Category: Cooking

The magical spice of eastern Turkey

If you want an easy way to help bring the flavors of your cooking alive in under a minute, you might want to pick up a jar of this terrific dried red pepper from Turkey. Marash pepper is magical. The more you use it, the more likely you’ll feel like a magician in the kitchen. My longtime friend and award-winning Boston chef Ana Sortun (at Oleanna and Sofra) said:

Marash is dear to my heart and I can’t cook without it now. I reach for it like most reach for black pepper and in fact it replaces black pepper in many cases. Its job is to lift flavor. Not to make something super spicy although you could use it this way, too. It’s sweet, warm, oily and vegetal and not too spicy. It’s perfect on everything including salad. I like to keep it in a shaker on the counter so it’s easy to shake over breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Marash is one of the most impressively flavorful dried red peppers I’ve ever tried. The peppers are grown in the town of Karanmaras, the pepper capital of Turkey—up until 1973 it was known merely as Maras. In either case, pronounce the “s” as an “sh.” I heard about these incredible red pepper flakes from friend and food writer Paula Wolfert. Paula, in turn, learned about them from Ayfer Unsal, an avid supporter of her homeland’s traditional foods. Thanks to Ayfer, we’ve been getting the Marash (and Urfa) pepper from Turkey ever since. Ayfer, I should add, has been teaching Turkish traditional cooking for years, and she’s always been working to enhance life in her community. She made it a particular focus to try to bring together Turkish and Armenian women in an attempt to heal the wounds of Armenian massacres early in the 20th century. She’s also engaged in a program to bring back the grandchildren of Armenian exiles to visit Turkey and be welcomed with dignity and honor. “Having them cook with me helps them feel at home in my house. When we enjoy food together, we can put aside the past.”

The peppers for Marash, all grown right around Karanmaras, are first sun-dried, then seeded, with just a tiny bit of salt added. When you get “red pepper flakes” in most pizza joints in one of those shaker jars, you’ll notice lots of seeds. The seeds add weight for the seller but no flavor for the eater. Marash, by contrast, is completely seed free. It has an amazingly full flavor with just a moderate amount of heat. By comparison, cayenne pepper is one dimensional—hot, but hardly flavorful. Use Marash red pepper on pasta, pizza, casseroles, or anyplace else you’d use red pepper flakes. Here’s a great bulgur salad from the folks at Oldways (through whom I first met Ana Sortun).

Marash pepper is woven into so many items on our menu at the Deli, that 25 years later that it’s hard to imagine life without it. At the Roadhouse we use it in the vinegar sauce for the pulled pork, the refried beans, and then some. We use it at the Bakehouse in the savory kitchen. And I have two jars of it sitting on our kitchen table at home (about 16 inches from where I’m typing right now) to use on salads, pasta, eggs, and just about everything else. One of the things that Paula Wolfert taught me about Marash many years ago is that if you mix the flakes with citrus juice it will relatively quickly break down into a paste. Mix the pepper flakes with lemon juice—within a matter of ten minutes the peppers will dissolve. You can also use a simple paste of Marash and lemon or orange juice to rub onto chicken, lamb, or pork before cooking.

It’s hard to go wrong having a jar of Marash red pepper on your table. As Ana Sortun said, “It will change your life and your recipes for the better.” I’ll leave you with this line from Jane Black, who I met years ago at Camp Bacon when she was writing for the Washington Post, who said of Marash: “Think of it as the Eartha Kitt of chilies . . . sultry and rich with a slow, subtle heat.”

You can pick up Marash pepper at the Deli or Bakeshop or have some shipped to a cook close to your heart.

Category: Cooking

Traditional Korean cooking in your home kitchen

Seven months in, it’s safe to say that the challenges of the pandemic have been many. You don’t need me to detail them all here. But in the shadows of the struggles that have gotten most of the attention, there have still been small slivers of positive progress that inspire. Here at Zingerman’s, new products like Zinglish Muffins at the Bakehouse, Goat Brie at the Creamery, the Deli’s Reuben Tour, ZingTrain’s new master class series, the Fried Chicken Sandwich at the Roadhouse, and more have all come on board during the last five or six months.

At Miss Kim, Ji Hye and crew have moved quickly too—adding sauces, dressings, and meal kits to the daily mix. The latter have been particularly popular. Boxes of ingredients that you can quickly assemble at home and bring a little of the aroma and flavor of eating out at Miss Kim to your abode.

