A beautiful and delicious bread to brighten your day on August 18 & 19

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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.