Sephardic-Style Charoset With Dried Fruit and Nuts Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the difference between Sephardic and Ashkenazi charoset? ›

What's the difference? Ashkenazi charoset is usually made from apples, walnuts, a lot of cinnamon, and sweet wine. Sephardic versions veer more toward dried fruit, balanced spices, and a variety of nuts. And in my experience, they have a far superior texture and depth of flavor.

Charoset has been included as a representation of the mortar the Jews used to build things for the Egyptians when they were slaves.

Star of the Seder Plate

Sweet and flavorful, charoset is usually everyone's favorite symbolic dish on the Passover seder plate, sitting beside a shank bone (zeroa), a roasted egg (beitzah), bitter herbs, or horseradish (maror), and a vegetable like parsley, lettuce, or celery (karpas).

Purple grape juice: Kosher red wine is the traditional choice, but grape juice keeps our version family-friendly! White grape juice also works as a substitute.

About 85 percent of the world's Jews are considered Ashkenazim, the other 15 percent Sephardim. About 10 percent of the world's Ashkenazim live in Israel com- pared with about 80 percent of all Sephardim. The Sephardim make up about 55 percent of Israel's Jewish population and the Ashkenazim about 45 percent.

Charoset (pronounced har-o-set) comes from the Hebrew word cheres that means "clay," though it goes by many different names around the world.

In simple terms, a nut is also known as a dry fruit. A dry fruit can be categorized as indehiscent and dehiscent. Dehiscent refers to seed enclosed in a pod while indehiscent refers to seeds which aren't found in a seed pod. This takes account of cashew nuts, pistachios, almonds, and walnuts.

Maror and Chazeret – Bitter herbs symbolizing the bitterness and harshness of the slavery that the Hebrews endured in Egypt.

Dried fruits like currants, raisins, berries are sometimes coated with light oils to prevent spoilage and preserve taste and nutrients. The oil lightly seals the fruits from losing their natural aroma and original flavour, it also prevents mildew from infesting the fruits by sealing their pores from fungal spores.

charoset in British English

or haroset (xæˈrəʊsɛt ) noun. Judaism. a dish of chopped fruit, nuts, and wine eaten at Passover, representing the mortar that enslaved Jews used to build parts of Egypt.

Why do Jews eat charoset on Passover? ›

On a surface level, charoset is present on the Seder plate to represent the mortar the Hebrews needed to work with during their enslavement, as the Hagadah states, “They embittered the Jews' lives with hard labor in brick and mortar.”

The word karpas [כרפס] appears only once in the Bible, in the phrase ותכלת כרפס חור u'tekhelet karpas hur, that is found in the Book of Esther. In this context it means "a fine linen," using a word borrowed from the Sanskrit or Persian kirpas.

Charoset variations:

The only thing we wouldn't recommend subbing in here is your more standard red wine. In this recipe (and in many American households) the key to a good charoset is using sweet, Kosher wine like Manischewitz. The taste borders on grape juice, and lends a sweetness to balance out the tart apples.

Wine used for sacramental purposes must be kosher. For some Jews, for a wine to qualify as kosher it must be made from grapes gown on land owned by an observant Jew and all aspects of its production must be conducted by observant Jews.

This recipe is very versatile and wine is not needed. As a matter of fact, this recipe doesn't use any alcohol at all! We change it up by using grape juice to get the same flavors and effects, without the buzz.

One of two major ancestral groups of Jewish people whose ancestors lived in France and Central and Eastern Europe, including Germany, Poland, and Russia.

Yiddish, a Germanic language with Hebrew influence, has been historically associated with Ashkenazi Jews. Yiddish served as a key cultural and linguistic marker of Ashkenazi identity. This community has contributed significantly to Jewish literature, music, and folklore, particularly through the Yiddish language.

Which Sephardic Jewish population is most closely related to Ashkenazi Jews? Genetically, Sephardic Jews are one population. They are closely related to Ashkenazi Jews, differing only in that intermarriage added some Southern European DNA ito one group and some Iberian DNA to the other.

We confirm the notion that the Ashkenazi, North African, and Sephardi Jews share substantial genetic ancestry and that they derive it from Middle Eastern and European populations, with no indication of a detectable Khazar contribution to their genetic origins."