It’s not often that you think you just did something nobody’s ever done before. But today, it might have happened.
It’s Purim, so I’m making the hamantaschen recipe my grandmother z”l developed while she was alive, and passed down to me. It’s my family obligation to make this recipe now every year and send hamantaschen out in boxes (gifts called mishloach manot) to my family and dear ones. I’ve done my best to preserve this recipe; I’ve written it up in the New York Times, I’ve taught workshops on how to make it for two Purims in a row, and I’ve committed to the family hamantaschen-baking role.
But this year, I did something else. You may be familiar with the Sierpinski triangle, a mathematically attractive, self-repeating fractal that starts with one equilateral triangle and breaks down into ever-smaller triangles.
Somehow this year it dawned on me that the world was incomplete without a Sierpinski hamantaschen, or sierpinskitaschen. I scoured the vast reaches of the Interwebs, to see if this had been done before. I may have missed something, but it seems this has not.
Until today.
Very carefully, I have made the possibly-world’s-first Sierpinskitaschen. It’s a little… irregular, but charmingly so. And it smells better than any Sierpinski triangle I’ve ever met.
Nerdecadent to be sure. Tessellicious, as my friend Ben said, although I’m pretty sure these are meant to be given away. And yes, ideas are already in the works for things like a mandelbrot, Mandelbrot set…
Now, just to be clear, I am not a mathemataschen, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I’ve been more and more inspired by math lately (details in a moment). I learned some basic facts about the Sierpinski triangle as i went. First of all, when rotated to any side, it looks the same; I couldn’t even tell where I’d started it. Also, as the triangles get smaller, notice a pattern in the quantity of each size: 1, 3, 9, 27…. I’m sure it would go on if I could make really really tiny hamantaschen, but I don’t have that much power. Also, technically this triangle has no area, so maybe all the sugar doesn’t count? But careful with that logic: it has infinite perimeter, and that dough for the perimeter is full of not-healthy ingredients like flour and sugar and oil.
Watch this stunning video lecture of my friend Dan teaching about the Sierpinski triangle. Watch the triangle grow out of a fractal line or Pascal’s triangle in really surprising ways, and try to guess how many dimensions the Sierpinski triangle has. (You will probably guess wrong, and that will be fun.)
There are many, many more cool things to learn about math and patterns and math and food. Dan from the video is my friend Dan Finkel, who writes www.mathforlove.com with his partner, mathematician Katherine Cook. It is their lovely blog that has inspired my appreciation for math and patterns and the overlap between math and the natural world, and math and playfulness/whimsy. At some less-busy moment in life, Dan is going to write a guest post for Seattle Local Food all about food and math. It’s not just about Romanesco cauliflower, though that’s a pretty cool place to start. In the meantime, check out their amazing blog. [Edited to add: The Sierpinskitaschen has been gifted to Dan and Katherine; they blogged about it here.]
~
You too can make this!
Sierpinski Hamantaschen
Start with my grandmother’s recipe. FYI, it’s not gluten-free (or paleo-friendly). Tomorrow I’m going to try a rice flour/tapioca version for myself, since I’ve been good and not eaten a single one of the hamantaschen I’m baking. Also, this is not a healthful recipe. It includes flour, sugar and oil, the trifecta I almost never eat. For the oil, I settle for high-oleic sunflower oil, since the high-oleic sutff is lower in omega-6 fatty acids.
Get yourself a dough scraper, about 5″ wide. You could do this with a knife too, but a dough scraper is a great tool to have around the kitchen for cleaning cutting boards, lifting fragile cookies, assembling hamantaschen, etc etc.
Roll out the dough and cut an equilateral triangle about 10″ on each side. Draw a line down the middle each way. Measure this carefully.
From strips of cut dough, make a triangle in the center, from the middle point of each triangle’s side. These dough strips will not want to stand up. So, use bits of aluminum foil to hold them in place. Quickly fill the center with prune butter.
