Is the Perfect Matzo Ball Fluffy or Dense?

Every Passover, I — like most Jews — look forward to one dish in particular: matzo ball soup. When my mom made it, the matzo balls were consistently, ethereally fluffy. You could run a spoon through them with no effort, and they’d hold their shape, never disintegrating into the broth. To me, these “floaters” were precisely what matzo balls should taste and feel like. I loved them so much that I requested them on every Jewish holiday, and also when I was feeling sick. There’s a reason why people call matzo ball soup “Jewish Penicillin.”

But the first time I attended a Passover seder at my aunt and uncle’s house, I was thrown for a loop. When the matzo ball soup came out, it looked just like my mom’s… but the texture was all wrong. The dumplings were firm, compact, and chewy. I finished my bowl — all matzo ball soup is good matzo ball soup — but when asked if I liked it, I admitted that I prefer a fluffy matzo ball. My cousins were perplexed. “What are you talking about? Dense matzo balls are so much better.”

This sparked a debate around the seder table (a not-so uncommon occurrence for Jewish families like mine), about the perfect matzo ball consistency. My cousins grew up eating firm balls with a pronounced matzo meal flavor, otherwise known as “sinkers,” and to them, these were the platonic ideal. How could two people from the same bloodline have such a vastly different perspective on the same dish?

The Great Matzo Ball Debate

It turns out, the Great Matzo Ball Debate goes far beyond my seder table. It seems like every Jewish person is either Team Floater or Team Sinker. But is one team more popular? And on a technical level, is one correct? 

I tried to settle the debate with an informal Instagram poll, and the results were even more varied than I had thought. While the majority of respondents said that they prefer fluffy matzo balls (54%), 15% named dense as their favorite, and 32% specified that they should be “fluffy on the outside, dense on the inside.” 

“I want a matzo ball that mimics the layers of the earth — denser closer to the core,” Will Hartman, staff writer at The Infatuation, told me. “I just want them to have a little structure.” F&W special projects editor Lucy Simon agreed. “I want a little bit of stick-to-your-teeth texture. Sue me!”

Floater fans were just as vocal. Eric Handelsman, senior vice president of food and drink at Dotdash Meredith, the publisher of Food & Wine, polled his entire family, and everyone was Team Floater. “According to Henry — our resident 11-year-old matzo ball connoisseur who can consume six to eight matzo balls in a day — fluffy balls are superior because they feel better in your mouth when you eat them, they absorb the chicken soup better, and you can eat many, many more of them,” he said. 

I was more confused than ever. So, I did what I always do when I need an expert food opinion — I reached out to professional chefs. Maybe they could decide, once and for all, which matzo ball is superior.

What chefs say

I asked eight Jewish chefs what their ideal ball consistency is, and their responses were almost unanimous: Seven prefer a fluffy matzo ball. 

“I absolutely want a light, fluffy matzo ball that rests buoyantly in the broth,” says 2022 F&W Best New Chef Caroline Schiff. “The lightness makes it a perfect way to start the Passover meal. And texturally, I like the mouthfeel of something delicate and airy. Also, the lighter the ball, the more it acts like a sponge, soaking up the aromatic broth. This makes them juicy — a quality I personally love.”

Cookbook author and Top Chef judge Gail Simmons agrees. “Matzo balls should be light and pillowy, and I’ll die on that hill,” she says. “Otherwise, they taste overworked, undercooked, dense, gluey, and weighted down. I truly don’t understand how others can enjoy a dense matzo ball.” Same goes for Hillary Sterling, executive chef of Ci Siamo in New York City, who says she likes them “fluffy.”

Chef Todd Ginsberg, owner of The General Muir in Atlanta, is also Team Floater. “In all honesty, if you’re eating dense matzo balls, you didn’t cook [them] properly,” he says. Ginsberg cites the Manischewitz matzo ball mix recipe — which is often considered the gold standard — noting that if you follow the instructions closely, you should wind up with floaters. “That’s the way a matzo ball should [be made] — the way that the people at Manischewitz deemed as the way a matzo ball should be made.”

CookNSolo restaurant group co-founder Michael Solomonov prefers floaters as well, noting that light matzo balls are more digestible. “I feel like everybody gets excited about everything matzo for the first two days of Pesach, and then they’re like, ‘Oh my god, I need something leavened.’ But you can eat a fluffy matzo ball every day, for eight days. With dense, there’s a limit.”

The team at Russ & Daughters, a historic Jewish delicatessen in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is particularly passionate on the topic. “To all who prefer dense, may your soups runneth over from the displaced volume of your matzo balls,” says fourth-generation owner Josh Tupper.

2016 F&W Best New Chef David Barzelay, owner of Lazy Bear in San Francisco, takes a more middle-of-the-road stance but ultimately identifies as Team Floater. “[A matzo ball should] certainly not be dense, but it should have some bite to it,” he says.

Still, one chef is on Team Sinker. “I love a dense matzo ball,” says Eli Sussman, chef and co-owner of Gertrude’s in Brooklyn, New York. “I want to be able to cut it into pieces and not have it completely dissolve in the soup. A cloud-like, wispy matzo ball is not something I am ever really interested in eating.” Sussman grew up eating dense matzo balls every year at his aunt’s house.

And really, whatever most of us consider to be “the best” type of matzo ball is probably the one we ate as children. Perhaps more people like fluffy matzo balls because more of us grew up with them. Or maybe fluffy matzo balls are definitively better. 

I suppose we’ll never be able to officially crown one type of matzo ball as superior to the others. That just means we have more to debate about during this year’s seder.