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!

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One of the best things I’ve gleaned from working with the organizational ecosystem metaphor over the last few years is the reminder that everything impacts everything else. Which, in turn, I’ve been reminded of again by the arrival in the ZCoB of the Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter (now available at the Roadhouse, Bakehouse, and Deli). The butter is so good that it has me thinking anew about a whole host of dishes I want to revisit, but this time, with butter. Last week I wrote about one of them—the spelt chocolate chip pancakes at the Roadhouse. This week it’s another—the upcoming Special Bake of Somodi Kalács!

The name, if you don’t yet know it, is pronounced sho-MO-dee-ka-loch. If you’re not yet familiar with it, it is a particularly tasty cinnamon swirl bread that’s made in the tradition of the Transylvanian town of Torockó. The town’s website says, “‘Somodi’ is the pride of Torockó gastronomy.” Amy Emberling, long-time co-managing partner of the Bakehouse and co-author of the books Zingerman’s Bakehouse and Celebrate Every Day, shares that,

Somodi Kalács originated some 400 years ago, when the village of Torockó was a prosperous iron ore and gold mining town. The lucrative metals trade gave villagers the means to afford cinnamon and sugar, which back then were a big luxury. It was, and continues to be, served for Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, and until the 20th century, it was the customary wedding cake.

Made with organic wheat flour, Michigan honey, fresh eggs, and a sweet, buttery, cinnamon sugar swirl, the smell is amazing. The taste is even better. Sophia Gottfried, writing last fall, talked about her first trip to Transylvania:

It was easy to fall in love with Transylvania. From the moment I clambered off the small, tinny plane from Budapest at the small regional airport in Marosvásárhely, I was taken by its beauty. Rows and rows of golden sunflowers, framed by the verdant hills and rugged peaks of the Apuseni Mountains rolled by as we headed for our bed and breakfast. … I wasn’t really focused on dessert. … That is, until I tried a pastry called somodi kalács … it’s as if cinnamon-raisin bread and babka had a baby. While every meal served by our grandmotherly hosts left us stuffed, I loved the folded bread so much that our guide got the inn to pack us a honey-glazed loaf to go.

It’s much the same story all the way here in Ann Arbor. Many customers tell me they buy two—one to eat a large part of in the car on the way home, the other for the family. The Kalács is wonderful ripped right off the loaf and enjoyed with coffee. The Kalács make a killer French toast. Or I guess we could call it Transylvanian toast. The Somodi Kalács will be available at the Bakeshop, Deli, and Roadhouse this coming weekend! Like I said, they sell quickly so hop on one of the websites or pick up the phone and place your order ASAP! The Somodi Kalács is particularly appropriate this weekend for Easter. As food writer Anna Howard Shaw says, “No Hungarian Easter is complete without Kalács!”