Next, you’re making the three second-largest triangles. Take a glass about 3″ wide — to get the right measurement, hold it in the place where the next three large triangles will be and see if it fits perfectly. Follow grandma’s instructions for making those into hamantaschen. Place them, with one flat side up rather than one pointed side up (just like your big triangle).
Now, fill all open spaces with a thin layer of prune.
Now, find your next-smallest circle size, probably a little smaller than a shot glass. I used the top of a spice container. Make those into nine tiny hamantaschen, and place them into the fitting holes (consult a picture of the Sierpinski triangle as you do this). Finally, fill in the last spaces with 27 very tiny hamantaschen — I used the top of a bottle of vanilla extract.
Finally, time to make the sides. Roll out strips of dough and drape them around the sides and corners of the hamantaschen, letting them lean in a little.
Bake at 375 till golden brown at the edges.
And share, infinitely. Especially, but not exclusively, with Jewish math geeks.
❤ to whoever on Twitter called this "the best intersection of math and baking since Pi." 🙂
Apparently WordPress doesn’t know ❤ = ♥
[…] local food blogger Deborah Gardner has made something truly amazing—combining the delicious Jewish traditional filled cookies called hamantaschen with wondrous […]
[…] with Deborah’s recipe, here, and you’ll have 27x the nom nom this […]
This post has made Boing Boing 🙂
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/21/how-to-make-a-hamant.html
This is brilliant and looks like so much fun — I can’t wait for your gluten-free version! (and I love the term “nerdecadent!”)
pretty amazing hamantaschen you got there! next time you make one, maybe you’ll consider using one of my family recipes.
http://www.jewcy.com/featured/jewcy-mothers-cooking-hamantashen
Mazel tov! Possibly the most creative thing I’ve seen done with food for the sake of sheer whimsy. I wonder if Randall Munro from XKCD has gotten wind of this?
Not only that, they look delicious!
A recommendation for next year’s gluten free recipe: garbanzo bean flour. I used it last year, with the addition of some rice flour and it was well recieved even from the gluten eaters.
Thanks, Sheridan. For my (fairly rare) baking of this sort, I usually do a combination of fine white rice flour and tapioca flour. It holds together decently and isn’t gritty. My two problems with garbanzo flour: the taste, which is a little metallic or bitter, and the flatulence. Eep! But I know not everyone agrees. 🙂
beautiful! I can’t wait to try this
Wow, very cool! Your Sierpinskitaschen look so delicate and delicious, it must have taken so much skill and patience to make them!
This recipe is fabulous and it looks not only delicious but absolutely great. I love your idea of making a pie looking like Sierpinsky’s triangle. I am going to feature it on my “The Fun and Art of Cooking with Maths” lens on Squidoo … Thanks
This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen! I do a ton of different food creations for both math groups (where they coordinate with the theme of the meeting) and Jewish occasions – but the Sierpinskitaschen tops them all. I don’t know if I’d have the patience to make it, but I might show a picture of yours at a Latke-Hamemtaschen debate.
Coincidentally, I just met Dan & Katherine at a math circle conference over Purim weekend. Thanks for sharing this.
[…] The Perfect Hamantaschen + Sierpinski Hamantaschen + […]
[…] has made something truly amazing— […]
[…] Gardner took her family’s traditional recipe and made “Sierpinskitaschen,” or Sierpinski Hamantaschen. This is not pieced together like the cookies, but it begins with a large pastry which is then […]
[…] One could argue that I should have made seven year-spirals within each shemittah-spiral. If you want to make 49 of them, that’s fine, and I’d be happy to hear how it went. While you’re at it, try this. […]
[…] this same family of foods we have the recursive pizza and the fractal hamentashen, […]
[…] Deborah Gardner took her family’s traditional recipe and made “Sierpinskitaschen,” or Sierpinski Hamantaschen. This is not pieced together like the cookies, but it begins with a large pastry which is then […]
I am so glad I found this. I was looking for validation re: using my mother-in-law’s mandelbrot basic dough for hamentash, and wasn’t finding it. And here it is – the exact recipe PLUS math. Thanks!
