A beautiful and tasty taste of Northern Michigan in a jar

My friend Lex Alexander in North Carolina, who’s studied the subject of artisan jam making for many decades, always tells me that apricot is the hardest fruit to successfully put up in preserves. It follows well from the metaphor up top—democratic engagement is perhaps the hardest way to learn to govern. When either or both are done well, though, the results are inspiring. With Lex’s wise words in mind, I’m perpetually impressed by American Spoon Foods’ amazing Leelanau Apricot Preserves—they’re a great way to put an inspirational bit of apricot into your daily dining, and a wonderful way to appreciate the beauty of the apricot at its absolute best.

Apricots are not, of course, native to this part of the world. The fruit was originally cultivated in China and Central Asia as far back as 2000 B.C. From there, it moved west with merchants who traveled the Great Silk Road, eventually arriving in Persia, where it was called a “yellow plum.” Arabs took apricots to the Middle East, and it also made its way to ancient Armenia. The amazing English writer John Ruskin (who also famously and I believe accurately said, “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.”), described it as “shining in a sweet brightness of golden velvet.” Although the biggest volume of American apricots comes from California, some of the most flavorful fruit is actually grown here in Michigan. Apricot trees were planted near South Haven around the end of the 19th century. Early efforts were not successful, but eventually, apricot growing took hold. Today, Michigan apricots are known all over the country for their amazing flavor.

Noah Marshall-Rashid, second-generation owner at American Spoon, says of this wonderful jam,

Our Harlayne apricots are grown by Marty Jelinek on a hillside farm a few miles north of Leland, Michigan. The Harlayne is a richly colored, highly aromatic, late-ripening variety specifically developed by Richard Layne in Harrow, Ontario for cultivation in our cool Northern climate. These precious fruits are hand-pitted and then macerated to achieve a silky, succulent texture in our small batch copper preserving kettles.

I never take the excellence of the American Spoon Apricot Preserves for granted. As Amy Emberling, long-time co-managing partner at the Bakehouse, once told me, “Good apricot preserves are hard to come by.” American Spoon crafts the preserves in the best possible, totally traditional way—about 60% apricots (nearly double the fruit content of many commercial jams), cane sugar, a small bit of lemon juice, and a lot of slow cooking in the copper kettles. And they’ve been this good for 43 years now—American Spoon started making preserves in 1982, the same year we opened the Deli.

The jam is super spoonable. It goes great with hard cheeses like Spanish Manchego, over the top of the Creamery’s Cream Cheese, and/or also with cured meat. As you would expect, it’s wonderful on toast. Or take home a dozen of the Roadhouse biscuits—now even better thanks to Vermont Creamery’s Cultured Butter that I wrote about last week—and serve them at your place with apricot preserves on the side. American Spoon makes a curried apricot chicken salad that seems like a great idea—I’m planning to try it with tuna too. And if you spot fresh apricots at the market (now’s the time!), try making what we call a Jamwich: toast a Zinglish Muffin, spread on some Creamery Cream Cheese, add a generous layer of apricot jam, and top it all off with slices of fresh apricot.

Procure your preserves

Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter takes ’em to new heights

The big news around ZCoB parts right now is that the Roadhouse’s long-loved Buttermilk Biscuits, made from scratch every day, just got even better!

It’s been two years since we added the Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter to the bread service at the Roadhouse. The commercial butter we’d been serving up until that point had been a relatively peripheral product for us. Now, the cultured butter has become a signature offering with glowing reviews. The Vermont Creamery Cultured butter is a game changer—I actually added a few paragraphs to the “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy” pamphlet in the final weeks of production just to highlight how good it is. We have had it on our counter at home regularly for many months now. I’m pretty confident that if you try it (be sure it’s at room temperature), you will be doing the same for your house as well!

Credit for the butter goes to Allison Hooper, longtime industry colleague and friend, who, along with her business partner Bob Reese, started Vermont Creamery back in 1984. Working in the small town of Websterville, the pair pushed from the beginning to make the kind of cheese and butter that Allison had experienced when she’d interned in France a few years earlier. I asked Allison for the back story on the butter:

The butter was developed early on, in the early ’90s. The story is that the farm that I worked on in Brittany had Jersey cows. They were separating cream, and they were selling butter and crème fraiche at the local market. It was so delicious!!! I wanted to make that butter here. Bob and I found a used churn outside a dairy barn and we bought it. We figured out how to use it, and we started making butter. I found this pretty famous French chef in New York, and I decided to take a chance and send him some butter. He called me back, and he was so excited. He said, “This is exactly what the great French chefs in New York are all looking for. It’s the butter of our childhood!” The chefs there loved it, and they really helped us get it off the ground. The chefs knew! They say we make the best butter in the country, and to this day, that’s what we’re known for.

The Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter is made with cream from nearby St. Albans Cooperative. Cream is cultured overnight and then churned into butter. All, and au natural! The butter is 86% butter fat. And like I said, you really can taste the difference! The American standard for butter is 80%. Even most fancy European butters are 82 or 83%. The Vermont Creamery Culture Butter is 86%. And it is so darned delicious!

The Roadhouse has been making its ever-popular Buttermilk Biscuits for decades now. As of last week, we began baking them with this spectacular butter. What has been really wonderful for many years is now noticeably better still. The aroma of the biscuit is amazing—bigger, beckoning you in to take a bite, or two or three. A small luxury to bring a little cultured, buttery, culinary joy to your day! They’re so good they’ve got me thinking I might well want to write a bit of poetry about them. After all, Carl Sandburg, the classic poet of my hometown of Chicago, once wrote, “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” At the Roadhouse, you can gild the butter-rich biscuits by spreading more of the same cultured butter on top just before you eat them! Grab a biscuit (or two) when you drive through the Roadshow. And/or, buy a dozen in the morning to bring home for brunch!

Reserve a table

Mayhaw, Beautyberry, and Mimosa Flower Jelly from the Florida Panhandle

Looking for a lovely lunch alternative? Here you go! A little spice, a little sweet, a little smoke, some great Bakehouse bread, and the crowning culinary jewel—a couple spoonfuls of one of the great new fruit jellies we just started getting in from the Florida Panhandle.

The sandwich starts with Bakehouse bread. I made mine with Rustic Italian, but really, a couple of moderately thick slices of any of them would probably work really well. Toast them until they’re golden brown.

Next, spread on some of our Pimento Cheese—a bit on the inside of each slice of bread. It’s been two decades now since I first came up with this recipe, and over the course of those 20 years, Pimento Cheese has become one of the most popular items we produce. You can score some seven days a week at the Creamery, Deli, Roadhouse, and Bakehouse!

Atop the cheese, spoon on a thinnish layer of one of these special Panhandle jellies. While they’re not all that hard to find in the Southeast, up until they arrived at the Deli last month, you might have gone most of your life without ever seeing them here in Southeastern Michigan. They come from the folks at Bright Acres Homestead, in Wakulla County, not too far from Tallahassee. The farm has been owned and run by Dan and Jenn Bright since the middle of the aughts, right around the same time I started working on the pimento cheese recipe! Bright Acres is a real working farm—animals, crops, and crafts. I look forward to getting down there in person one day.

Right now, we have three of their special Florida Panhandle jellies in stock:

• Mimosa Flower Jelly – Mimosa flowers are beautiful to look at, but few folks know you can also make jelly out of them. Freshly plucked from the trees on the farm, then gently simmered with sugar into a jelly. Since the mimosas bloom only once a year, the jelly is remarkably rare! Delicate, aromatic, elegant flavor. Mimosa—Albizia Julibrissin—is also known as “The Joy Tree,” so if you, like me, are always looking to add a bit of joy to your day, give it a try!
• Mayhaw Berry Jelly – Mayhaw berries come from early spring blossoms. Tart and terrific! The color of a light red wine, the jelly has a bit of the tartness I’m so taken by when it comes to cranberries.
• Beautyberry Jelly – Beautyberries come from a small shrub that grows in both the American Southeast and Southeast Asia. If you happen upon a plant, take note that the leaves are said to act as a natural mosquito repellent. The berries, though, are what the jelly is based on—tiny and bright purple when they’re harvested in August. The freshly pressed juice is also purple, but in cooking with sugar, it turns a wonderful pinkish purple. The Beautyberry Jelly is quite hard to come by, so score a jar or two ASAP if you want to try it!

After you’ve spread on the jelly, lay on a slice, or two, or three, or four, of your favorite bacon. Nueske’s applewood smoked bacon is often my choice—24 hours of smoking over applewood logs makes one seriously lovely bacon.

That’s it! Close up the sandwich, slice, eat, and enjoy. Open a bag of Zingerman’s potato chips (I’m partial to the Tellicherry Black Pepper) and you’ve got a lovely lunch.

