Tag: gelato

America’s secret fruit shows up on the Southside It was nearly 20 years ago that we started the project to make Paw Paw Gelato at the Creamery. At the time, hardly anyone in Ann Arbor knew this old American fruit. Today, I’m happy to say, paw paws are getting more and more popular! I’ve seen them in half a dozen shops around town. And we now have a good number of fans waiting for our annual autumn release of this super tasty gelato. I’m happy for paw paw’s increasing popularity. It’s the kind of traditional, delicious food with a great story that we love to work with. In the context of what I wrote last week about awe and wonder, the paw paw is pretty much a perfect example of the wealth of wonder-ful foods and drinks we get to work with every day. Once upon a time, paw paws were very popular and far easier to find around these parts. Native to North America, they have been known historically by a range of wonderful monikers: Prairie Banana, Hoosier Banana, Indiana Banana, Poor Man’s Banana, Quaker Delight, and Hillbilly Mango. Paw paw trees are about 10 to 20 feet in height with long dark green, sort of droopy-eared leaves and the largest edible fruit that grows in North America. They look a bit like a mango, but with pear green-colored flesh. The fruits are ripe when their skin gets a bit darker and the perfume is more pronounced. One reason that paw paws pretty much disappeared is that, like many great heirloom varieties, it’s hard to grow, has a very low yield, and the fruit one does get requires a lot of handwork to process. Thanks to a couple of local farmers and the Creamery crew, the rest of us can just stick our spoon in and enjoy the fruits of their labor! Even after a decade of doing this special gelato annually, most folks we encounter are still unfamiliar with this fruit. That said, it has slowly but surely built ever more fans! One of them is Roadhouse bartender Cori Scharmin: “It’s so freaking good! It tastes like a tropical fruit but it’s from here in Michigan. A little mango and it’s really banana-y. It’s really good and really different! I love it!” To my taste, the Paw Paw Gelato is slightly citrusy, kind of custardy, a bit like passion fruit and Cherimoya with a little hint of lime, a touch of vanilla, papaya, and ripe pear. Serious Eats said it’s “a riot of mango-banana-citrus that’s incongruous with its temperate, deciduous forest origins.” You can get the Paw Paw Gelato at the Cream Top Shop (by the Bakehouse on Plaza Drive), the Roadhouse, and the Deli. Better still, ship some gelato to your cousin in California where paw paws will be an unknown culinary delight. Ask for a taste for sure next time you see us! Pairs beautifully with the Gingerbread Coffee Cake as well! Pick up a paw paw pint P.S. The city of Paw Paw, Michigan is named for the fruit. It’s also the place where Malinda Russell was living when she authored A Domestic Cook Book back in 1866. It was the first such book published by a Black woman. Russell is featured in Patrick-Earl Barnes’ “Blacks in Culinary” art piece at the Roadhouse and is also featured in the center of the terrific t-shirt we made from Patrick-Earl’s piece—I get many compliments on it every time I wear it! Proceeds from the shirt go to the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County.

 

Check out all of the Creamery’s gelato flavors

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Super-tasty Zingerman’s synergy by the spoonful!

In the interest of organizational health and well-being, I’m almost always thinking of win-win ways to bring together different parts of our diverse organization. I’m not sure who actually first thought of this one, but I love it! What if you take the Bakehouse award-winning, nationally renowned, Sour Cream Coffee Cake (featured on the cover of Zingerman’s Bakehouse!) and then blend it into really great gelato from the Creamery. What a wonderfully tasty way to sweeten up your day! Thirty-something years ago, I remember we mixed the batter for the very first Zingerman’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake in the tiny prep kitchen in the basement of the Deli. Then, and now, it’s made with lots of butter, sour cream, Indonesian Korintje cinnamon, fresh eggs, toasted walnuts, and really good real vanilla. All these years later, the Bakehouse bakes thousands of them a year and Mail Order ships a literal ton. The Deli, Roadhouse, and Coffee Company sell a fair few, and we wholesale them to dozens of other pastry-loving cafés and retailers. The coffeecake has long been one of those products that lots of people seem to love. Kids love it, pastry chefs love it. All age groups, religions, races, and political persuasions are apparently agreed on its excellence. Not only that, but it can be eaten happily any time of the day—with a cup of coffee or tea for breakfast, as a snack, for dessert after lunch, or dinner. If you’re looking to bring a gift to someone’s house or ship something from Zingerman’s to someone you love or look up to, the Sour Cream Coffee Cake could well be a wonderful option. Here, Lexi Stand and the lovely crew at the Creamery have created a super-tasty, cinnamon-scented, coffee cake-laden gelato that you can eat by the spoonful after dinner! Ask for a taste next time you’re in! It’s the perfect way to have your cake, eat it, and your gelato too! Sip a cup of Tree Town Blend and savor a spoonful of this delightful dessert! Or do as Jenny Tubbs of Zingerman’s Press does—pop a scoop of the gelato atop a bowl of artisan oatmeal! It’s shockingly good! The Sour Cream Coffee Cake Gelato is at the Creamery’s Cream Top Shop.

