Magical Cheese Blintzes with Chestnut Honey
On the Mail Order website or in the Deli’s freezer case
Speaking of Jewish history, blintzes have been part of Eastern European Jewish cooking for centuries. Closer to home, these blintzes have been a big hit at the Deli almost since the day we opened, and I’m excited that we have them in very workable frozen form for folks to heat up at home and serve!
For those who don’t know them, blintzes are one of the core items of the kind of Eastern European Jewish cooking I grew up on in Chicago. These handmade crepes are wrapped around a vanilla-and-honey-flavored cheese filling, and we’ve long proudly held our version up against other, often better-known blintzes made elsewhere.
The base of the filling is Zingerman’s Farm Cheese—and then, to add marvelous to mouth-watering, we shifted the sweetening in the recipe from a standard commercial honey to a very special Italian chestnut honey. Add a little vanilla, a snippet of sea salt, and there you have it!
Chestnut honey is slightly smoky and almost, at times, more bitter than sweet—deep, dark, and mysterious, with a hint of burnt sugar. It’s complicated and wonderfully out of sync with what most imagine honey to be. The late, great New York City pastry chef Gina DePalma used to say that chestnut was her favorite: “Dark and spicy, with touches of smoke and leather, chestnut honey is complex, mysterious, and nuanced.” It adds both a beautiful sweetness and a simultaneous bit of bitterness to the flavor of the blintzes’ filling.
Take ’em home and reheat ’em with a little butter in a hot skillet until the crepes turn an elegant golden brown and the cheese-and-honey filling is soft inside. All you need on the side are some good preserves—especially, per what I wrote above, apricot. Whether for brunch, lunch, dinner, or secret snacking, you really can’t go wrong with these.
