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.

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!

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Reserve Your Seats!

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

There’s always a lot of excitement going on at Zingerman’s, and this week did not disappoint. BAKE!, our hands-on teaching bakery, just release its highly anticipated calendar of classes for the new semester through January 2019—that includes our super-popular Fancy Schmancy Cookies sessions and two NEW classes. Some have already sold out!

Our Fancy Schmancy Cookies 2018 edition will feature four new sweet holiday creations, including Buckwheat Sablé, a traditional French cookie made with buckwheat flour that we’ll cut into festive shapes and drizzle with vanilla glaze; Merry Masala cookies that plays on a Gujarati snack from India (we’ll make a grated carrot cookie that’s subtly sweetly spiced and dip ’em in white chocolate); the romantic Sarah B’s, a chocolate-dipped, bite-sized almond meringues cookie topped with french butter cream and sea salt; and Passionfruit Einkorn Bars with a flaky pastry crust made from an ancient wheat variety and layered with exotic passion fruit custard.

“I’m impressed that in our eleventh year of Fancy Schmancy cookies, I’m so excited about the cookie line up our instructors and bakers came up with!” says Sara Whipple, Zingerman’s Bakehouse Marketing Manager, adding that some customers have been calling since April inquiring about when they can start signing up for our December cookie classes.

Many of our students sign up for Fancy Schmancy year after year, and over half of this year’s classes have already sold out (We know! It’s crazy). Our guests tell us they love that the recipes change for every edition—and because each student goes home with eight dozen cookies, many participants take the impressive goodies they make to holiday parties and give them as gifts. It’s also a holiday tradition for some, who come back with the same group of friends or family member—and some add more people to their cookie crews each season.

“I have enjoyed so many classes over the years with your wonderful instructors,” says BAKE! student Robin. “We are hooked on Baking with Zing.”

We’re offering other holiday dessert classes, too, including Buche de Noel and Holiday Sweet Breads, where we make our guest favorite Bakehouse item German Stollen (pictured above)—we sell a ton of stollen at the Bakehouse and through Mail Order every holiday season. Imaging being able to present your friends and family with one you made yourself! Like all our classes, you’ll leave these session with recipes, the knowledge to recreate them at home, everything you make, and great coupons to Zingerman’s and other local businesses.

Entirely new is our Showstopping Dessert: Gateau St. Honore class. If you’ve never heard of this over-the-top French delight, it’s a harmonious marriage of cream puffs and a napoleon. While it’s an absolutely delicious treat, what’s really cool about this class is the myriad of classic techniques that you’ll learn from taking the course and be able transfer to other recipes. This dessert combines puff pastry, pâte à choux (the main component of cream puffs), pastry cream, whipped cream and caramelized sugar. It’s a real tour de force and includes the building block for so much deliciousness.

It’s not all about the holidays at BAKE! though. We are also offering Paczki & Doughnuts, so you can start your own Fat Tuesday tradition or just make ’em whenever the craving hits. You’ll learn how to fry doughnuts properly to keep them light, fluffy and scrumptious. And of course, we’ll be teach all the classics, too, from Cinn-ful Cinnamon Rolls and Signature Sour Cream Coffee Cake to Ooh La La Croissants and Baking Pies a Plenty.

Happy baking and making!

BAKE! classes sell out fast and some are already gone. Check out the list of classes for the new semester on our website.

Baking can be challenging—even for professionals. Our BAKE! class instructors, who’ve helped countless bakers improve their skills with our hands-on baking classes over the years, were brave enough to share their baking mishaps with us. You’re not alone!

Read Carefully and Double Check
“I was trying a new recipe for a syrup based amish pie. Something went REALLY wrong! I think I added a leavener that was not supposed to be in there. When I put the pie in the oven, the filling started bubbling like lava and then foamed up and poured all over the bottom of my oven. It started a fire and the house was filled with smoke. It took me months to get my oven clean!” – Arie

Stay Focused
“I messed up many recipes as a young teenager because I loved to talk on the phone and bake at the same time! Yes, it’s a bad idea. It made me the master of leaving things out, putting ingredients in twice and sometimes only doubling half the ingredients in a recipe. Disaster! These days I rush too much…and then things are not disasters but aren’t quite perfect and the process isn’t so fun.” -Amy

Know Your Tools
“I broke a mercury thermometer in the sugar syrup for making Italian buttercream, before I had ANY IDEA what I was doing!” -Sara

Use Great Ingredients and Taste Before You Bake
“The night before Thanksgiving years ago, I was making a pumpkin pie. I made a crust from scratch and was very proud of it. I had to use an off brand pumpkin puree because the store was out of the good stuff. I had it all mixed up and poured it in the shell. Then I tasted the filling and found it DISGUSTING! I tried pouring it out of the shell, but made a mess. I was so mad I just tossed the whole thing, went to the store, and ended up buying a pre-made pie shell and filling.” -Nikki

