Happy New Year!

Rosh Hashanah, known as the Jewish New Year, begins the eve of Sunday, September 29th at sundown and ends on the eve of Tuesday, October 1st, 2019. This holiday is a time for family, reflection, and food! Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the two “High Holy Days” in the Jewish religion.

Many communities celebrate with Rosh Hashanah dinners on both evenings. At these feasts, blessings are recited over a delicious variety of symbolic dishes. Sweet dishes are served to usher in a sweet year, and round foods, like Challah, to symbolize a complete year. The dishes can include such things as apples dipped in honey and challah bread. Fish is another symbolic dish, most typically gefilte fish, to represent abundance.

Zingerman’s offers a wide variety of dishes from both Ashkenazic (Eastern European) and Sephardic (Mediterranean) traditions to add to your celebratory table.

Here are some delicious offerings around the ZCoB for your celebration table:

Zingerman’s Delicatessen

Stop in to pick up ready-made treats, or place an order for a fully catered meal. Our Rosh Hashanah menu will be available for pick up starting at 1pm on September 29, 2019. From sweet carrot tzimmes to beef brisket and noodle kugel, the Deli has a variety of great dishes and desserts to help you sweeten up the new year. Here are just a few of our favorites from Zingerman’s Catering and Events:

• Handmade baked knishes—Tender, baked pastry wrapped around savory fillings, like potato, chicken, kasha, and pastrami.
• Matzo balls—Homemade from matzo meal, fresh eggs, and chicken schmaltz. Perfect addition to our chicken broth, made daily in our kitchen from free-range, Amish-raised chickens!
• Vegetable Tagine—A North African favorite of slowly simmered vegetables, seasoned with tajine spices from Épices de Cru.

(And don’t forget the Deli’s annual Honey Sale. Keep reading to learn more!)

Zingerman’s Bakehouse

Leaven up your celebration with treats from the Bakehouse—we’ve got some great special items to wish you a Shana Tova U’Metukah—a good and sweet new year!

• Challah Turbans—Our fresh egg and clover honey bread in the traditional round shape for the new year. Available 9/6 – 10/8, with or without dark rum-soaked raisins.
• More Rockin’ Challah—Traditional Moroccan challah, a beautiful 5-strand braid brushed with honey and topped with poppy, sesame, and anise seeds. Available 9/26 – 10/8.
• Bumble Honey Cake—A dense spice cake made with buckwheat honey, brewed tea, almonds, and golden raisins. Available 9/26 – 10/8.
• Babka—A traditional Jewish loaf of sweet bread, its name means “little grandmother” in Yiddish. It all started when nuts and seeds were twisted up with scraps of challah dough on Shabbat, then it evolved into the modern-day chocolate version when Jews arrived in New York. We start with a rich, buttery brioche dough, paint it with dark chocolate, sprinkle it with chocolate crumble and orange-syrup-soaked raisins. Available Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays in September.
• Rugelach: One of our best-selling Jewish baked goods. These are royally good cookies. Cream cheese pastry folded up with special fillings, sprinkled with sugar and baked until golden brown. Try them all: apricot, raspberry, currant walnut, date, or sesame almond. If you’ve not yet tried one of these traditional Jewish treats, now is the time. Available every day in September.

 Zingerman’s Candy

Creating old-fashioned sweets by hand, we know the huge difference in flavor you get from great ingredients when candy is sold fresh after it is made!

• Dark Chocolate Sesame Halvah—big, delicious sesame flavor. This special version is dipped in dark chocolate, making it extra good!
• Rosh Hashanah Superzzang—Our ZzangⓇ candy bar, but so much bigger and with special Rosh Hashanah packaging. It makes a great host gift!
  

HONEY

A clean slate, a fresh start. There’s no time like the New Year for a healthy dose of optimism. When it comes to Rosh Hashanah, that hopefulness is symbolized by one of our favorite things: sweets! Classic sweet dishes and treats, from raisin-laced kugel to every kind of rugelach, are favorites at New Year celebrations, the idea being that with every heavenly bite, prospects for the future become sweeter and, well, sweeter.  

One of the best-known examples of this High Holiday tradition is the custom of dipping apples in honey. But most of the best cooks and hosts we know don’t stop there—they make sure that honey is infused throughout their Rosh Hashanah meals. Of course, at Zingerman’s, we’re also big proponents of letting the honey (Tupelo, Idaho Snowberry, Scottish Heather—we love ‘em all) flow.

