Getting ahead of Rosh Hashanah’s arrival

Ready to kick the New Year off in good form? Here’s a new apple babka from the Bakehouse, made specifically for this year’s celebration of the Jewish High Holidays.

Babka is one more food that comes out of the culinary traditions of Eastern European Jews. I did not grow up with it at all but almost every Jewish person I know from the East Coast did. “Baba” is a reference to a Polish Easter cake, and it’s also a reference to “babushka,” or grandmother. It would likely have arrived in the Americas in the large waves of late 19th/early 20th century arrivals of Jewish immigrants.

Babka’s origin—where it is most consumed and associated with the culture—is in Belarus, the Baltics, Ukraine, and Russia. The old forms of babka were likely much larger, somewhere from the size of a modern-day panettone on up to a few feet high. The original name was likely “baba,” meaning grandmother. One theory says that with the modern era’s smaller sizes, the name shifted to the diminutive, “babka,” meaning “little grandmother.” Others say the tall shape they were made in resembles a grandmother’s pleated skirts. One origin theory says babka is indigenous to Ukraine. There it was part of an ancient fertility symbol used in the matriarchal system once in place in the region.

Babka at the Bakehouse

We’ve been happily making Chocolate Raisin Babka at the Bakehouse for many years. This new Babka celebrates the coming Rosh Hashanah season. Apples and honey are classic Eastern European eating for the holiday. Now we can eat them in the form of this beautiful baked good! It’s particularly tasty cut into slices, then browned lightly in butter. Great with gelato, more butter, or just as it is. The hygroscopic nature of the honey (it absorbs moisture over time) and the juiciness of the roasted apples make the dough a bit richer and moister. I can’t guarantee Eve’s Apple Babka will make the coming year culinarily better than the last few—I will ensure that at least you’ll be getting it off to an awesomely flavorful start!

The new Eve’s Apple Babka is available throughout the month of September at the Bakeshop, Deli, and Roadshow. It can also be shipped across the country from Mail Order.

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The Roadhouse will greet the Jewish new year with a special harvest dinner hosted by cookbook author Joan Nathan, the James Beard Award-winning tour-de-force of Jewish cooking, featuring Laurentide Winery. 

Reserve your seats before they sell out!

Join us for our Harvest Special Dinner #242 as we reap a lifetime of Joan’s stories and recipes for a very special Rosh Hashanah celebration. Joan will sow the seeds of the special holiday’s traditions, right here at Zingerman’s Roadhouse. This dinner is an excellent chance for those who grew up with the tradition to return to their roots, and for those who welcome fall as their own personal ‘fresh start’ every year to appreciate the spirit of the ancient holiday.

Joan Nathan: The Queen of American Jewish Cooking

In addition to being a James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, Joan is a University of Michigan alum. Help us welcome Joan back to Ann Arbor for an evening celebrating the bounty of her cookbook collection as we recreate several of her dishes. We can’t wait to taste the very recipes that have planted the seeds for Jewish cuisine with the “Queen of American Jewish cooking” (Houston Chronicle), herself.

Just as the biblical King Solomon cross-pollinated culinary cultures by sending out emissaries across ancient land and seas, “[Joan] Nathan serves as a modern emissary, gathering recipes and stories from all around the globe.” —Tim Carman, The Washington Post

Tradition, Taste and Terroir

The dinner will be complemented by expertly-paired wines from Laurentide Winery’s exquisite collection. Susan and Bill Braymer of Laurentide Winery will talk us through how the ancient flavors of their New World wines highlight the ancient flavors of Joan’s Old World dishes.

Taste the product of the Leelanau vineyard’s harvests, which are sown in rich soil layered with fossils and minerals left behind by the Laurentide glacier, which carved the geography of Michigan over 10,000 years ago.

We hope you join us for this one-of-a-kind event exploring tradition, taste, and terroir!

Here’s a peek at the menu:

Appetizers

Laurentide Pairing: Fume Blanc 2017

Hummus
With preserved lemon and cumin.

Gefilte Fish Mold
With horseradish and beet sauce.

Salad

Laurentide Pairing: Sauvignon Blanc

Carrot Mahammar
With dried clementines, ricotta, and fennel.

Entrées

Laurentide Pairing: Reserve Meritage 2016

Bene Israel Fish Curry
With fresh ginger, tamarind, and cilantro.

Moroccan Lamb Shanks
With caramelized onions and tanzeya, a dried fruit sauce.