Check out all of the Creamery’s gelato flavors Want more from Ari? Sign up for Ari’s Top 5 e-newsletter and look forward to his weekly curated email—a roundup of 5 Zing things Ari is excited about this week—stuff you might not have heard of!

5 Ways to Enjoy: Wild Fennel Pollen

 

Pollen So Good You’d Befriend a Bee to Get More

Fennel pollen is that special, though luckily there’s no need to pal around with pollinators to try it, you can buy it by the jar! It’s one of my favorites to reach for in my spice drawer, so I’m spreading the word about what makes it so exceptional.

Dubbed “culinary fairy dust” by our friends at Zingerman’s Mail Order, fennel pollen is exactly what it sounds like, pollen from the flowers of a fennel plant. Often grown for its bulb, fennel is somewhat unique in that you can consume the entire plant—the bulb, the stalk, the fronds, the seeds, and the pollen. 

If you were growing fennel in your garden in hopes of procuring homegrown pollen, instead of harvesting the bulb, you’d let the plant keep growing until it flowers, pick the umbels (the flower clusters), dry them, and collect the pollen. Speaking from personal experience, that is indeed as labor-intensive as it sounds, which explains the relatively high price of this special spice. (Fennel pollen’s BFF in the Most Arduous Spices to Obtain Club might be saffron. The vivid reddish-orange stigma from the saffron crocus has to be harvested by hand—and there are only three stigmata in each flower!) 

Given that fennel seeds (which are derived from cultivated fennel) cost [a quarter the price of fennel pollen], we wondered if the wild pollen could be worth the splurge. When we compared the two… we understood the hype: The delicate crunch of these golden granules and their remarkably complex flavor featuring hints of licorice and citrus and a honeyed, marshmallow-like sweetness overshadowed the fibrous texture and one-note licorice taste of the seeds. —Cook’s Illustrated

It is also perhaps part of the reason why, up until a couple of decades ago, wild fennel pollen was relatively unknown here in the States, unlike in Italy, where wild fennel is rampant. We have Dario Cecchini, an eight-generation Italian butcher in Tuscany, to thank for helping to popularize fennel pollen (head to Mail Order’s blog, The Feed, for the full story.), making it easier for more of us to enjoy it.

Fennel pollen can add that mysterious and sweet herbaceous flavor that transports you to a small town in Tuscany, just with a flick of your fingers. —Ji Hye Kim, Chef and Managing Partner of Miss Kim

Fennel is often confused with anise, and while they are entirely different plants, it is the closest flavor comparison for what fennel and fennel pollen taste like. Fennel pollen does have a slightly sweet, anise-like flavor (don’t be deterred, licorice haters, it’s milder than you might expect) and it’s very fragrant. Val Neff-Rasmussen, Product Buyer for Mail Order says, “It tastes like fennel seed, but lighter, more ethereal.” 

 

5 of Our Favorite Ways to Use Fennel Pollen

• Make a Stand-out Main Dish

Fennel pollen plays well with different meats and fishes, but it’s an especially flavorful partner for pork. In fact, one of Zingerman’s Catering & Events many specialties is a Fennel Pollen Pork Shoulder rubbed with sea salt, fresh herbs, fennel pollen, and olive oil. Order theirs, or play around with your own blend.

Used a little of the [Wild Fennel Pollen] to season my whole roast chicken and it took the flavor and aromatics to a whole new level! This truly is a magic spice that makes anything you put it on so much more wonderful! Where has this been all my life?!? -Alicia C, Zingerman’s guest and pollen promoter 

• Create a Flavored Salt 

Make your own fennel pollen salt and then use it with abandon. If you’ve yet to delve into DIY flavored salts, start with 1 teaspoon per 1/4 cup of coarse, flaky salt, and then adjust to taste as you see fit. Sprinkle your new favorite salt over roasted veggies. Dip tempura vegetables in it. Use it to rim a glass (Bloody Marys?!). Dust it over sauteéd mushrooms or fried eggs. 