Honey sale at Zingerman’s Delicatessen!

It’s really amazing how many dishes honey can find its way into. Vegetables, like carrots and turnips, can be glazed for a crowd-pleasing side. Even meat dishes can get the honey treatment. Honey-baked chicken is fantastic and easy to pull off, plus you can dress it up with herbs and root veggies. Zingerman’s co-founder, Ari Weinzweig, shared that one of his Rosh Hashanah favorites is Lamb and Honey Stew, a staple of the deli’s special Rosh Hashanah catering menu. The Sephardic dish (see the recipe on pg. 378 of Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating if you’d like to make it yourself), isn’t too sweet, with the honey and saffron complementing each other in a deep, delicious way.

For Rosh Hashanah, challah takes on a round shape to represent the cycle of life, and it gets a little sweeter than usual, too, since, as with the apples, dipping challah in honey is also a tradition. The ones we make at Zingerman’s Bakehouse (can you believe we sell 2,000 of them every New Year?!) are brushed with clover honey, and we even make one with rum-soaked raisins. If you’re a home baker, come into the Deli and sample a few different jars to turn up the flavor on your own challah this year.

And if your sweet tooth is still crying out for more, we’ve got two words for you: honey cake. It’s the most enduring of traditional Rosh Hashanah desserts—there’s evidence that it’s been around since the 12th century! Spiced, rich, and nostalgic, it’s no wonder that it’s lasted so long, or that so many bakers hold fast to their beloved recipes. We take ours pretty seriously, too. We use buckwheat honey to give it big, bold flavor. Kind of like an exclamation mark at the end of the meal.

And, hey, if you want to add a little oomph to your apples and honey display, Ari has a tip for you: make it a spread. Lay out a few different varieties of apples and a couple of types of honey. “It makes for great conversation. Plus, they’re delicious!” he says.

Don’t miss out! 20% Off ALL Honey at Zingerman’s Delicatessen 9/17-10/1, 2019

From a mild and delicate Acacia honey to deep, dark, bold flavors like Fir Tree or Corbezzolo honey, we can help you find the perfect pairing for any dish or flavor preference. Come in and taste through a few to select your personal favorite!

GEFILTE FISH

Twice a year, homemade gefilte fish appears in the Deli case. Ari says that he is always happy to see it because it brings back big memories for him! Food critic Mimi Sheraton says it’s “part of the holy trinity of Jewish holiday eating: chicken soup, chopped liver, gefilte fish.” Ari’s grandmother made the first two every Friday night for dinner, and gefilte fish was on the menu for every Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. 

Although gefilte fish has become a big part of Jewish holiday eating over the centuries, it isn’t actually a formal or required part of religious observance. It’s definitely not Biblically-based. That said, there is an old Jewish saying: “Without fish, there is no Sabbath.” This was also true for all the big holidays, including Rosh Hashanah—fish of some sort was often part of any important celebration. Back in the 19th century, shtetl fish was bought live at the market (in fact, Ari’s great-grandfather was a fish seller in his hometown of Vawkavysk in Belarus).

The gefilte fish tradition is also based in the poverty of Eastern European Jewish society. Tradition dictated that everyone should have a piece of fish on the Sabbath or holidays, but many people couldn’t afford it. Gefilte fish made it possible to serve a small piece of fish to everyone in the family. Also, Jewish law prohibits any work on the Sabbath or High Holidays, and it was determined many centuries ago that pulling bones out of fish was considered “work.” That meant that any fish dish eaten on the Sabbath or High Holidays (like Rosh Hashanah) had to be boneless. Hence, gefilte fish—fish that was boned, ground, and poached to make for easy, work-free consumption.

While we know it gets a bad rap at times, gefilte fish is GOOD! It’s truly an appetizer that everyone could and should try. Made with fresh lake fish and spiced with sea salt and white pepper—the fish we use is ground in the Deli kitchen, then poached in homemade fish broth. Over the years, co-managing partner Rodger Bowser and the Deli kitchen crew have gotten really good at making this traditional Jewish specialty. Buy it by the piece and serve it with the Deli’s housemade prepared horseradish (be careful—it’s hot!).

Check out the Deli’s entire Rosh Hashanah menu! 

And don’t forget: 20% Off ALL Honey at Zingerman’s Delicatessen from 9/17 to 10/1, 2019!