7 Healthier Desserts for Passover
These homemade Passover desserts are a sweet (and healthy) way to end the meal.
During the Jewish holiday of Passover, foods that contain wheat are eliminated from the diet for eight days. That means no bread, pasta or traditional wheat-based cereals. The only exception is matzo, which is made by combining wheat and water. You can almost think about it as a week of (mostly) gluten-free meals. This can become a problem when dealing with dessert, though, as cakes, cookies and pies are typically made with wheat flour. While there are packaged desserts that can be eaten during Passover, they tend to be high in calories and fat. If you're looking for a healthier option for Passover dessert, here are seven recipes you can make at home.
A note about Passover ingredients: If you are keeping strictly kosher for Passover or making the dish to bring to someone who is, look for the “kosher for Passover” symbol (a circled U-P symbol next to the kosher symbol) on the ingredients you purchase.
Chocolate-Coconut Macaroons (pictured above)
This traditional Passover dessert is easy to make using only five ingredients and it's a definite crowd-pleaser.
Stephen Johnson, 2014, Television Food Network, G.P. All Rights Reserved
You can’t go wrong with a three-ingredient chocolate dessert. Shake things up by using your favorite nut-and-fruit combo, like peanuts and cranberries or cashews and apricots.
Go beyond the traditional Passover fruit salad and bake these mouthwatering poached pears.
Instead of flour, this recipe uses a combo of matzo meal and potato flour to make scrumptious tea cakes.
Matzo farfel is small bits of broken matzo that get used for many oven-baked dishes. In this haystack recipe, however, the farfel gets mixed into the chocolate along with nuts, fruit and coconut, and the mixture is refrigerated until each haystack sets.
Instead of spending extra dough on purchasing the packaged version, make your own, using leftover matzo. Nuts and dried fruits add some nurtrients to this kid-friendly dessert.
Get creative by serving colorful fruit on skewers and dark chocolate-dipped strawberries. Clinical research suggests that eating eight medium strawberries a day may help improve heart health, manage diabetes, support brain health and reduce the risk of certain forms of cancer.
Toby Amidor, MS, RD, CDN, is a registered dietitian and consultant who specializes in food safety and culinary nutrition. She is the author of The Greek Yogurt Kitchen: More Than 130 Delicious, Healthy Recipes for Every Meal of the Day.
*This article was written and/or reviewed by an independent registered dietitian nutritionist.
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