The biggest selling of the Miss Kim kits has been this awesome Bibimbob package. Here’s what Ji Hye had to say:

Before the March shut down, our stone bowl bibimbob was one of the most popular dishes at Miss Kim. We’ve had bibimbob in various iterations since we opened, but I was really liking the ones we had in early March. I’ve studied up on regional cooking in Korea, as well as Korean Buddhist cuisine. There were four different regional bibimbob on our menu, and I felt proud of them. Each offered unique flavors and stories, and they were so pretty to look at. There was a Jeonju bibimbob with beef tartare, and a North Korean-inspired one with pork belly, a mountain side bibimbob with potatoes. I found bibimbob a good microcosm of each region it represented. By serving them with local vegetables I felt like I was creating a kind of Korean food here in Michigan. I loved the drama of bringing them out all hot and crackling to the common table in the middle of our dining room, with guests oohing and aahing with their arrival. The warmth of the hot bibimbob and the aroma of sesame was intoxicating. There is nothing like a sizzling stone bowl full of deliciousness when the weather is chilly outside.

And then here we are. Seven months into the pandemic and we are still not doing indoor dining, and for now sticking to serving in compostable containers. We streamlined the menu, so while our guests still have options, the bibimbob is less of regional nature. I’ve been thinking though. There is no rule against sending a little of that warmth and conviviality home with our guests. We just need to get creative.

Enter our new bibimbob meal kit. The basic kit has our sesame rice, soft boiled eggs, banchan vegetables, gochujang sauce, and sesame seeds and scallions for garnish. Then you can add whatever that strikes your fancy! Tender roasted pork belly, garlicky grilled chicken, roasted mushrooms, soft braised tofu, potatoes for extra heartiness, even kimchi. Here’s what I do: I get the basic kit with mushrooms and a protein of my choice. I definitely make sure I add potatoes and napa cabbage kimchi. Once I’m home, I break out my favorite cast iron pan. Lightly oil the pan, place the rice in a thin layer, place my proteins next to the rice. Slowly warm it up for a little bit until the rice starts getting crispy, then I add the banchan vegetables, soft cooked eggs. Voila, present it to your family. Once appropriate numbers of pictures are taken for Instagram, then add the sauce and mix it all up for a warm hearty meal. Next day, add the leftovers and kimchi and turn it into kimchi fried rice! Two meals in one meal kit.

We miss you all a lot. My hope is that we’d bring a little bit of Miss Kim to your dining table with a hot sizzling cast iron pan standing in for a Korean stone bowl for your bibimbob. And when you choose your own bibimbob adventure, you’re creating your own Korean regional food, right on your table, right here in Michigan.

Order your Miss Kim Meal Kit today!

Category: Cooking

Miso butter is a scrumptious sauce you can put to work in wonderfully easy ways

miso butter

Looking for an easy way to make your home cooking meaningfully more interesting? Here’s a wonderful one—miso butter. Its roots are in Asian tradition; you can order it up every day of the week from Miss Kim’s kitchen, and it’s easy to put to work in yours. Miso butter sauce is a staff favorite and one of managing partner and chef Ji Hye Kim’s most compelling go-tos:

At Miss Kim, we use a variety of fermented sauces and pastes. They’re like magic potions packed with flavor, secret weapons for anyone who fancies themselves a good cook. We have what we call three Korean mother sauces: Korean soy sauce (ganjang), soy paste (doenjang), and chili paste (gochujang). Then we have fermented fish sauces: fermented anchovy sauce (myulchijut), fermented sand lance fish sauce (kanarijut), and fermented tiny whole shrimp (saewoojut). And last, but not least, we also have miso, the fermented Japanese soy paste.

Ji Hye’s not the only one who loves Miso. Sarah Jampel sang its praises in Bon Appétit 14 months before this pandemic set in: “Salty, earthy, and funky, miso is the fermented, versatile ingredient that we put in everything from pasta salad to apple pie.”

Ji Hye continues:

Have you seen the Netflix show and the cookbook by Samin Nosrat called Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat? Samin’s premise is that these four things—salt, fat, acid, and heat—are the element of good cooking. It’s a succinct and skillful way of looking at cooking. The fermented sauces (like fish sauces and soy pastes) are basically the element of salt. They bring deeper savoriness and complexity to each dish. The only thing is that for a novice, it may be slightly tricky to use as the saltiness and the flavor can be quite intense.