• Try It with Tomatoes

Whether sprinkled over tomato soup or sliced tomatoes fresh off the vine, tomatoes and fennel pollen are a culinary match made in heaven. Food writer Max Falkowitz says fennel pollen “tastes like pure summer joy,” so you know it’ll play well with other seasonal produce, too.

• Pair Pollen with Fresh Cheeses

Like cream cheese or fresh goat cheese from Zingerman’s Creamery. For an easy appetizer, spread some fresh soft cheese on your vehicle of choice—a crostini, a cracker, a cucumber slice—sprinkle with fennel pollen, and enjoy

• Sprinkle It on Sweets

This is, admittedly, perhaps a bit more unexpected, but stay with me! Try sprinkling fennel pollen on vanilla ice cream or gelato. (Or on fennel ice cream! If you need a recipe, you can find one in my cookbook, Cooking with Scraps.) Or even yogurt along with a drizzle of honey. Try making fennel pollen sugar (start with the same suggested ratio for flavored salt, above, just swap in sugar). Fennel pollen pairs well with chocolate, too; sprinkle some on a batch of truffles or chocolate mousse. After all, Zingerman’s Deli and Zingerman’s Candy Manufactory often carry chocolate bars with fennel seed (See Exhibits A, B, and C), so fennel pollen is just another step in that flavorful direction.

Ready to see what the buzz is all about? Get a jar of Wild Tuscan Fennel Pollen at Zingerman’s Deli or have one shipped to your doorstep from Zingerman’s Mail Order.

A terrific new tasty treat

Looking for a super tasty dessert this week? Are you a big fan of bourbon? We have just the ticket at the Creamery—handmade gelato crafted with a healthy dose of barrel-aged Kentucky Bourbon.

Gelato, if you’re not familiar with it, is the frozen dessert of Italy. It originated, it seems, in the 17th century, most likely in Florence. Cosimo Ruggeri, astrologer and advisor to Catherine de Medici, is generally credited with inventing it. Ruggeri was renowned at the time as a master of the occult and magic, and I suppose we could say that gelato was the creative culinary application of his skills in those areas. Gelato actually came to North America around the time of the American Revolution but was overshadowed at the time by the development of ice cream. It was only in the latter decades of the 20th century that it became popular in the U.S. We started making it here at the Creamery in 1999. Gelato has less fat and less air in it, making it creamier in texture than ice cream. It’s a wonderful way to sweeten anyone’s day.

The Bourbon gelato at the Creamery is made with Basil Hayden bourbon, Madagascar vanilla extract, and a good bit of the dark demerara sugar we get from the island of Mauritius. Swing by the Creamery or the Roadhouse, order a scoop or two, and enjoy. I think it’s terrific topped with pecans and real maple syrup—so good, in fact, that we might add that sundae to the Roadhouse dessert menu. It’s really wonderful with bananas sautéed in butter and brown sugar. It pairs pretty darned deliciously with Eve’s Apple Babka from the Bakehouse, and it’s great with the Bakehouse’s Graham Crackers too, and/or with the Noccioliva Cocoa and Hazelnut Spread from Italy at the Deli.

If you want to make a special brunch dish, put a scoop of Bourbon gelato atop slices of French Toast. That makes me think of putting some on the spelt pancakes (yum!) at the Roadhouse. Jenny Tubbs of Zingerman’s Press has long advocated for gelato on oatmeal or as a creamer in your coffee—this seems a good way to get a bit of Bourbon into your breakfast!

You can get the Bourbon gelato at Cream Top Shop in a cup or cone, or order it up for dessert at the Roadhouse!

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I scream, you scream, we all scream for gelato!

Gelato is Italy’s version of ice cream. It is to American ice cream what Gucci is to Levi’s. Most Italian towns have at least a few gelaterie, tiny shops that sell nothing but gelato. Big cities will have dozens of them. They’ll usually have at least a dozen flavors prominently displayed, everything from sexed up standards like super dark chocolate to more exotic flavors like Marron Glacé (candied chestnut) or Torrone (nougat). When you pick a flavor, they’ll pile it into a cup or cone using a paddle that looks more like a spatula than a scoop. You eat it with a brightly colored, shovel-shaped spoon that’s as long as a toothpick and as wide as a cheap emery board. But before you pick a flavor and dig in, you have to pick which gelateria to visit.

