04 Dec 2010, Posted by admin in MEET, 0 Comments

Meet Phil Weinstein (And Aunt Erma): Their Family Recipe For Mandelbrodt Was Good Enough To Irritate A Rabbi Or Two

The good thing about Hanukkah hitting the secular calendar so early this year is you’ve got a valid excuse to buy your mandelbrot. As in, you’re still trying to scrape the burnt bits of caramelized sweet potatoes off your sheet pans, so they’re definitely not ready to transport dozens of the traditional Jewish holiday cookies to the oven, right?

Enter Phil Weinstein, a cartoon animator from Burbank who last year launched a line of mandel bread (“brodt” means bread, but you knew that already) named after his Aunt Erma. The multi-generation family recipe is based on one that his grandmother would make for Hanukkah every year. When she died, it was Erma who salvaged the recipe remnants.

Mandelbrodt are essentially biscotti, but with a more tender, cookie-like texture. Weinstein’s version is sprinkled with cinnamon-sugar and contains chocolate chips rather than almonds and raisins — something that 89-year-old Aunt Erma, who lives in Maryland, thinks took a lot of chutzpah. “She reminds me every time I talk to her that she likes the kind with nuts and raisins better,” says Weinstein.

As a one-man start-up, Weinstein says that he couldn’t afford the nearly $4,000 or more a year in Kosher certification fees. Like many Jewish food products, Weinstein’s cookies are simply “Kosher style,” meaning they’re made with Kosher ingredients but aren’t certified by a rabbi. Side note: Weinstein’s Team Mandel Blog is quite a handy documentation of the challenges of opening a food business for anyone who might deem themselves crazy enough to give it a whirl (Guilty, and I also got the Kosher question quite often back in my cookie biz days.).

In one particular blog post ranting, Weinstein talks about how expensive certification really is (one grocery store he had hoped to sell his products to wouldn’t accept the cookies unless they were certified). That post started a minor rabbi confrontation after Weinstein called the Kosher certification process “horse shit”.

Well, he does have an “equal mandelbrodt opportunity for all” point. Then again, certification is simply the way, literally, the Kosher mandelbrodt cookie crumbles. Or something like that.

Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread, (818) 301-5775, www.auntermas.com, $6.99 per box online.