It Takes Practice
“I once tried to make Cardinal Slice but I didn’t know what I was doing. My meringue wasn’t stiff enough, my ladyfingers were extremely sloppy as I did not know how to pipe them. The whole thing was a mess!” -Sue

“A labor of love.” That’s how Robyn Eckhardt, describes the process of producing her new cookbook Istanbul and Beyond. A journalist by trade, Robyn and her husband, photographer David Hagerman (who took the gorgeous photos for the book), traveled throughout Turkey for 16 months in search of the country’s best food—along the way they met plenty of generous locals who invited them into their kitchens to share meals and recipes.

Istanbul and Beyond, as the name suggests, covers more than just the food found in Instanbul, Turkey’s cultural capital. At her recent demo classes at BAKE! (the hands-on teaching bakery at Zingerman’s Bakehouse), Robyn explained that she and David wanted to go “beyond” Istanbul in very specific ways. For one, they wanted to challenge preconceived notions that Turkish food is just one thing, instead linking the country’s diverse cuisines to their respective regions. It was also their desire to take their readers beyond the parts of Turkey that are most commonly visited by foreign tourists and Turks, alike.

The book, and Robyn’s demo, spanned from the Black Sea to the Syria-adjacent Hatay region to Hakkari, which borders Iran and Iran. Each area has it’s own culinary traditions, reliant on topography and what is able to be grown and produced locally. Near the Black Sea, for instance, the climate is similar to that of the American Pacific Northwest with its cool, damp climate and lush greenery. Fish is the main protein here, but cows also flourish thanks to large grazing pastures, making dairy a big part of the diet. Corn is also a popular staple, and dishes like Cheese Fondue with Corn Flour are popular in the eastern Black Sea Region.

Fields of hazelnuts grow in the Giresun, a Black Sea city known as Turkey’s “hazelnut capital”, and Kadayif Cake is a result of the abundance. “Almost every pastry chef in Giresun has a version of this cake, and they serve it with dense Turkish ice cream,” says Robyn.  The dessert is a mixture fine pastry threads called kadayif, skinned hazelnuts, milk,  butter. It’s drenched in a simple syrup while still hot, resulting in a moist, not-too-sweet treat.

While cows are plentiful in the north, the southeastern Hakkari has jagged hills and mountainsides perfect for goats and sheep. There’s also not a lot of farming land available, so foraging for greens and the plethora of herbs that pop up in spring is necessary. Robyn represented the cuisine of this region with Meatballs with Pumpkin & Spice Butter—the meatballs, which are lighter than you might expect, are made with ground lamb, rice, minced onion, and a bit of ground dried chiles and dried purple basil. Tomato paste gives the broth depth, and the sweet mildness of the pumpkin cools down the slight spiciness of from chile. This dish was a favorite.

The most common bread in the east and southeast is pide, a thick, chewy bread that’s shaped into circles and ovals or longer, thinner shapes. Bakers add their own flourishes to the bread, decorating it by pressing on it with their fingertips and topping it with sesame or poppy seeds. It’s used for dipping and served with meze.

Perhaps the most surprising of the dishes was the delicious Sun-Dried Tomato and Pomegranate Salad from the Hatay province. Visually stunning, the salad starts with a layer of sun-dried tomatoes, which are topped with pomegranate, red bell pepper, fresh mint and salty white cheese, like Bulgarian feta or ricotta salata. The dressing is a pomegranate molasses that’s poured on right before serving. Robyn says she got the recipe from a friend, who serves it as a Hatay-style breakfast, but she thinks the vibrant red and green might make a nice Christmas dish.

Want to add more great recipes like this to your repertoire? Take a BAKE! class! Check out the full schedule here. And don’t miss another great guest chef—sign up for the BAKE! email class announcements.

We teach hundreds of classes every year at BAKE!, but there’s no denying it: it’s really exciting when a big-time chef comes around. Our latest culinary star visitor was Barbara Lynch, the Boston-based chef who owns Barbara Lynch Gruppo, an eight-restaurant empire. She’s also a James Beard Award winner and the only American woman to hold the title of Grand Chef Relais & Chateau. She’s got a full plate.

While introducing Barbara at her recent BAKE! cooking demo (she also cooked a special fish dinner at the Roadhouse!), Bakehouse managing partner Amy Emberling remarked, “You must have more energy than I can possibly imagine!” The chef’s response was a simple, “Yeah.”

