An easy-to-make and really delicious morning repast

Here’s a delicious morning meal that I tried out a few months ago—super tasty and under 10 minutes to make! When I first had the thought, I doubted myself and dismissed it for a few days as odd. But, the more I thought about it … well, if you like toast and jam, this is really just another (terrific) way to eat it! The doubts went by the wayside, and I ended up with a wonderful, quick morning meal!

I started with some leftover cooked, but not dressed, maccheroni. It was the Mancini maccheroni, the super fine farmstead pasta we sell at the Deli and use enormous amounts of at the Roadhouse for mac and cheese. It’s the only farmstead pasta made in Italy—the Mancini family, in the Marche region on Italy’s east coast, grows only heirloom wheat varieties and then makes the milled grain into pasta on the farm. They use all traditional techniques, including the old bronze-die extrusion—the bronze makes for the appropriately rough, sandpaper-like surface that old-school pasta is supposed to have. (Modern pastas are extruded through Teflon, which is cheaper and faster but makes the pasta super-slick, so your sauce inevitably ends up at the bottom of the bowl.) Mancini dries the maccheroni at the appropriately very low temperatures to protect the integrity, texture, and flavor of the grain for over 50 hours (instead of 5–6 hours at high temperature as is done in commercial pasta plants).

One of the best parts of artisan pasta is that when it’s leftover, it still tastes terrific. (By contrast, leftover industrially made pasta will have next to no flavor at all.) You can, of course, cook the pasta from scratch the morning of—it will be wonderful! Just start the rest of this after you have hot, drained pasta! The Mancini pasta worked wonderfully well, but all of the artisan pasta we stock—Rustichella, Gentile, etc.—would be great too!

For the breakfast pasta, I took the leftover maccheroni from the fridge, and taking the easy way out (it was morning!), sprinkled it with a small bit of water, and popped it in the microwave for maybe a minute at most, just enough to get it hot. When it came out, I tossed it with a bit of extra virgin olive oil, and then some great jam—given everything I’ve been writing, you won’t be shocked to know that I used the American Spoon apricot preserves! So delicious! Really, though, any high-quality jam you love will work well—try it with that terrific Mara des Bois strawberry preserves I wrote about last month from our friends at Agrimontana in the Piemonte region of Italy. Add a little sea salt to taste, and then add a small bit of freshly ground coarse black pepper.

If you’re going minimalist, you’re good to go just like that. If you want to take it up a notch, you can do as I did one time and add slivers of sautéed fresh fruit (I had some fresh apricots on the counter). And/or a spoonful of fresh ricotta! And/or some toasted nuts! And, although it sounds crazy, it’s delicious with Grape-Nuts sprinkled over top, which is a great way to approximate the use of toasted breadcrumbs atop so many Italian pasta dishes.

All in all, it’s lovely, slightly sweet, slightly savory, super tasty, and easy to make. And if you’re having company, you’ll both catch people’s attention and please their palates at the same time!

Stock up on supplies

A wonderful dish to bring to summer picnics

The great 20th-century American author Wallace Stegner said, “Tell me where you’re from and I’ll tell you who you are.” In the spirit of Stegner’s statement, I have always been drawn to foods that are very particular to a place. The anchovies of Cetara on the southwest coast of Italy. Pesto from Genoa. The Pinquito beans from the Central Valley of California that the Roadhouse has had on its special list. Paesano, the bread of Puglia. Comté from the Franche-Comté region of France. Foods that are from one particular place, and whose entire essence emanates out from that origin.

Vicksburg Potato Salad is far less known than all those others I listed, but it’s been embedded in my mind ever since I first read about it in The Food of a Younger Land, the compilation of the WPA-sponsored project on American cuisine, edited by Mark Kurlansky. The essays in the book, which date to the 1930s, include some of the country’s great writers—Zora Neale Hurston, Nelson Algren, and Eudora Welty, to name just a few—sharing thoughts on regional American eating back in the dark days of the Depression.

The potato salad popped up in Eudora Welty’s section about Mississippi. Born in Jackson in 1909, Welty spent most of her life there and became one of the South’s most celebrated writers. When she wrote this piece for the WPA, she was just another young writer trying to make her way in the world. It was part of a pamphlet she created that was originally distributed on mimeographed sheets. She would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter in 1973 and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. Alongside her fiction, Welty was also a wonderful photographer, capturing rural Southern life during the Depression. She died in 2001 at age 92, leaving behind a legacy that continues to shape American literature.

