20-Mar-2013 -
Extreme Makeover. A new gefilte fish earns a welcome place at the Passover table. Poor gefilte fish. It's got no personality. So why are the Monsey-based founders of A&B Famous Gefilte Fish convinced their ground-fish loaves - sold frozen, not in jars - can make the Passover staple so popular that even non-Jews will clamor for a taste?
Simple says A&B's Shalom Halpern: A loaf of frozen gefilte fish, cooked for about an hour and a half, is worlds away from the jarred kind. Imagine, instead, a dish more like pate or terrine.
Getting the public to try it, however, has proved difficult. "Once they see the word 'gefilte', the vision that comes to their mind is gooey stuff in gel," says Halpern. A&B's sales an marketing manager. "They think they know what it is, and they already know they don't want to taste it."
When they do, the reaction is always positive, adds Halpern, whose efforts at re-branding find him convincing people they don't know what they are missing.
"One 40-year-old woman said ever since her grandma passed away, she's never tasted such delicious gefilte fish. It's only been the gunk in the jar," he says. "That's the way she described it."
Although fresh-made gefilte fish has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts - Brooklyn's Gefilteria and Kutsher's Tribeca in Manhattan offer varieties made with sustainable fish - it is rare to find the home cook who makes it from scratch. Traditionally, the dish, which originated among the Jews of Eastern Europe, calls for ground fish - often whitefish, pike or carp - and requires time for preparation and cooking.
A&B, founded in 1972 by Monsey fish mongers Abe Koth and Ben Berger, wasn't always in the gefilte business. But when the pair got stuck with a surplus of whitefish, their wives suggested making gefilte-fish loaves t freeze and sell. Those loaves flew out of the store, snapped up by Orthodox women tired of making their own. The company, which spun off a gefilte-fish division in the early 1990's, still owns and operates a fresh-fish store in Monsey. All its gefilte fish is produced in Paterson, N.J.
If more people knew how tasty gefilte fish can be,it could become more popular, says kosher-cooking maven Jamie Geller, who until recently lived in New Hempstead. Each of her cookbooks features recipes for gefilte fish: spicy, pink-rimmed, mashed into croquettes or stuffed with a carrot. Condiments include wasabi, mayonnaise, tartar sauce and horseradish. "Like chicken, you can do anything with it," she says. "This is one of those things that hasn't gone mainstream yet."
To kick-start that move, A&B is considering subtle changes. Recently the company offered shoppers tastes of its salmon gefilte-fish roll, calling it "premium salmon roll." Everyone loved it.
Motty Berger, son of founder Ben Berger, says A&B's plans are indeed grand. "We're thinking a few years from now, every person in the United States will have gefilte fish on their table."
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1-Apr-2009-
No Joke: Gefilte Fish That's Not Gooish For lots of Jews under 30, gefilte fish can be summed up thusly: Funny? Sure. Edible? Not so much.
We have taunted it with songs, jokes and kitschy T-shirts that sport images of Manischewitz jars and slogans such as "Gefilte Fish: The Other White Meat." We enjoy YouTube clips of gefilte fish wrestling promoted by the satirical Heeb Magazine.
It didn't seem fair to us that Jell-O and whipped cream always get all the fun," says contributing editor Oliver Noble.
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12-Apr-2005-
Large-scale Business Move Gefilte fish plant opens in Paterson.Few people would call Mendel Monhert's work exciting.
Day in, day out, he stands in an 8-by-10-foot room cooled to a steady 50 degrees, breaking eggs into a glass bowl and checking each one for blood spots. Though he cracks about 21,000 eggs each day, he has no complaints.
"It's a fun job," he said, explaining that he staves off boredom by listening to recorded readings from the Bible.
It's also a relatively new job - at least to Paterson.
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