Apples and honey: The traditional symbols of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which begins Wednesday evening. They represent the sweetness that we wish upon our communities for the year ahead. There’s a neat opportunity this year to take a nod from another Jewish holiday to make a modern tweak in the way we symbolize the sweet new year.
While most American Jews typically throw together some apples, nuts and wine to make haroset for a Passover seder, New York-based entrepreneur Michael Rubel has created a new-age pre-packaged jar of the Jewish staple with the intention of eating it all year long, including on Rosh Hashanah. “There’s salsa. There’s chili crisps. Why not haroset,” Rubel tells me. He calls it Schmutz.
The Spiel About Schmutz
Rubel created Schmutz to tell one of countless stories of the Jewish diaspora. A Jewish Studies minor, Rubel grew up bouncing around–first in Maine, then Kansas City and Dallas, before studying in Massachusetts. “I was jumping from some settings where Jews were everywhere and other settings where I was the only Jew that people had met,” Rubel says. “I spent a lot of time learning about how people in the past have created non-religious, but still very Jewish communities around the world.”
Schmutz Founder Michael Rubel
His admiration for haroset, like the love of food for most Jews, stems from his mother’s cooking. She would prepare it every Passover in a traditional Ashkenazi way–apple, walnuts and cinnamon. “She would make it in a huge Tupperware and I just ended up eating this thing with a spoon,” he recalls.
Working at a CPG development firm armed Rubel with crucial insight into starting his own CPG company. During his studies, both formal and from reading Jewish cookbooks, he would get lost in the world of haroset, learning that different communities of Jews from all over the world have their own versions. “[Harosets] in Jamaica or in Suriname have cinnamon and peanuts. From Venice with chestnuts, and you’ve got versions from Italy with figs.”
He began to experiment with international versions in his own kitchen for fun, when he came across a Kurdish recipe that blew his mind. “It had hazelnuts, blackcurrants, and it was thick enough to roll into these truffles. I was like, ‘this is the best thing I’ve ever had.’” Along with a version of the dish from Latin America, where it’s called ‘garosa,’ Rubel was inspired to prove how different cultures are so interconnected. “It opened me up to new perspectives on something that I really took for granted as one thing,” he says.
Schmutz You Can Schmear
Leading up to the launch of Schmutz in April of 2023, Rubel used his family and friends as guinea pigs while testing various types of haroset in his kitchen. “People started using it in unexpected ways. They put on grilled cheese…they would put it on ice cream” he remembers. “Seeing my friends who weren’t even Jewish love this thing…it felt like a no-brainer to bring it to everyone.”
Schmutz Fig Hazelnut Haroset
Some harosets are known to be very chunky, but one of the most important textures Rubel focused on achieving was making it spreadable–almost like a schmear (which is part of the wordplay in the name ‘Schmutz’). A few other features of the haroset: “It’s gotta be crunchier than anything else out there,” he thought during his R&D process. “It needs to be really spice-forward. It needs to balance sweetness with a flexibility that can go on sweet or savory dishes.” Schmutz presents itself as a thick, sticky applesauce with a powerful crunch in every single spoonful.
Schmutz currently comes in two varieties: Apple Walnut, which is a take on the Ashkenazi haroset, and Fig Hazelnut, which is a take on an Italian haroset. It’s Rubel’s view that any haroset contains a base of apples, nuts and spices, which is simply all that a jar of Schmutz contains. “There are zero other ingredients,” Rubel points out. “No preservatives, no sweeteners, no artificial flavors.”
Schmutz Apple Walnut Haroset
Haroset on a Passover seder table is known to represent the bricks used to build pyramids. But Schmutz’s spreadable texture honors a lesser-known tale of the origins of the dish. “Haroset started as a sort-of spread that would be at these Roman dinners,” Rubel explains. “When Jews fled Rome…they brought this spread with them.”
The Seder, The Shofar, And Every Day In Between
When launching the brand, Rubel utilized The Gefilteria, which works around the world to help elevate the platform of Ashkenazi Jewish food. Jeffrey Yoskowitz, Gefilteria cofounder and author of The Gefilte Manifesto cookbook, tells me that we’re in the midst of a revival of Jewish food, particularly following a plummet of Jewish delis. “What changed is the new generation,” Yoskowitz explains. “The more traditional, suburban Jewish experience was to go and become a professional of some kind. But the explosion of food in general led to young people graduating college and deciding to go into food.” He cites the founders of Brooklyn’s Mile End Delicatessen and New York Shuk North African packaged goods as examples. Yoskowitz himself happens to be an example too. He cooked the gefilte fish that he became known for at the 2013 and 2014 James Beard House Passover seders.
Schmutz fits precisely as a piece of The Gefilteria’s larger puzzle. “Matzo balls used to only be associated with Passover, and now we have them all year round,” Yoskowitz points out. “[Schmutz] challenges people in the notion of ‘what is haroset? Why is it so tied only to Passover?’”
Clearly it doesn’t have to be. “There’s all the intellectual stuff that I love about it, but at the end of the day, it’s delicious,” says Rubel. His preferred method of eating the haroset is the same as when he would eat his mother’s–with a spoon straight out of the jar. An average day aside, there’s no reason it also shouldn’t be enjoyed during Rosh Hashanah just as much as Passover. “Rosh Hashanah is all about apples, and haroset really makes apples the hero,” says Rubel.
Schmutz is a vehicle for Rubel to highlight the wonder and history of Jewish food. He works a full-time job and works on Schmutz in the little downtime he gets. He has no staff nor investors. “This is not my bar mitzvah money, but it’s basically as close as you can get,” he jokes. He creates the space for it because of his steadfast effort to achieve the brand’s mission. “I want to empower people to make Jewish food every day,” he says. “If they don’t love making food, I want to empower them to eat, find and see Jewish food every day.”