Moroccan Tagine of Vegetables

Crunchy Saffron Rice

Dessert

Laurentide Pairing: Bubble de Bubble 2017

Dates in Brown Butter
With vanilla ice cream, date syrup, and halvah crumble.

Reserve your seats before they sell out!

Happy New Year!

Rosh Hashanah, known as the Jewish New Year, begins the eve of Sunday, September 29th at sundown and ends on the eve of Tuesday, October 1st, 2019. This holiday is a time for family, reflection, and food! Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the two “High Holy Days” in the Jewish religion.

Many communities celebrate with Rosh Hashanah dinners on both evenings. At these feasts, blessings are recited over a delicious variety of symbolic dishes. Sweet dishes are served to usher in a sweet year, and round foods, like Challah, to symbolize a complete year. The dishes can include such things as apples dipped in honey and challah bread. Fish is another symbolic dish, most typically gefilte fish, to represent abundance.

Zingerman’s offers a wide variety of dishes from both Ashkenazic (Eastern European) and Sephardic (Mediterranean) traditions to add to your celebratory table.

Here are some delicious offerings around the ZCoB for your celebration table:

Zingerman’s Delicatessen

Stop in to pick up ready-made treats, or place an order for a fully catered meal. Our Rosh Hashanah menu will be available for pick up starting at 1pm on September 29, 2019. From sweet carrot tzimmes to beef brisket and noodle kugel, the Deli has a variety of great dishes and desserts to help you sweeten up the new year. Here are just a few of our favorites from Zingerman’s Catering and Events:

• Handmade baked knishes—Tender, baked pastry wrapped around savory fillings, like potato, chicken, kasha, and pastrami.
• Matzo balls—Homemade from matzo meal, fresh eggs, and chicken schmaltz. Perfect addition to our chicken broth, made daily in our kitchen from free-range, Amish-raised chickens!
• Vegetable Tagine—A North African favorite of slowly simmered vegetables, seasoned with tajine spices from Épices de Cru.

(And don’t forget the Deli’s annual Honey Sale. Keep reading to learn more!)

Zingerman’s Bakehouse

Leaven up your celebration with treats from the Bakehouse—we’ve got some great special items to wish you a Shana Tova U’Metukah—a good and sweet new year!

• Challah Turbans—Our fresh egg and clover honey bread in the traditional round shape for the new year. Available 9/6 – 10/8, with or without dark rum-soaked raisins.
• More Rockin’ Challah—Traditional Moroccan challah, a beautiful 5-strand braid brushed with honey and topped with poppy, sesame, and anise seeds. Available 9/26 – 10/8.
• Bumble Honey Cake—A dense spice cake made with buckwheat honey, brewed tea, almonds, and golden raisins. Available 9/26 – 10/8.
• Babka—A traditional Jewish loaf of sweet bread, its name means “little grandmother” in Yiddish. It all started when nuts and seeds were twisted up with scraps of challah dough on Shabbat, then it evolved into the modern-day chocolate version when Jews arrived in New York. We start with a rich, buttery brioche dough, paint it with dark chocolate, sprinkle it with chocolate crumble and orange-syrup-soaked raisins. Available Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays in September.
• Rugelach: One of our best-selling Jewish baked goods. These are royally good cookies. Cream cheese pastry folded up with special fillings, sprinkled with sugar and baked until golden brown. Try them all: apricot, raspberry, currant walnut, date, or sesame almond. If you’ve not yet tried one of these traditional Jewish treats, now is the time. Available every day in September.

 Zingerman’s Candy

Creating old-fashioned sweets by hand, we know the huge difference in flavor you get from great ingredients when candy is sold fresh after it is made!

• Dark Chocolate Sesame Halvah—big, delicious sesame flavor. This special version is dipped in dark chocolate, making it extra good!
• Rosh Hashanah Superzzang—Our ZzangⓇ candy bar, but so much bigger and with special Rosh Hashanah packaging. It makes a great host gift!
  

HONEY

A clean slate, a fresh start. There’s no time like the New Year for a healthy dose of optimism. When it comes to Rosh Hashanah, that hopefulness is symbolized by one of our favorite things: sweets! Classic sweet dishes and treats, from raisin-laced kugel to every kind of rugelach, are favorites at New Year celebrations, the idea being that with every heavenly bite, prospects for the future become sweeter and, well, sweeter.  