Barbara’s no-nonsense attitude—and great memory—is part of what made her class so fantastic. As she demoed some of her signature dishes, she regaled us with some seriously cool stories (some of which appear in her new memoir Out of Line), including meeting Julia Child while playing hooky in high school and then later crank calling the beloved chef (it wasn’t intentional—she just got too scared when Child answered). The two eventually connected in a meaningful way once Barbara started cooking professionally. She even got to eat chocolate cake with her idol, a memory she really treasures.

One of the most fascinating things we learned during the class, which started with delicious bite-sized Tomato Tarte Tatin, was that Barbara, who is renowned worldwide, is a actually self-trained chef. “I read a lot of cookbooks,” she told us, citing Alain Ducass as an early influence. “I have no college, no business background.” She does admit to having a thriving bookie business for a while, though.

Her Poulet au Pain was the most memorable dish of the day. Quite simple a whole chicken wrapped and baked in bread dough. Fresh rosemary livens up the flavor. Michelle Carter, the Executive Chef of Barbara Lynch Gruppo, sliced into the golden brown bread to reveal juicy chicken and a fragrant mirepoix, a sauteed medley of carrots, onions and celery. While demonstrating her process, Barbara broke off a piece of the dough to allow us to see that it, in fact, was a bread dough rather than a difficult pastry dough. She encouraged any intimidated would-be home cooks that overworking the dough isn’t an issue.

Barbara finished the class with her Creamy Vanilla Bread Pudding, which is a Lynch family favorite as well as a signature dish at her restaurant No 9 Park. Barbara advised us to double the vanilla in this and all recipes and admitted that she doesn’t particularly enjoy baking. “I hate the feel of sugar on my hands,” she told us.

When one audience member marveled at how delicious and seemingly simple the recipe was, Barbara summed up her take on home cooking. “I want to take the mystery out of cooking because it shouldn’t be hard,” she said, explaining that she does her best to simplify the process for the everyday kitchen. “Why would you want to cook like a chef at home?”

Sounds fun, right? Want to take a class at BAKE? Check out the schedule! Want to meet other great chefs like Barbara? Sign up for the BAKE! enews to keep up with special appearances.

Have you heard the great news? Just last week, BAKE!, Zingerman’s Bakehouse’s hands-on teaching bakery,  released a whole new schedule of classes for August 2017-January 2018. There’s already been quite the frenzy—almost all 55 of our Fancy Schmancy Holiday Cookie classes have sold out and many others are going fast, too!

We’re also offering a slew of classes we’ve never offered before. “After having very few new classes for the last year, we’re rolling out a busy fall with about a dozen new choices. Our Principal, Sara Molinaro, is a bread gal, and she’s developed three new bread classes!” says Bakehouse co-managing partner Amy Emberling. Naturally Leavened Breads 2.0, which will introduce students to the liquid levain method, is one of those classes, and Amy thinks it will be an enriching experience.

Here are some other fantastic new classes you won’t want to miss:

Mexican Treats: Learn to make conchas, the panaderia staple that look like sea shells, and cochinitos de piloncillo, pig shaped soft cookies sweetened with spiced sugar cane syrup. We’ll also demonstrate churros, a piped and fried cinnamon sugar pastry. Spots still available—sign up here! 

Signature Sour Cream Coffee Cake: “For the first time in years we’ll be teaching our sour cream coffeecake recipe. Students have wanted this class for a long time and we’ve been waiting until the Bakehouse cookbook was published before teaching it regularly. Now’s the time!” says Amy.

Learn the recipe for our signature sour cream coffee cake with ribbons of cinnamon brown sugar and toasted walnuts. It’s a Bakehouse classic that graces the cover of our new cookbook (being released October 2017), not to mention our most popular mail order gift. In class you’ll also make the lemon poppyseed version. The sour cream coffee cake batter is a scrumptious start that can easily be dressed up with other mix ins at home. This is sure to be a treasured recipe in your house for years to come! Spots still available—sign up here!

Amy & Franks Favorites: Only two dates! After 25 years in business it will be impossible to choose favorites, but they’ll try. To celebrate the release of the new Zingerman’s Bakehouse cookbook (October 2017), Bakehouse owners and bakers Amy Emberling and Frank Carollo will guide you through making a couple of their favorite recipes (It’s the first time they’ve taught together in years!). Then they’ll sign your personal copy of our new 240 page book complete with Bakehouse stories and more than 60 recipes. Spots (but not many!) still available—sign up here!

And don’t forget our classic classes, like Mambo Italiano: Italian Breads, Detroit Classics, Pizza: the Other American Pie, Bake Me a Cake, and more. We’re not kidding, though, sign up soon because they sell out!

See the complete BAKE! schedule by class name.

See the complete BAKE! schedule by class date.