I know I’m a year late but… I make GF hamentaschen for a few friends using buckwheat flour and a bit of milled flax seed.It works well with my recipe (which is basically a sugar cookie dough), but I’m not sure how it would work with other recipes. Even non-GF people think it’s good! (and your fractal hamentaschen is brilliant)
Fractals used to be one of my favorite topics when I taught Pre Calculus. The sierpinski hamantaschen are a delicious reminder!
[…] Gardner took her family’s traditional recipe and made “Sierpinskitaschen,” or Sierpinski Hamantaschen. This is not pieced together like the cookies, but it begins with a large pastry which is then […]
[…] Gardner took her family’s traditional recipe and made “Sierpinskitaschen,” or Sierpinski Hamantaschen. This is not pieced together like the cookies, but it begins with a large pastry which is then […]
[…] Gardner took her family’s traditional recipe and made “Sierpinskitaschen,” or Sierpinski Hamantaschen. This is not pieced together like the cookies, but it begins with a large pastry which is then […]
Very intersting and tasty application of fractal figures. But what puzzles me the more is not your culinary imagination, but your incredible resemblance with my daughter. And far more, she is a (French) mathematician, and especially fond of geometry. You should get acquainted with each other!
Really! Apparently I have some doppelgangers out there. Sure, put us in touch! I’m actually technically in a part of France right now (hence no new posts), in French Guiana in South America.
Hello! I am the daughter and your doppelganger! You can contact me at cerise26@voila.fr if you want!
[…] other delicious examples of mathematical foods you can try at home are the Sierpinski Hamantaschen, or eating tortilla chips dipped in cheese in the Fibonacci sequence ( first 1 chip, then 1 chip, […]
[…] sierpinski-hamantaschen-sierpinskitaschen […]
[…] Sierpinski Hamantaschen: Sierpinskitaschen (First in the world?!) – "Somehow this year it dawned on me that the world was incomplete without a Sierpinski hamantaschen, or sierpinskitaschen. I scoured the vast reaches of the Interwebs, to see if this had been done before. I may have missed something, but it seems this has not." […]
What’s next? Sierpanikopita? Pascal’s Popovers? Tortellini tori? Or perhaps a course in culinear algebra?
Culinear algebra = excellent! I was thinking maybe Fibonacci’s cake. Which, of course, would be created from a cheese cake.
MIND BOGGLINGLY BRILLIANT!
[…] The Jewish lego. – The most interesting thing: Different Hamentashen: The Bloody Marry ones or The Hamentashen made out of…Hamentashen and of course the classical […]
Hi Debs, I’m the food editor of the Forward — would love to repost this on JCarrot, with a link back… What do you think? (If so, let’s email…)
Hi Liza,
Sorry, I just saw this. I had to change my comments settings so that I approve comments because WordPress was doing a pretty bad job of filtering out spam. This is your post, yes? http://blogs.forward.com/the-jew-and-the-carrot/215952/hamantaschen-plus-math-equals-mathmataschen/ If so, it’s fine, and thanks for the link back. Happy Purim!
cool
Lovely! But we did it in 2014 🙂
I’m glad you did! If you’ll notice, though, this post is from 2011 so several years before that. 🙂 It was the first; I searched every possible combination of keywords before I made it. The post got picked up by Buzzfeed and later mentioned in the annual Latke–Hamantasch debate at U Chicago. The post tends to circulate again around Purim. Did you enjoy making it and eating it?
Another nice result of writing this: In 2013, I got an email from a teacher working at a yehsiva in Riverdale, NY asking if a student from their math program could interview me about the Sierpinskitaschen. Within a few emails, we realized this teacher had known my other grandmother––the non-hamantaschen one, on my father’s side, who died before I was born, and who was herself a teacher.
I was just thinking about that because I have another article about my family hamantaschen out in Jewish Journal today:
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/333528/making-hamantaschen-and-puns-a-pandemic-year-later/