Tag: bakery

a pile of radishes

A super-simple spring pleasure to put on your table at home today

One of my favorite parts of spring eating is this amazingly simple and super delicious little “appetizer.” It’s a coming together of fresh vegetables and fresh bread, great butter, and a small sprinkle of sea salt, that wakes up taste buds and, as per what I wrote about in “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy,” conveys the beauty of what’s possible when we put together really great ingredients.

Radishes, right now, are really good around Ann Arbor! Pink and white, small and large, long and round, with their greens still attached or without, they’re hot, spicy, refreshing, lively, and lovely. When you eat a freshly dug, heirloom radish it can easily become the highlight of your meal. While supermarket ones tend towards tastelessness, really great local radishes are alive, crunchy, and spicy—sometimes so much so that they start to seriously clear your sinuses the way good Dijon mustard can do. Which makes complete botanical sense because, although few Americans are aware of radishes’ roots, they’re in the same spicy plant family as mustard and turnips.

An Easy Appetizer with Radishes

Radishes that are that good are excellent on their own. But they’re also amazing in this classic-in-France-but-barely-known-over-here combination of radishes, bread, butter, and sea salt. Because it’s so simple, you only want to do this with really great ingredients. (A supermarket version of it, to be honest, wouldn’t be worth the time it took to slice the radishes.) To put the dish together, start by cutting some thickish slices of the Bakehouse’s dark-crusted Country Miche (preferably from the large, 2-kilo loaf), True North, or Farm bread. Spread the bread with some good butter, like the Vermont Creamery cultured butter that wins raves pretty much every few minutes when folks eat it on the Bakehouse Artisan Bread appetizer. Slice your radishes. Lay them onto the buttered bread. Sprinkle on a good bit of the super delicate crystals of fleur de sel, then eat. That’s all you have to do.

You get the crunch and the spice of the radishes, offset by the light, lactic, lively creaminess of the cultured butter, set off against the dark, wheatiness of the Country Miche, all enhanced by the sporadic delicately crunchy high notes of the salt crystals. If you put them out on a nice plate or tray, everyone at the table can assemble the ingredients in their own way, which I’d argue, is part of the artistry of it all.

Want to make this a bit fancier? Slice the radishes partway through, stuff them with softened butter, and then dip the open end into the salt. That way folks can pick them up, pop them into their mouths, and enjoy the contrast of textures and flavors.

Buy some better butter

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Tag: bakery

Totally tasty toast with pimento cheese, black pepper, and olive oil!

Totally tasty toast with pimento cheese,
black pepper, and olive oil!

It’s not a well-known fact, but I’m pretty sure that one of the most delicious ways to have breakfast or lunch in the ZCoB is to come out to the Coffee Company (a few hundred feet up the walk from the Bakehouse). Hanging on the wall behind the counter, on the left, you’ll see what we call “The Big Brew Board”—it’s all the ways we offer our coffee varietals (and yes, every single method means a different flavor). To the right, about half its size in both height and length, is the toast menu! While the coffee is, of course, the main point, don’t miss those terrific (if seemingly peripheral) toasts! They are truly tremendous! Great breads from the Bakehouse, toasted and offered in eight different ways. Every single one of them is delicious!

This week, the Coffee Company toast that I have in my mind is the first one on the list—it’s what we’ve come to call over the years “The Caviar of the South.” It starts with a toasted slice of Roadhouse bread from the Bakehouse. If you don’t yet know that loaf, it’s long been one of my favorites. Though no other bakery I know of makes it, here in the ZCoB we’ve brought it center stage! Historically, it’s the old “thirded bread” of New England from the colonial era, a blend of rye, wheat, and corn, nearly all of which we mill right here at the Bakehouse (fresh milling means more flavor and better nutrition!). The bread has, as from its beginnings, had a small bit of molasses in it to sweeten it up just the slightest, barely perceptible bit.

When the toast comes out of the toaster, we spread on a whole bunch of the Creamery’s Pimento Cheese—“the Caviar of the South” so to speak! Then we pour on a little extra virgin olive oil, and last but not least, we add a nice grinding of the Zingerman’s 5-Star Pepper Blend. It’s a blend of five different black peppercorns, put together for us by our friends at Épices de Cru up in Quebec: Tellicherry Reserve (from the original home of pepper, Kerala, on the southwest coast of the country), Mlamala, Rajakumari (the last two from the Cardamom Hills in Southern India), Tellicherry Extra Bold, and Shimoga (from the Indian state of Karnataka.) It’s terrific! Buy a tin for your kitchen table!

“Caviar of the South” makes for a beautiful breakfast, lunch, late morning or late afternoon snack! The toasted grain flavors of the bread, the roundness of the olive oil, the creamy piquancy of the pimento cheese, set against the spiky pepperiness of the 5-Star Pepper … as we often say when we come out with combinations like this where every single element is awesome on its own, “What could be bad?”

