04 Dec Kashruth Question of the Week

What bracha do you make on gluten free products?

Gluten free products, by definition, don’t have flour in them. Because they don’t have flour, they are not mezonos or hamotzi. So a gluten free cracker, which looks like a mezonos product, is actually not mezonos. We had this issue a couple of years ago where a company made gluten free crackers for Pesach that looked like matzos but weren’t matzos. If you want to fulfill the mitzva of eating matzos on Pesach you can’t use that because matza, by definition, is made by a grain. A gluten free product will typically not have grain because that’s where you’ll find the gluten- inside the flour. When you see a gluten free product, you’ll know it’s not hamotzi or mezonos. What it is depends on what was used to make the product; it could be ha’Adoma or she’Hakol.

If someone made tea or poured hot water on Shabbos and didn’t finish the cup and an hour later wants to add more tea/hot water to the cup, is that okay? They are making the cold water in the cup hot again.

It matters how they’re doing it. If they’re pouring it directly from the kettle or the percolator that the water was kept in, they should not do so. If they took the water from the kettle and poured it into a cup and then used the water from that cup, there’s room for leniency.