Joy-inducing jellies

A restored estate, a bird sanctuary, a whole lot of history

Fritz Maytag, the founder of Anchor Steam Brewery, once told me, “It’s not all that hard to find a great product. And it’s not that hard to find a really wonderful story. But when you can find a great product that has a great story behind it, you’re onto something special!” The Italian rice from Cascina Oschiena is just that—both the rice and the story behind it are exceptional. Oschiena’s work exemplifies beautifully all of what I wrote in “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy,” and thanks to the always amazing work by our friends and importer Rogers Collection, their rice has finally arrived in Ann Arbor!

Cascina Oschiena is one of the oldest farms in their area in the province of Vercelli in the Piedmont, up in the northwest corner of the country. All the way back in the 13th century, Cascina Oschiena was being farmed by the friars at the Abbey of St. Stephen of Vercelli. As was true in those days, estates of this sort were essentially self-contained communities. As the crew at Oschiena writes:

All the inhabitants contributed to life on the farmstead, each with their own activity: the paddy weeders, diggers, carters, riders, saddlers, blacksmiths, carpenters and joiners. … The traditional hand broadcast sowing method was accompanied by the transplant technique in the 1930s, and this continued until the end of the 1950s.

Rice growing at that time was almost exclusively done by hand. If you want to see what it was like, check out the amazing 1949 black and white film Riso Amaro, which is centered around the work of the folks who worked so hard in the fields. For the most part, they were women, known in Italian as mondine. Today, Cascina Oschiena is again run by a woman. It is the passion project of Alice Cerutti, whom I had the honor of spending a day with back in 2019, when I visited Cascina Oschiena. Of her work, Alice shares,

I am a farmer with a degree in Business Studies from the University of Turin. … We are deeply involved in safeguarding the environment, and are committed to biodiversity and conserving the historical landscape. Over the years, we have made renovations to maintain the essence and character of the original structures, honoring a centuries-old history of our farmhouse.

In the spirit of what I wrote above about stories and birds, part of the drive for the project was to create a safe resting place for some very special winged creatures. Alice shares the backstory:

The fields surrounding our farmhouse constitute the last recorded Italian nesting site of the Black-tailed Godwit. This … brought us to create the Cascina Oschiena Nature Reserve by converting 60 acres (one fourth of the farmland) from rice cultivation to Natural Reserve and the Black-tailed Godwit became the symbol of our Farm and its Products.

Of course, the main culinary question is “What is the quality of the rice?” The answer is, it’s excellent! There’s a wonderful freshness to the flavor, a vitality and aliveness that I love. It is, in the context of what I wrote last week, the essence of the amazing ecosystem from which it emerges.

We have four risi from Oschiena on hand at the Deli to get going with:

Arborio – The classic for making risotto. Rice arrived in Italy as an immigrant, coming from the Spanish-ruled Sicily, where rice had earlier arrived from India. Arborio (and Carnaroli) are actually descended from rice varieties that came from the Philippines in 1839. Nearly 200 years later, Arborio and Carnaroli would clearly be called some of the most Italian agricultural products available.

Carnaroli – With a bit more “tooth” and a little more flavor, this is my personal pick for risotto.

Selenia – A special short-grain variety that works well for making Sicilian arancini and other similar dishes that call for a stickier rice. Though it’s rarely seen in the U.S., we have this rice on hand, and I’m especially excited!

Ebano – A rare black rice with a great toasty, earthy flavor. Super tasty and visually appealing for summer rice salads, main course rice dishes that aren’t risotto, and more.

All four rices are remarkable, as wonderful as the story of Alice Cerutti, her family, friends, and team at Cascina Oschiena have created over the last eight years. Swing by, take some home, and start cooking soon!

Buy a box (or two)

Extraordinary organic oil from California

Over the last few months, trying to figure out how to lead through such trying times, I’ve been reassuring myself regularly that working through hard times like these (which I wrote about in the pamphlet of the same name) builds character, increases resilience, and enhances long-term health. In a sense, I suppose, that is what was proven true for us throughout the Covid pandemic. Although it was incredibly challenging, I can see now that there are indeed some good things that came out of it. ZingTrain added online classes. BAKE! did the same as well. Roadhouse Park was created in response; in fact, it just opened for the spring season a few days ago. (Swing by on a nice afternoon, appreciate the fresh air at the picnic tables, and enjoy some oysters—they’re only $2 each if you come for Happy Hour, Monday through Friday from 2–6 pm. Order up beer, wine, cocktails, and the whole compelling Roadhouse menu anytime this spring and summer.)

