Erez Komarovsky

Erez Komarovsky (; born 1962) is an Israeli chef, baker, educator, and author. In the 1990s he founded the Lehem Erez (Erez's Bread) bakery and café chain, and he is considered the initiator of artisanal bread-making in Israel. Since 2007 he has led a cooking school in his home in Mitzpe Mattat in the Upper Galilee. He has authored several cookbooks.

Biography Erez Komarovsky was born in Tel Aviv to Menachem and Ruth Komarovsky. For five years he also wrote a cooking column for the Tel Aviv weekly newspaper Ha'ir (The City). He worked as a stylist on a dessert cookbook by Wolfgang Puck and assisted Hugh Carpenter in Northern California with his fusion cookbook. Komarovsky planted an extensive organic garden of herbs and vegetables on his property, including "dozens of types of sage, exotic herbs, tomatoes from Sicily and Uzbekistan, Indian purple beans, Thai beans, apples and pears … and bay leaves growing on a tree",

Cooking style Komarovsky's dishes emphasize seasonal ingredients; organic herbs, vegetables, seeds, and fruits; and the meat and cheeses of locally raised lamb and goat. His recipes incorporate a limited number of ingredients and spices, but are known for their intense flavor. Komarovsky draws his inspiration from Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Druze cuisine.

Views and opinions Komarovsky espouses secular, leftist views. In the 1980s, as a columnist for the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha'ir, he published a recipe for suckling pig on Yom Kippur. During the Second Intifada, he traveled to Nazareth to conduct a weeklong series of collaborative dinners with Arab chef Duhoul Sfadi of the Diana Restaurant, followed by a second week of collaborative dinners at his restaurant in Herzliya. He lobbied to cancel the government ban on bread sales during the Passover holiday. He was also a member of a group that successfully lobbied the government to ban the force-feeding of geese for the making of foie gras.