27 Jun KASHRUS QUESTIONS OF THE WEEK WITH RABBI MOSHE ELEFANT

When does a restaurant need a mashgiach? How
important is the mashgiach?
A restaurant always needs a mashgiach. A restaurant owned by a religious
Jew, whether it’s meat or dairy, requires a mashgiach temidi. At the OU
we have a mashgiach at every food service establishment. We’re proud of
that standard and we think it’s a necessary standard. We don’t look at it as
a stringency. I was just at a conference this week where somebody gave an
interesting story of how he is the Rav in a local community and they had a
local pizza shop that did not have a mashgiach temidi. They thought that
they could rely on the owner. To make a very long story short, the Rav came every week to check
on the restaurant. His first stop was to go to the refrigerator to check the cheese and all the cheese
was kosher, cholov Yisroel. Until one day he looked in the garbage and he discovered cases of
non-kosher cheese. This person was keeping kosher cheese in the refrigerator, which he knew the
rabbi was checking regularly, but he also had another place where he was keeping the non-kosher
cheese, which is a lot cheaper than kosher cheese. The difference in price was a real incentive
to cheat and people in that community
probably, for quite a while, were eating pizza

with a very reliable hashgacha with very non-
kosher cheese. That was a store that certainly

had some level of Jewish ownership, religious
Jewish ownership, and it was a store that
wasn’t even meat. We’ve learned the hard way,
unfortunately, that we will only give hashgacha
to a food service establishment once we know
the owner and feel comfortable with that
person. Only then do we begin the discussion
and we require that it have a mashgiach temidi.

Is there any flour on the market that does
not require sifting?
The assumption is that flour requires sifting. It’s a very
interesting phenomenon; flour bought in Israel has to
be sifted, but that is actually not the case in the United
States. We have never, and I’ve checked many times,
we have never found flour in the United States that is
problematic. If somebody wants to be machmir, they can
sift the flour that they buy in the United States, but the
OU does not require it.

Are ramen noodles (e.g. Tradition soup)
allowed to be cooked on Shabbos? Are they
already cooked, and can we apply the rule of ein bishul achar bishul?
How about cooking them in a kli sheini or kli
shlishi?
Even though they were cooked, they dried after being
cooked. The drying would make it be considered bishul.
So, you have here afiah (baking). Even though you first had
bishul on the noodles in the soup, then you have afiah.
There’s a halacha of ein bishul achar bishul, but there is a
halacha of yeish bishul achar afiah. You’re not allowed to
cook something after it was baked and therefore that’s the
problem with the Tradition soups. By pouring the hot water
in, you’re cooking it after it was baked. What you can do is
use a kli shlishi.