A good beginner sauce to bring “salt” would be miso. Here we use shiro miso, or white miso. It’s sort of a milder cousin of the robust and rustic Korean doenjang. Because it’s a bit less salty than doenjang and a bit rounder too, white miso is easier to play with and to incorporate into different dishes across cuisines, even in baking (think salty chocolate chip cookies or salty butterscotch bars).

Now, to be upfront about all this, I’m relatively new to cooking with miso. So if you’re like me, take note of what Ji Hye said: like a roux in Louisiana, the darker the miso, the bigger the flavor. Miso can move from white, to yellow, to red—all the way on to the biggest flavor, black miso. The lighter the miso, the less fermentation time, and a higher ratio of other grains like rice, barley, or soybeans. The white miso in the miso butter at Miss Kim is, as Ji Hye has said, is on the mellower end of the spectrum.

One great example of how we use it is our miso butter. Butter certainly does not have a very long tradition in Korea, only having been brought into the country mostly after the Korean War. But that doesn’t mean butter is not well embraced.  People quickly found out that fermented soy sauces and pastes are delicious paired with butter. In fact, pairing a dairy product with a fermented sauce can be quite tasty.

One of my favorite childhood meals is soy butter rice with an egg on top.  Korean teenagers often enjoy melted mozzarella on tteokbokki, made extra spicy with more gochujang and chili flakes. It was popularized in the U.S. by chef David Chang at his Momofuku restaurants. We pair the amazing local unsalted Calder Dairy butter with the white miso for its versatility and mildness, as well as for its lack of gluten.

Miso butter is great. (It is super easy to make—take 2 parts good unsalted butter and 1 part white miso, fold into each other until uniform in a mixing bowl at room temperature). It keeps well in the fridge.  It’s amazing on most things, but especially on vegetables. So good, that we have it all year at Miss Kim to serve on seasonal vegetables—asparagus and soft egg during spring; zucchini and pepitas during summer; slender Asian eggplants during late summer; butternut squash with toasted nuts during winter. At home, I spoon it over hot rice or noodles with a good pinch of black pepper for a quick and easy meal, like a grown-up buttered noodles.


As per what Ji Hye has said above, miso—and miso butter—are, like a great olive oil, best when added at the end of the cooking (too much cooking will kill the microorganisms active in the fermentation that help make it so magical). In addition to all those great ideas she just gave you, you can put it on green beans, (corn when it comes in later this summer), potatoes. It would be good on that farina I wrote about last week. Terrific melted over just-cooked fish. You could put it on toast, and then pile on a good bit of sautéed fresh spinach or zucchini. Ji Hye adds:

With our dining room closed and everyone spending more time at home, we’ve made some of our prepared sauces available for purchase and the fermented sauces make a prominent appearance. Along with the tteokbokki sauce (made with gochujang and used for our popular Street Style Tteokbokki and all our Bibimbob) and the galbi marinade (made with our house soy sauce, a wonderful marinade for meat, firm tofu, and vegetables), miso butter is on the menu and definitely one you should try. Go get it!

Order Miso Butter for curbside pick up at Miss Kim

Get Miss Kim’s recipe for miso butter and squash

Category: Cooking

***Special hours as of April 8***

 

Whether stocking up on staples to cook at home, or need a break from cooking, Zingerman’s is here for you!

 

Zingerman’s Delicatessen:
Pickup & local delivery for you or a loved one
11am-7pm every day

SANDWICHES
zingermansdeli.com
(734) 663-3354
Your favorite sandwiches, sides, salads & soups

GROCERIES
zcob.me/deligrocery
(734) 926-4005
Bread, meats, cheeses, coffee, tea & specialty foods

AT HOME MENU
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(734) 663-3400
Hearty breakfasts, comforting dinners, snacks & more, ready to warm in your own home (plus beer & wine!)

 

Miss Kim:
misskimannarbor.com
OPEN for takeout and delivery orders every day from 12pm to 8pm
Give us a call (734) 275-0099
Order to pick up at MissKimToGo.Square.Site or with the Snackpass app
Or Delivery with GrubHub or EatStreet

 

Zingerman’s Coffee and Candy Co.:
zingermanscoffee.com
Coffee, Toast, and Candy available for carryout and curbside pickup from 7am – 4pm daily!
Give us a ring at (734) 929-6060 to place a curbside order
Order pick up with the Snackpass app

 

Cream Top Shop:
Cheese, gelato, salads, and grilled sandwiches available for carryout 11a-6p daily.
We offer same-day delivery and free pickup for cheese, gelato, and more. See the menu at zingermanscreamery.com and order online here.