Another one of the good things that emerged out of the Covid pandemic was my connection with the Independent Restaurant Coalition (IRC). The non-profit brought together quality- and community-focused independently owned and run restaurants from all over the country. The group advocated for restaurants with great effectiveness in very thoughtful, collaborative ways throughout those Covid years, and is still actively engaged in doing terrific advocacy work today. Maybe most meaningful of all, out of that group of caring people, I probably also made 14 or 15 new friends! On every level, it was, and is, an inspiration!

One of the many great friends I’ve made through that work is Camilla Marcus, one of the IRC’s co-founders. At the time, she was running a recently opened restaurant in Manhattan. Unfortunately, like many small businesses I know, the restaurant did not make it through the pressures of the pandemic. To her enormous credit, Camilla came out of Covid by creating a whole new company, which she called west~bourne, in its place. Fast Company called Camilla one of the “Most Creative People in Business.” I just call her kind, caring, compassionate, and a great cook and businessperson to boot! All the products on the west~bourne website are worth taking a look at. My total top pick, though, is the exceptional extra virgin avocado oil.

The folks at west~bourne have set a whole new standard for me of what avocado oil can be—it really does redefine the class! Each bottle is filled with a beautiful green-gold, cold-pressed oil that’s really the essence of what makes the best avocados so special. The flavor, like any of the great extra virgin oils we sell, is complex, beautifully balanced, and has a lovely, long, lingering finish. It tastes, as you would expect, intensively of what you would expect from the best ripe avocados (which, to be clear, we rarely get around these parts)—buttery, subtly sweet, amazingly aromatic with a little hint of licorice and a titch of tarragon! Food & Wine journalist Kyle Beechey says west~bourne’s is the best avocado oil she’s ever had. Ever since it arrived at the Deli a few weeks ago I’ve been saying the same!

Use west~bourne’s extra virgin avocado oil to dress salad as you do olive oil. Make bruschetta with it—toast some Bakehouse bread, and while it’s hot, pour on some avocado oil and sprinkle with a pinch of good sea salt and some freshly ground black pepper. (I love the top grade Tellicherry at the Deli, and also at the Roadhouse, where it’s on all the tables and those incredible Pepper Fries.) Drizzle it on avocado toast, and you’ll take your usual favorite to new culinary heights. Great on a tin of high-quality tuna—try Salade Nicoise with avocado oil. Superfine on a salad with fresh fennel and oranges and, if you want, slices of ripe avocado as well. Great on pasta with grated Parmigiano Reggiano (the Valserena is tasting particularly great right now) or Pecorino, a bunch of freshly ground black pepper, and avocado oil, along with maybe some sautéed spring asparagus or fresh English peas. You can bake with it too—here’s west~bourne’s recipe for lemon cake made with avocado oil.

Camilla Marcus’ marvelous new cookbook, My Regenerative Kitchen: Plant-Based Recipes and Sustainable Practices to Nourish Ourselves and the Planet, is full of great recipes, including many for avocado oil. Oh yeah, chef and restaurateur Alice Waters wrote the foreword! A big part of what makes west~bourne’s work so special is the significant commitment to work towards ecological sustainability. It is, from the outside looking in, what appears to be the essence of the business. In fact, west~bourne was founded with one simple mission:

… to cure the climate crisis through regenerative food. With a focus on our collective decisions around food and the kitchen, we create products to shift the current paradigm while repairing the relationships between ourselves, our food, and our Earth.

Want to emulate west~bourne’s wonderful efforts at sustainability? west~bourne’s writer Angela Fink offers this sound suggestion:

Start small and stay consistent. In fashion, focus on buying fewer, better-quality pieces that reflect your style. For food, support local farmers, plan meals, and opt for seasonal produce. Sustainability isn’t about perfection—it’s about progress and making mindful choices that align with your values.

Your new favorite finishing oil?

P.S. You won’t see the extra virgin avocado oil on the Zingermans.com Mail Order website, but we’d love to ship you some—just send us an email at [email protected].

It’s not a pigment of your imagination, this issue is a real work of art. Inside you’ll find:

 An essay from Ari on how making art can help enhance our ecosystems
 An essay from Ji Hye about her mother
 A celebration of pimento cheese

Newsletter – May-Jun 2025 by Zingerman's Community of Businesses