One of the best-known examples of this High Holiday tradition is the custom of dipping apples in honey. But most of the best cooks and hosts we know don’t stop there—they make sure that honey is infused throughout their Rosh Hashanah meals. Of course, at Zingerman’s, we’re also big proponents of letting the honey (Tupelo, Idaho Snowberry, Scottish Heather—we love ‘em all) flow.

It’s really amazing how many dishes honey can find its way into. Vegetables, like carrots and turnips, can be glazed for a crowd-pleasing side. Even meat dishes can get the honey treatment. Honey-baked chicken is fantastic and easy to pull off, plus you can dress it up with herbs and root veggies. Zingerman’s co-founder, Ari Weinzweig, shared that one of his Rosh Hashanah favorites is Lamb and Honey Stew, a staple of the deli’s special Rosh Hashanah catering menu. The Sephardic dish (see the recipe on pg. 378 of Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating if you’d like to make it yourself), isn’t too sweet, with the honey and saffron complementing each other in a deep, delicious way.

For Rosh Hashanah, challah takes on a round shape to represent the cycle of life, and it gets a little sweeter than usual, too, since, as with the apples, dipping challah in honey is also a tradition. The ones we make at Zingerman’s Bakehouse (can you believe we sell 2,000 of them every New Year?!) are brushed with clover honey, and we even make one with rum-soaked raisins. If you’re a home baker, come into the Deli and sample a few different jars to turn up the flavor on your own challah this year.

And if your sweet tooth is still crying out for more, we’ve got two words for you: honey cake. It’s the most enduring of traditional Rosh Hashanah desserts—there’s evidence that it’s been around since the 12th century! Spiced, rich, and nostalgic, it’s no wonder that it’s lasted so long, or that so many bakers hold fast to their beloved recipes. We take ours pretty seriously, too. We use buckwheat honey to give it big, bold flavor. Kind of like an exclamation mark at the end of the meal.

And, hey, if you want to add a little oomph to your apples and honey display, Ari has a tip for you: make it a spread. Lay out a few different varieties of apples and a couple of types of honey. “It makes for great conversation. Plus, they’re delicious!” he says.

Don’t miss out! 20% Off ALL Honey at Zingerman’s Delicatessen 9/17-10/1, 2019

From a mild and delicate Acacia honey to deep, dark, bold flavors like Fir Tree or Corbezzolo honey, we can help you find the perfect pairing for any dish or flavor preference. Come in and taste through a few to select your personal favorite!

GEFILTE FISH

Twice a year, homemade gefilte fish appears in the Deli case. Ari says that he is always happy to see it because it brings back big memories for him! Food critic Mimi Sheraton says it’s “part of the holy trinity of Jewish holiday eating: chicken soup, chopped liver, gefilte fish.” Ari’s grandmother made the first two every Friday night for dinner, and gefilte fish was on the menu for every Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. 

Although gefilte fish has become a big part of Jewish holiday eating over the centuries, it isn’t actually a formal or required part of religious observance. It’s definitely not Biblically-based. That said, there is an old Jewish saying: “Without fish, there is no Sabbath.” This was also true for all the big holidays, including Rosh Hashanah—fish of some sort was often part of any important celebration. Back in the 19th century, shtetl fish was bought live at the market (in fact, Ari’s great-grandfather was a fish seller in his hometown of Vawkavysk in Belarus).

The gefilte fish tradition is also based in the poverty of Eastern European Jewish society. Tradition dictated that everyone should have a piece of fish on the Sabbath or holidays, but many people couldn’t afford it. Gefilte fish made it possible to serve a small piece of fish to everyone in the family. Also, Jewish law prohibits any work on the Sabbath or High Holidays, and it was determined many centuries ago that pulling bones out of fish was considered “work.” That meant that any fish dish eaten on the Sabbath or High Holidays (like Rosh Hashanah) had to be boneless. Hence, gefilte fish—fish that was boned, ground, and poached to make for easy, work-free consumption.

While we know it gets a bad rap at times, gefilte fish is GOOD! It’s truly an appetizer that everyone could and should try. Made with fresh lake fish and spiced with sea salt and white pepper—the fish we use is ground in the Deli kitchen, then poached in homemade fish broth. Over the years, co-managing partner Rodger Bowser and the Deli kitchen crew have gotten really good at making this traditional Jewish specialty. Buy it by the piece and serve it with the Deli’s housemade prepared horseradish (be careful—it’s hot!).

Check out the Deli’s entire Rosh Hashanah menu! 

And don’t forget: 20% Off ALL Honey at Zingerman’s Delicatessen from 9/17 to 10/1, 2019!