 

Zingerman’s Bakehouse:
Freshly baked bread and pastries, packaged soups, sandwiches, and salads ready for you to enjoy at home from 7am-7pm daily! Walk-in and curbside pick up. See the menu at zingermansbakehouse.com and call (734) 761-2095 to place your order!

 

Zingerman’s Roadhouse:
On the Road Delivery
Stay at home, we’ll come to you!
Lunch & Dinner – 6 mile radius
Online Menus:  www.zingermansroadhouse.com/menus
Every day  11am-8pm
(734) 663-3663

Roadshow Drive-Thru
Order ahead, drive on up, stay in your car!
Online Menus:  www.zingermansroadhouse.com/menus
(734) 663-3663
Every day 7am-8pm

 

Zingerman’s Cornman Farms:
Stock up your freezer with delicious, farm-fresh meals by Chef Kieron!
Order online: shop.zingermanscornmanfarms.com
Pick up: Sundays, 4-7pm at Zingerman’s Cornman Farms

 

Zingerman’s Mail Order:
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Shipping food everywhere in America, including meats, cheeses, chocolates and more.

***NEW!*** A weekly curated box of Zingerman’s goodies from our various businesses
Available at www.mercato.com/shop/zingshare

Category: Cooking

Domaine Carneros champagne with Parmigiano Reggiano

Sparkling Wine and the King of cheeses come together to make one terrific meal

I learned this dish, Champagne and Parmigiano Reggiano Risotto, about two dozen years ago from Laura di Collibiano, the woman who’s helped to revive the production of the terrific olive oil Tenuta di Valgiano estate in the western part of Tuscany. She makes it, she said, whenever she has “leftover champagne.” The flatness is important—if the sparkling wine is still freshly opened the heat of the alcohol will dominate the dish.

Although it can understandably feel intimidating to make risotto if you didn’t grow up with it, it’s actually not very hard to do. The chapter on Italian rice in Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating will walk you through the whole process in a great deal of easy-to-understand detail. The three-year-old Roncadella Parmigiano Reggiano we have on hand at the Deli would be ideal for it!

INGREDIENTS: 

4 cups chicken broth (you may not end up using it all)

2 1/2 cups flat champagne or flat sparkling wine 

Rind pieces from Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (optional)

2 tablespoons butter 

1 small onion, peeled and finely chopped (about 3/4 cup)

1 cup Italian rice, preferably Carnaroli

4 ounces Parmigiano Reggiano broken into 1/4-inch chunks

2 tablespoons finely chopped Italian parsley—rinsed and squeezed dry

Additional butter to taste

Sea salt to taste

Freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper to taste

4 tablespoons grated Parmigiano Reggiano, for serving

 

DIRECTIONS

Combine the chicken broth with 2 cups of the champagne. If working with an unsalted broth, add sea salt to taste. If you have some Parmigiano Reggiano rind on hand, put a piece into the liquid. Bring broth and champagne mixture to a boil, reduce heat only slightly and simmer for about 10 minutes. Reduce heat slightly again. 

Melt two tablespoons of butter in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Sauté the onion in the butter until soft and golden (don’t brown or the onion will become bitter).

Add the rice, stir well. Sauté for a couple of minutes until the rice is very hot and shiny. Add the 1/2 cup of champagne. Stir until it’s been absorbed by the rice. Add 1/2 cup of the broth-champagne mixture. Stir until absorbed. Repeat the process over and over again until the rice is tender but still firm. 

The risotto is done when the rice is al dente, about 18 minutes from when it first went into the pan. Add a touch more butter and one last 1/2 cup of the broth-champagne mixture. (If you’ve used up all the broth you can use hot water at this stage.) Stir, yet again, then remove from the heat. 

Add the parsley and Parmigiano pieces and mix well. The cheese should still be in chunks—don’t let it melt into the dish. Let stand for a minute. Add salt to taste.

Serve in warm bowls. Top with the additional Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and a generous dose of black pepper atop each bowl. Serves two generous main courses or four appetizers.

The whole dish can be made in under half an hour and you can probably play with your kids or do half your email while you’re stirring! The result is a great dinner! Because the two featured ingredients here—Parmigiano Reggiano and bubbly—are already so special, it’s a great way to impress company, or convey the import of any event. That said, you can just put it together for two on a Tuesday evening too! 

Category: Cooking

Nearly 90 years and 20 million copies later, Irma S. Rombauer’s self-published Joy of Cooking is a kitchen staple for generations of home cooks and professional chefs.