I think what really drew my attention to the potato salad was Welty’s statement that “Yankees are welcome to make these dishes.” I took her at her word and went to it. Welty writes, intriguingly, that the Vicksburg Potato Salad, made with a lot of mustard, is “wickedly hot.” Since he was born in Vicksburg, I checked in with Bill Ferris about the potato salad. (I wrote about Bill’s amazing work with folklore and his exceptional ability to encourage people to tell their stories. Additionally, I’ll add, his book about the blues, Give My Poor Heart Ease, is beautiful.) “The Vicksburg Hotel no longer exists,” he explained. “It was located on Clay Street, and I remember going there as a child when my father got his hair cut. They had a large barbershop on the street level with five or six chairs where men sat while they had their hair cut. It was a magical place for a young child.”

Making the salad at home is super easy. As per “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy,” the better the potatoes you use, the better the salad will taste. I made it with the terrific Tantré Farm potatoes that I picked up at Argus Farm Stop, but Yukon Golds from the supermarket work well too. Start by cubing just-cooked potatoes (Welty’s recipe calls for a quart). Add a lot of chopped hard-cooked egg (three, she says). Add a whole green pepper, chopped fine—it cuts the richness of the dish. And a couple roasted red peppers, also finely chopped. Mix it all with a generous amount of mayonnaise, plus the standard salt and freshly ground pepper (we have a wide range of great ones) to taste, and a good bit of spicy mustard. Crumble a bunch of good bacon on top. For the bacon, I like a bigger, smoky one for this dish—Broadbent’s or Benton’s would both be beautiful options. (Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon will give you a lot more insight into bacon histories and flavors.)

Back in Ms. Welty’s world, the mayonnaise she’d have used certainly wasn’t store-bought; Hellman’s and Duke’s were modern convenience foods back then. As she wrote in the forward to The Jackson Cookbook, published in 1971, “Mayonnaise had a mystique.” Between that and the “wickedly hot” thing, she certainly had my attention. Proper mayonnaise was always prepared in the home. “Little girls,” Welty went on,

were initiated into it by being allowed to stand at the kitchen table and help make it, for making mayonnaise takes three hands. While the main two hands keep up the uninterrupted beat in the bowl, the smaller hand is allowed to slowly add the olive oil, drop-by-counted-drop. The solemn fact was that sometimes mayonnaise didn’t make. Only the sudden dash of the red pepper onto the brimming, smooth-as-cream bowlful told you it was finished and a triumph.

And to put it fully in context, she concluded, “Of course you couldn’t buy mayonnaise, and if you could, you wouldn’t. For the generation bringing my generation up, everything made in the kitchen started from scratch, too.” This homemade mayonnaise issue is not something to take lightly. Culinary historian Marcie Ferris, Bill’s wife and an Arkansas native, told me that,

Bill’s mom told me that a true Southern woman ALWAYS has HOME-MADE mayonnaise and home-made sweet pickles in the refrigerator (and a tin of beaten biscuits in the pantry … just in case, guests arrive—to serve with stiff drinks of bourbon, and a slice of country ham or pimento cheese!

So there you go … It’s “just potato salad,” but clearly it’s also so much more. Find a kid in your family and initiate them into mayonnaise-making. Make some potato salad with local eggs, good potatoes, and any one of the great bacons we’ve got on hand. Make it wickedly, seriously, hot, I hope. And get a copy of Ms. Welty’s work and do some reading while the potatoes are cooking.

Wednesday and Saturdays only, and only at the Bakehouse!

The Big O Oatmeal Raisin Cookies have long been one of my favorite Bakehouse products. We take organic oats, sweeten them with Michigan maple syrup, and stud the cookies with large, juicy Red Flavor raisins. I think the results are remarkably good! Because these cookies have no chocolate, they are akin to what an early-19th-century colonial grandmother might have made for her family in the 1830s, around the time Cornman Farms’ barn and house were being built. I think she would have used oats, wheat, and raisins from Europe, along with native maple syrup to sweeten them.

Come by the Bakehouse to get an especially excellent version of these already amazing cookies. Two small Little O Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, sandwiched around a generous spread of Ermine Frosting. Though little known now, this old-fashioned frosting was once very popular amongst American bakers. Sometimes called “roux frosting” or “boiled milk frosting,” it’s made by whipping together a cooked-flour roux, butter, and sugar. Ermine is less sweet than a typical buttercream and boasts a delightfully silky texture. Best I can tell, the frosting called for on a traditional Red Velvet cake. Closer to whipped cream than would be typical for most frostings, it’s creamy, tender, and terrific.

Here it makes for a really marvelous, frosting-filled sandwich cookie, one that will thrill anyone who has a love for that kind of thing.

And remember, Wednesday and Saturday only, and only at the Bakehouse on Plaza Drive.

