain-like product — quinoa, first cultivated thousands of years ago by the Incas.
“On Passover, the No. 1 thing you’re really missing is grains, and quinoa is such a great substitute,” said Susie Fishbein, whose cookbook “Passover by Design” includes several quinoa recipes.
While technically a seed, quinoa (pronounced keen-wah) takes on a grain-like consistency when cooked, and also can be ground into flour. It’s been a mainstay of the natural foods world for a while, but now is catching on in the mainstream.
“The fact that you almost never hear people calling it ‘kin-oh-ah’ anymore says something” about its emergence onto the American food scene, says Cynthia Harriman, director of Food and Nutrition Strategies for the Whole Grains Council.
According to Harriman, quinoa flour is an increasingly common ingredient in processed foods. ConAgra Foods recently unveiled a line of quinoa flour, and sales of quinoa have grown more than tenfold since 2003 for Bob’s Red Mill, a Milwaukie, Ore.-based grains company.
Lorna Sass, author of the cookbook “Whole Grains for Busy People,” praises quinoa as versatile and easy. Her basic preparation, in which she boils it like pasta in a large pot of water, takes about 15 minutes. “You can use it every which way,” she says. “One day I’ll make it Southwest style, another day Mediterranean or Middle Eastern.”
Echoing Sass, kosher cookbook author Fishbein called quinoa a “blank canvas for almost any flavor you want to add.” Many kosher chefs are turning to quinoa for pilafs, breakfast cereals, salads and desserts.
Though quinoa is not universally accepted as kosher for Passover in Orthodox Jewish circles, Jeffrey Nathan, executive chef of the New York kosher restaurant Abigael’s, makes ample use of it during Passover, his busiest time.
“Any recipe I would use rice in, I put quinoa in,” Nathan said, adding that he finds it works well in risotto, soups and salads like tabbouleh as well.
Every year, new kosher-for-Passover foods that aim to mimic the flavor and mouth feel of wheat pasta and bread appear on the market. Nathan is dismissive of most. But he puts quinoa in a radically different category.
“It’s not faking it,” he explains. “Quinoa I use all year-round, so why not take advantage of it for Passover?”