In November 2019, the 12th edition of the iconic cookbook Joy of Cooking was released after undergoing a thorough revision and expansion by Irma’s great-grandson, John Becker, and his wife, Megan Scott. They developed more than six hundred new recipes for this edition, tested and tweaked thousands of classic recipes, and updated every section of every chapter to reflect the latest ingredients and techniques available to today’s home cooks. Their strategy for revising this edition was the same one Irma employed: vet, research, and improve Joy’s legacy recipes while introducing new dishes, modern cooking techniques, and comprehensive information on ingredients now available at farmers’ markets and grocery stores. This latest version is a great addition to cookbook collections for Joy of Cooking fans and budding cooks.

Joy of Cooking book cover

Inspiring Joy

Here at Zingerman’s, where hundreds of people are living out their dreams of working with food every day as a career, it turns out that the Joy of Cooking has helped inspire some of those dreams.

“It was the first book I cooked from. I’d come home from school when I was in 5th grade, read the recipes and pick some to try, always something baked. I used my mother’s copy, which was printed in 1953. She got it as a sophomore in college when she got married and moved into her own apartment. She still has that book. When I visited her last week it was right above her refrigerator with a couple of her other favorites. This made me laugh. At 83 she doesn’t cook much anymore but there it was, Joy of Cooking, right within her reach in case she needed it. I continue to use it as my tried and true resource book for basic information. I have a much newer copy that I bought in 1988 when I moved into my first apartment after college.”
-Amy Emberling, Zingerman’s Bakehouse baker, author and co-managing partner

“Reading this book in junior high is part of what inspired me to be a chef. My favorite section of my 1960’s edition was ‘know your ingredients.’ I think it’s a foundational cookbook everyone should have.”
-Rodger Bowser, Zingerman’s Delicatessen chef and co-managing partner

“It has changed my life. I go there first for nearly every recipe. I love the pancake recipe. I’ve also made the doughnuts, and it felt so good to have done this thing that seemed so hard, but was actually pretty easy! The descriptions and depth of ‘why’ put into the book is what is missing from most recipe books.”
-Gary Mazzeo, Zingerman’s Web Designer

“The Joy of Cooking version my mom had included recipes for ostrich and alligator. As a child, this brought me a tremendous amount of joy (ha!). I never tried making them though.”
-Sara Molinaro, Zingerman’s BAKE! principal

“I grew up with this cookbook as a child. My amazing mother sent me a copy for my 20th birthday (37 years ago). I made my first Hollandaise sauce when I was probably 10 years old assisting my mom with a dinner party. To this day I still use the recipe for quick tapioca custard.”
-Amy Berger, Zingerman’s Bakehouse bread mixer

Joy Comes to Zingerman’s Bakehouse

When asked about his desire to visit Zingerman’s, John Becker said “We met Zingerman’s co-founder Ari Weinzweig eight years ago at one of the first food-industry events we ever attended. Knowing next to nothing about said industry, we asked him what Zingerman’s was all about, and his answers really piqued our interest. One of the things Megan and I first bonded over was cheese, and we vowed to make it to Zingerman’s if circumstances ever took us through Ann Arbor. Since then, we have befriended Ann Arbor expats where we live who have nothing but glowing things to say about the Deli–and the community of businesses that have grown from it.”


One of John and Megan’s few midwest stops on their national book release tour brings them to Ann Arbor and Zingerman’s Bakehouse. In fact, it will be their only Michigan appearance! The authors’ visit on February 25th, 2020 includes a talk and a demonstration. Copies of the new edition of Joy of Cooking will be available for purchase and to be signed by the authors. Tickets for the 2pm and 6pm events are available now. This is part of the “Brown Bag Talk” series hosted by BAKE! at Zingerman’s Bakehouse in the ZingTrain speaker and meeting space.

The interview will be followed by a cooking and baking demonstration. Head to the BAKE! classroom at Zingerman’s Bakehouse to watch the authors create four recipes chosen from the book: olive oil flatbread crackers, spicy chickpea soup, frico eggs (with crispy cheese), and chocolate swirl halvah (a sesame butter fudge). After the demonstration, there will be generous samples to share, and you’ll go home with the recipes.

Get yourself inspired in the kitchen again. Pick up a copy of the new Joy of Cooking for you and for the cooking curious youngsters (or adults) in your life. And be sure to grab a seat at one of these special Zingerman’s events before they sell out!

——

Reserve Your Seats!

The new Joy of Cooking will be available for purchase and signing at the event, or order your book now.