Sweeten your Saturday (or Wednesday)

Orange and chocolate come together to make something super special

If you like orange and chocolate, this exceptional bar from my good friend Shawn Askinosie and the crew at Askinosie Chocolate is an awesome option! It has become a widely appreciated staff favorite across the ZCoB over the four or five years that they’ve been crafting it!

Four hundred years ago in Europe, the combo of orange and chocolate was completely cutting edge. If one wanted to impress a couple of your royal cousins, catch the attention of upper-crust colleagues, or get in good with a high-ranking court dignitary, chocolate with orange might well have been the almost-impossible-to-ignore ticket. Both ingredients were then relatively new on the European culinary scene.

But that was then, and this is now. Orange and chocolate in some form are everywhere. They’re on my mind, though, because of this very special iteration of the combination in my good friend Shawn Askinosie’s incredible chocolate bar. The bar begins with the relatively rare (it accounts for less than 10% of the world’s chocolate) and very carefully crafted Trinitario cacao that Shawn brings from the Philippines. It’s a 58% dark chocolate—very smooth and gentle—that comes from grower Peter Cruz. Thanks to Shawn’s good work, Cruz became the first Filipino farmer to export cacao since the country’s land reform in the mid-1970s. Shawn shares that “Peter is known nationally as an expert in organic and regenerative cocoa farming,” and his skill comes through in the quality of the cacao. The beans are conched and blended with turbinado sugar and cocoa butter (made by the folks at Askinosie from the same beans), and then a nice bit of orange pulp and orange peel. The finished flavor is something special.

To be clear, developing an offering of this quality is not an overnight activity. Natural Law #10 (see “Secret #01: Twelve Natural Laws of Building a Great Business”) is that “it takes a lot longer to make something great happen than most people think.” This bar is no exception—Shawn says it took about 20 iterations to get the ratios right, all done in a series of experiments that took about 18 months. I appreciate all the hard work, and I’m betting that, if you like orange and chocolate, you will most definitely want to buy a bar too. Or five. The flavor is fantastic. The chocolate and the orange are beautifully balanced. Like any good partnership, they bring different things to the table. The chocolate is the bass line—dark, nutty, cocoa-y. The orange comes at it from the other end—it’s the violin playing over top. Light, bright, sensual, ethereal. Together, the combo is otherworldly. The royal court of Spain, which brought cacao to the Philippines early in the 17th century, would likely have swooned over it

Can a chocolate bar make that much difference? Both Shawn and I are big fans of the work of the Irish philosopher John O’Donohue, so I’ll close this piece with a quote of his that conveys what I’m thinking after eating and reflecting on how good this bar is. Share a bit of your bar with anyone you care about. Or even someone you don’t yet know. As O’Donohue writes, “The time is now ripe for beauty to surprise and liberate us.”

Buy a bar

“Surf & turf” combo for some fine summer sandwiches

One of the quickest and absolutely most delicious meals I make—combining tuna and the spicy, spreadable Calabrian pork sausage called ’Nduja. A while back, I decided to call it Tu’nduja. It starts with some really good tuna. We have the Ortiz bonito (aka, albacore) on hand always—it’s one of our biggest sellers. Personally, though, I’m inclined toward the fuller flavor of the Yellowfin. Then I add some of the Tempesta ’Nduja from Tony Fiasche and friends in Chicago.

To make the Tu’nduja, start by adding about 2 parts tuna to 1 part ’Nduja in a mixing bowl—you can adjust the ratio to fit your taste. Add a squeeze of lemon juice and a few spoonfuls of mayonnaise. Stir to combine. Season with freshly ground black pepper (you probably won’t need salt, but taste and see), and fold in some chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley for brightness. That’s it. Super tasty.

Spread your Tu’nduja on toast. Make a Tu’nduja salad sandwich. Use it as a party spread or snack. Stuff it into small peppers or tomatoes. Or blend it smooth, add a drizzle of olive oil, and you’ve got a terrific spicy tonnato sauce for cold meats or vegetables. Thin it with more mayo and it becomes a great dressing for green salads or potato salad.

You can also toss Tu’nduja with hot pasta—just mix the sauce in at the end, after you’ve drained the pasta, and don’t cook it too long, or the mayo might separate. Add diced tomatoes, roasted peppers, or more chopped parsley if you like. Finish with toasted breadcrumbs—it’s darned delicious!

Try some tasty tuna

Or ship a jar to Jersey

You’d better baaaaah-lieve it, the July/August issue of Zing News is here!

Is this issue the GOAT? We don’t want to horn in on your schedule, but you might want to go ahead and clear your calendar, so you can read it and find out for yourself. Get ready for:

• An essay from Ari on Humility Conservation Districts
• A look at Little Kim, from vision to reality
• Eye-catching ads for Cornman Farms, the Summer Sale, Zingerman’s at the Art Fair, and more