There are a few factors to pay attention to when choosing a gelateria. Avoid gelato with DayGlo colors. Stay away from gelato mounded six inches above the tub, it probably has tons of stabilizers to help it keep that shape. Don’t go for the spot that has little jars of Nutella or tiny plastic fruits stuck in the gelato to show you which flavor is which. If the menu tells you where ingredients come from, like having IGP hazelnuts from Piedmont or DOP pistachios from Bronte, you might have found a good one. But the best indication of all is a long line—or, since this is Italy, a big, disorganized crowd.

The crowd knows. Those people waiting understand that a particular gelateria makes ice cream with luscious texture and big, bold flavors. And that’s the thing about gelato: when it’s really good the flavors are more direct and pure than American ice cream. The hazelnut tastes like freshly toasted hazelnuts. The strawberry sorbet tastes like fresh, ripe strawberries. I’m sure if Zingerman’s Creamery were tucked away on some narrow, cobbled, Italian alley, it would have a crowd stretching around the corner.

Gelato is made with only four major ingredients so you can’t skimp on any of them and get great flavor.

Zingerman’s gelato maker Josh starts with milk from Calder Dairy, located about an hour down the road from Zingerman’s Creamery in Carleton, Michigan. Calder has a herd of 113 cows that are known by names, not numbers. They’re never given any hormones or subtherapeutic antibiotics. The milk is gently pasteurized and not homogenized, a process that agitates the milk to distribute the cream more evenly rather than allowing it to rise and separate. The result is that Calder produces a richer, creamier, sweeter milk.

To the milk, Josh adds cream from Guernsey Dairy in Northville, Michigan—the same source our Bakehouse uses for the sour cream they stir into every Sourcream Coffeecake. Then he mixes in demerara brown cane sugar. He adds pinch of stabilizer to help the gelato maintain its texture when frozen for a few weeks, and then all that’s left is to add the flavor. And oh, those flavors! His peanut butter gelato is made with Koeze’s atonishing Cream Nut Peanut Butter from Grand Rapids, Michigan. His dulce de leche gelato is made with a super thick and creamy dulce de leche caramel we get direct from Argentina, its home base.

In spite of great variety, Josh’s vanilla gelato is probably my favorite. “Before I started making gelato, I thought vanilla was just white and sweet,” Josh confessed to me the other day. I’d say that’s a pretty apt description of a lot of vanilla ice creams, but not so with Josh’s. He uses Madagascar Bourbon vanilla—and lots of it!—and the result is a rich, earthy, woodsy flavor that lasts and lasts.

What’s the gelato maker’s favorite flavor?

Burnt Sugar. That’s not because it’s the easiest to make—in fact, Josh calls it “a thorough pain in the ass.” He loves it because it takes sugar, one of the three base ingredients of gelato, and transforms it into an entirely different flavor. He starts with white cane sugar and cooks it with water in a big pot. Over the course of an hour, the water boils off, the sugar melts, and then just as it starts to burn he pulls it off the stove and adds additional water to make a syrup and keep it from hardening into a sticky hard caramel mess. “I put on gloves, and I should probably wear goggles too. Then I yell to get people out of the way. It’s so hot that when I add the water it boils upon impact. It’s like this insanely hot exercise of sweating and trying not to get it on your skin while it cools in the sink.” The burnt sugar syrup tastes like the top of a crème brûlée. The gelato flirts with the line between sweet and bitter. It’s sugar utterly transformed, and the end result is super smooth and creamy with an autumn orange-yellow color and a complex, intriguing flavor.

– Val

You can find our amazing gelato at Zingerman’s Creamery, and the Zingerman’s Deli Next Door coffeehouse. We can also ship gelato through Zingerman’s Mail Order.

Add some sweetness to the winter chill!  

Gelato with Peppalo Chocolates!

We’ve teamed up with the folks at Peppalo Stone Ground Chocolate in Tecumseh, MI to bring you two new gelato flavors. Peppalo makes exceptionally tasty chocolate bars in very small batches, and their bars are unconched, which gives them a unique texture. Conching is a process that heats and rolls nearly finished chocolate in order to refine it, give it a homogenous texture, and allow for the making of creamy forms of chocolate. We find that unconched chocolate is just perfect for gelato, as it maintains a lovely texture when added.
We’ve debuted two brand-new flavors using Peppalo chocolate: