Kosher

Kosher in Silicon Valley

Where to shop, how to read a label, and who to ask when a particular product has you stuck.

Keeping kosher here is easier than people expect. There is a kosher market in San Jose, kosher sections in ordinary supermarkets, a handful of places to eat, and caterers who will do a party. The list below is the one we keep — the same one on our visitors page — and each listing shows its city, because some of them are a real drive.

Hours change, and shops close. Call before you drive, and tell us if you find something out of date so we can fix it.

• Pars
• Shopping
• Eating out
• Catering
• Bay Kosher
• Kosher symbols
• Ask about a product
• Kashering a kitchen

Pars Kosher Market & Deli

The kosher butcher, grocery and hot kitchen for the whole South Bay, on South Bascom in San Jose — about ten minutes from the Chabad House. Meat, poultry, groceries, wine, and a kitchen doing Israeli-style food to take away.

They also deliver a Friday order to Chabad of Palo Alto at 11am, which is worth knowing if you are up the Peninsula.

Bay Kosher orders, collected here

The nearest full kosher supermarket is Bay Kosher, and it is in Lafayette — the far side of the bay, and not a trip anyone makes for a chicken. So they deliver to us instead: you order online, choose the Chabad House as your pickup point, and collect it from Almaden Expressway.

They carry meat, dairy, groceries and specialty items from Israel, at prices that are the reason people made the drive in the first place.

1. Order at baykosher.com.
2. Select Chabad of Almaden as your pickup location and confirm the date.
3. Get your order in at least 24 hours before that date.

Collections have run roughly every three weeks. Questions about an order go to Bay Kosher directly on 925-440-1226; questions about collecting it from us come to 408-910-2034.

Reading a kosher symbol

A hechsher is the mark of a certifying agency: an agency inspects the plant and the ingredients, and its symbol on the package is that agency saying the product is kosher. The symbol is a registered mark, which is why it can be relied on — there is a named organization behind it that can be phoned and asked.

Different agencies use different symbols, and reliability is a question about the agency rather than about how official the mark looks. If you don’t recognize a symbol, that’s a question to ask rather than a judgment to make in the aisle.

A few conventions hold across most packages:

• A plain letter K is not in itself a certification. A single letter can’t be trademarked, so anyone may print one; it tells you nothing about who, if anyone, inspected the product.
• D beside the symbol means dairy. DE means the product itself contains no dairy but was made on dairy equipment — which matters if you’re eating it after meat.
• Pareve (sometimes parve) means neither meat nor dairy, so it can be eaten with either.
• P beside the symbol means kosher for Passover — and only that. It does not mean pareve, which is the mix-up that catches people out.
• Meat or Glatt marks a meat product. Meat and dairy are not eaten together, and there is a waiting period after meat.

Fresh fruit and vegetables need no certification, though leafy greens and some other produce need checking for insects. Wine and grape juice are a category of their own and do need a hechsher.

Asking about a specific product

The general rules above will get you through most of a supermarket. They will not settle the case in front of you — a symbol you’ve never seen, a product from another country, an ingredient list with something unfamiliar on it, a pan that was used for the wrong thing. Those are questions for a person, and they are welcome ones. There is no such thing as a question too small to ask about this.

Call the office and ask for the Rabbi: 408-910-2034, write to Info@chabadalmaden.com, or send the question in writing. Photograph the label — the symbol and the ingredient list — and it is usually answered the same day.

You can also check a product here, or send the Rabbi a photo of the package from that page.

Kashering a kitchen, and new dishes

If you’re making a kitchen kosher, or you want to start with one shelf rather than the whole thing, the Rabbi will come and walk through it with you. It is a practical visit, not an inspection, and people are generally surprised how much of their existing kitchen is fine as it is.

New metal and glass utensils are immersed in a Mikvah before use — our keilim mikvah page explains how that works and where to go.

Visiting rather than living here? The visitors page adds a mikvah and a weekday minyan, and the local centers list covers the rest of the Bay Area.