What does it take to BE KOSHER?
We tagged along with a rabbi to learn about the process
A rabbi walks into a restaurant carrying a blowtorch. There’s no punchline, it’s literally part of Rabbi Mendel Brogna’s job.
As the head mashgiach (Hebrew for supervisor) of the Kashruth Council of Canada, Brogna’s job is to supervise the kosher status of restaurants and catering venues to ensure the food and cooking equipment is up to the standards of Kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws.
Part of that involves kashering, which involves cleansing new or used cooking equipment, typically with the use of heat, to rid any traces of contamination from non-kosher foods or materials. Brogna keeps a giant blowtorch attached to a propane tank in the trunk of his car ready to heat up the inside of ovens as well as pots and pans.
During Passover, the busiest time for mashgiachs, the blowtorch comes extra handy to incinerate any traces of leavened bread in a kitchen since that’s forbidden during the holiday. If there’s anything that can’t withstand the heat of the blowtorch, which Brogna has a licence to operate, he’ll use one of the many electric kettles in his trunk to boil water to wipe down appliances, counters, floors and walls. That afternoon, he’s making a house call for a home kitchen.
KOSHER continued on E7
While Brogna doesn’t bless the food or cooking equipment (a common misconception), keeping a restaurant kosher is a labour-intensive and rigorous process that takes clean-eating to a whole new level.
“The (City of Toronto) health inspectors enjoy coming to kosher restaurants because they know it’s always inspected by us. I never had a restaurant that got a red card, ever,” says Brogna, who has been a mashgiach for two decades and oversees other mashgiachs working for the Kashruth Council of Canada. Prior to becoming a mashgiach, Brogna worked as a butcher at his father’s kosher slaughterhouse in Brooklyn.
On this day, he’s visiting the kitchen of Prime On Avenue, a recently opened kosher steak house on Avenue Rd. just south of Wilson Ave. in North York. A meat-oriented establishment, such as a steak house or a butcher shop, will have an inhouse mashgiach to ensure the meat is prepared properly, as well as sign off on every food item entering and leaving the restaurant. Even takeout boxes have to be taped shut to ensure nothing happens to the food while being delivered to the customer.
At Prime, its in-house mashgiacha (a female mashgiach) is Anat, who prefers not to use her last name. She inspects a shipment of ice cream that just arrived, making sure it’s pareve or made without milk, as dairy and meat cannot be mixed according to kashrut; the restaurant is dairy-free. Even something as seemingly innocuous as a salad can be a minefield as Brogna picks up a sealed bag of triplewashed arugula and estimates it probably contains 50 thrips, tiny winged insects that aren’t kosher. Part of Anat’s job is to wash all the produce with soap and water and inspect it for debris using a light box.
“I have to cut everything,” she says. “Even the asparagus, we take out the tips because insects can get in there. Once it’s washed, we mark that it’s ready to use.”
She’s also the first person to arrive at the restaurant in the morning to light the stoves (a Jewish person must be involved in the process of making any kosher food) and is the sole key holder to the fridges where all the food is locked up at the end of the night to prevent tampering. The locks require two different keys.
“At this restaurant, the owner doesn’t have a key to his own fridge,” says Brogna. “That’s how intense it is.”
The Kashruth Council of Canada (COR) is a non-profit agency of about100 employees and is the country’s largest kosher certification agency. It was formed in 1952 as a way to regulate how businesses prepared kosher food for the Toronto Jewish community. The council’s offices are located above a very unkosher Red Lobster on Dufferin St., just north of Lawrence Ave. E. To become a mashgiach, the COR offers a three-month course in conjunction with Liaison College culinary school where students also get a food handler certification. To be a mashgiach one has to be an ob- servant Jew who follows a kosher diet.
The organization oversees about140 food service establishments, restaurants, cafes, caterers and hospitals around the GTA and also certifies food plants across Canada.
The COR has certified about 70,000 food products including cereals, chocolate, spreads and condiments.
“I’d say most of the products in your home are kosher and you wouldn’t even know it,” says Brogna.
“You look at Heinz ketchup and you’ll see a COR logo on it. If it’s a nonmeat product, you’ll probably find a kosher symbol on it.”
He walks into the fridge of Prime to point out all kosher condiments and oils, some with the COR logo, others with logos from certifiers in Montreal, New York and California. Even though the kosher diet isn’t mainstream, it’s a growing business worldwide with more and more people catching on.
“People feel like there’s a more rigorous process when it comes to inspecting the meat,” says Richard Rabkin, managing director of COR. “We’re getting a lot more certification requests from restaurants and definitely from factories. A lot of people who buy kosher products don’t follow a kosher diet: they’re vegan or vegetarian or maybe feel like it’s healthier or safer.”
The COR has an app for consumers to figure out what’s kosher and what’s not, and there’s also an Ask A Rabbi function (Rabkin says in the month leading up to Passover he counted more than 10,000 queries). Rabkin takes out his phone to show a recent WhatsApp conversation with rabbis in Turkey, Australia, Israel, the United States and Belgium on sourcing kosher potato starch for a food company.
Still, while a kosher restaurant goes through a rigorous inspection process each day for the Jewish community, the COR emphasizes it’s just like eating at any other restaurant.
“We live in one of the most multicultural cities in the world and obviously Jewish people who keep kosher are the ones primarily frequenting these establishments,” says Rabkin. “But we’re happy and honoured to have people of different backgrounds come and share kosher food.”