Swing by soon! Sip coffee! Eat toast! Have a fun day!
Try this toast

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Tag: bakery

A beautiful and delicious bread to brighten your day.

A beautiful and delicious bread to brighten your day

One of my all-time favorite Bakehouse breads will be available this coming weekend, May 3 and 4, at the Bakeshop and Deli! Feel free to order ahead to be sure to get yours. I’ll be picking up a couple for our house!

James Beard once said: “Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.” This baguette from the Bakehouse supports his statement in a big way! Tear off a chunk and eat it, either as is, or spread with a bunch of that Vermont Creamery Cultured butter we’re carrying at the Bakehouse, Deli, and Roadhouse. Even the thought of it is making my morning, and giving me a good reason to be eager to get to the weekend!

Baking with chestnut flour is wholly uncommon in the 21st century, but it’s got a long history in Italy, France, and central Europe where chestnuts were used for all sorts of cooking. Chestnut flour was what people who couldn’t afford the more costly wheat would work with. It was popular in Liguria, the region of the Riviera, where Rocco and Katherine Disderide, the Italian immigrant couple who built the Deli’s building in 1902 came from. In that sense, I feel like the Bakehouse’s Chestnut Baguettes have come full circle.

To make the baguettes, we work with local chestnut flour from the folks at Treeborn, about half an hour or so west of here in Jackson. We blend that with freshly milled Michigan hard red spring wheat. No commercial yeast is used—just the flour, filtered water, and sea salt—to give us this naturally leavened baguette. The loaves are truly the color of chestnuts. The flavor is nutty, full, subtly sweet, with a long, lovely finish. I love it with the Creamery’s goat cheeses (the City Goats have been particularly great lately)! It’s wonderful, too, with the Creamery’s Manchester cheese. Toast and top with olive oil and fresh Bellwether ricotta. The toasting brings out the natural sugars in the grain in a wonderful way.

Unfortunately, chestnuts in the U.S. fell prey to a massive blight in the early years of the 20th century and were almost totally eradicated. Lucky for us, Michigan has been the center of the American chestnut revival over the last decade or so. The good news is that our state is currently the country’s leading producer of chestnuts. Maybe when the ZCoB hits its 100th anniversary in 2082, local license plates around these parts will say “The Chestnut State.” And, maybe, this beautiful baguette will become one of the state’s signature dishes—something travelers regularly take back with them to demonstrate what is possible when good people do good work in the world!
Pre-order for pick up at the Deli
P.S. If you want to make the baguettes at home, the recipe is in the Zingerman’s Bakehouse book on page 228.

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Tag: bakery

New Yorker Onion rolls from Zingerman's Bakehouse.

A Special Onion Rolls Bake for July 1st through 4th

Back in the early months of 1982, Paul and I drove all over the Detroit area together, going from one bakery to another, to try rye bread. The one we settled on, for whatever reasons of fate and good fortune, was the only one that would not deliver to Ann Arbor! We bought from them for 10 years until, in September of 1992, we opened the Bakehouse.

One of the positive side notes we’d never previously heard of was what they called New Yorkers. A regular item at the bakery we were buying from, I’ve still not found anyone outside the area who knows them, nor have I really found any history about them. Soft, square in shape, onion rolls, filled in the center with a generous dose of dark roasted onions and plenty of poppy seeds.

It’s not hard to imagine rolls like this as a part of the baking of poverty in Eastern European Jewish towns. Onions were readily available in northern climates and could be grown by almost anyone interested. Unlike more expensive spices like cinnamon, poppies grew locally and seeds were plentiful. It seems reasonable that Eastern European Jews who came to the U.S. would likely have brought them along. And they do seem to resemble the now famous onion rolls from the classic New York restaurant, Ratner’s.

This weekend we’ll be doing a Special Bake of these great old-school New Yorker Onion Rolls. Terrific just eaten out of hand. Great with lots of butter or the Creamery’s handmade Cream Cheese. I think they’re wonderful for egg sandwiches—either a fried egg, or scrambled eggs (even better still if you do it with the salami and eggs I wrote up a few months ago, or smoked salmon and eggs). Since I love poppy seeds, I might just spread on some cream cheese and then throw an extra handful of seeds in the middle before I eat.

I’m also thinking about toasting one, rubbing it with a bit of bacon fat, and then sprinkling on a bunch of Hungarian paprika! The New Yorkers are great for burgers or the BLTs that will soon be in season as well. In fact, thinking back to a story that I rarely remember to tell, making a BLT on a New Yorker was a regular morning treat for me back when we opened the Deli. Buy a bag of New Yorker Onion Rolls and start some family stories of your own!

New Yorker Onion Rolls will be at the Bakeshop July 1st through the 4th and at the Deli July 1st and 2nd.

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