Monday, March 15, 2010

PESACH, HAG’ALAT KELIM Part 1

29th of Adar, 5770

If you cooked meat in a pot and after you cleaned it thoroughly you boiled water in it, the water will taste like meat. Why? Because although the pot’s surface is completely clean, when you cooked the meat, its walls’ pores opened and absorbed the meat flavor/particles in the first place. When you boiled water, the walls opened again, expelling the meat flavor into the water.

To avoid this type of flavor/particles transmission of Chametz food into food that will be consumed during Pesach, our rabbis instruct us to perform a process called Hag’ala (a type of sterilization). The Hag’ala will cause the pores to open and expel the absorbed flavor, making the utensil, not only superficially clean but “sterilized” for Pesach.

The principle of Hag’ala is that a utensil will expel the flavor/particles in the same way it absorbed it in the first place (kebol’o kakh polto). The way of doing Hag’ala will depend on two major variables: 1. The material of the utensil. 2. The way it is used. For example: pots and pans are made of the same material, metal, but a pot is used to cook with water and the pan with oil. The process of their Hag’ala is therefore different.

B’H In the coming Halakhot I’m going to explain some examples of Hag’ala when you want to use the year round utensils for Pesach.

Needles to say, that if one can afford it, the best advice is to use a completely different set of cookware and tableware, special for Pesach.

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