Rosh Hashanah begins tonight! Let us help you celebrate the new year. Here are some delicious offerings around the ZCoB.

Zingerman’s Deli

We’ve got a full Rosh Hashanah menu, available for pick up starting today at noon. From an assortment of Zingerman’s Bakehouse challah to beef brisket to baked knishes, the Deli’s got a variety of great dishes and desserts to help you sweeten up the new year!

And don’t forget out annual Honey Sale. To make things extra sweet this year, the Deli’s entire honey selection is 20% off until September 24th.

Zingerman’s Bakehouse

It’s not a celebration without treats from the Bakehouse, and we’ve got some great special items for the holiday. Available September 15th thru 30th.:

Challah Turbans—Our fresh egg and clover honey bread in the traditional round shape for the new year. Available with or without dark rum-soaked raisins.

More Rockin’ Challah—Traditional Moroccan challah, a beautiful 5-strand braid brushed with honey and topped with poppy, sesame, and anise seeds.

Honeycake—A dense spice cake made with buckwheat honey, brewed tea, almonds and golden raisins.

Babka—A traditional Jewish loaf of sweet bread, its name means “little grandmother” in Yiddish. It all started when nuts and seeds were twisted up with scraps of challah dough on Shabbat, then it evolved into the modern day chocolate version when Jews arrived in New York. We start with a rich buttery brioche dough, paint it with dark chocolate, sprinkle it with chocolate crumble and orange-syrup-soaked raisins. Available daily in September.

Zingerman’s Candy

We’ve got lots of special confections just in time for the holiday!

Dark Chocolate Covered Matzo—We drench our matzoh in dark chocolate and then we sprinkle it with sea salt.

Dark Chocolate Sesame Halvah—Our Sesame Halvah has big, delicious sesame flavor. This special version is dipped in dark chocolate, making it extra good!

Rosh Hashanah Superzzang—Our original Zzang bar, but so much bigger and with special Rosh Hashanah packaging. It makes a great host gift!

We know you’ve been waiting for this, and they’re finally here: Holiday Challah!! Now through October 12, at the Bakehouse and the Deli, you’ll find challah small and large, plain and rum soaked, and of course, chocolate. Don’t forget our More Rockin’ Challah, a traditional five-strand braid topped with poppy, sesame, and anise seeds. So good!

Come in for a taste.

A clean slate, a fresh start. There’s no time like the New Year for a healthy dose of optimism. When it comes to Rosh Hashanah, that hopefulness is symbolized by one of our favorite things: sweets! Classic sweet dishes and treats, from raisin-laced kugel to every kind of rugelach, are favorites at New Year celebrations, the idea being that with every heavenly bite, prospects for the future become sweeter and, well, sweeter.

One of the best known examples of this High Holiday tradition is the custom of dipping apples in honey. But most of the best cooks and hosts we know don’t stop there—they make sure that honey is infused throughout their Rosh Hashanah meals. Of course, at Zingerman’s, we’re also big proponents of letting the honey (Tupelo, Idaho Snowberry, Scottish Heather—we love ‘em all) flow.

It’s really amazing how many dishes honey can find its way into. Vegetables, like carrots and turnips, can be glazed for a crowd-pleasing side. Even meat dishes can get the honey treatment. Honey-baked chicken is fantastic and easy to pull off, plus you can dress it up with herbs and root veggies. One of Ari’s favorites is Lamb and Honey Stew, a staple of the deli’s special Rosh Hashanah catering menu. The Sephardic dish (see the recipe on pg. 378 of Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating if you’d like to make it yourself), isn’t too sweet, with the honey and saffron complementing each other in a deep, delicious way.

For Rosh Hashanah, challah takes on a round shape to represent the cycle of life, and it gets a little sweeter than usual, too, since, as with the apples, dipping challah in honey is also a tradition. The ones we make at the Bakehouse (Can you believe we sell 2,000 of them every New Year?!) are brushed with clover honey, and we even make one with rum-soaked raisins. If you’re a home baker, come into the deli and sample a few different jars to turn up the flavor on your own challah this year.

And if your sweet tooth is still crying out for more, we’ve got two words for you: honey cake. It’s the most enduring of traditional Rosh Hashanah desserts—there’s evidence that it’s been around since the 12^th century! Spiced, rich, and nostalgic, it’s no wonder that it’s lasted so long, or that so many bakers hold fast to their beloved recipes. We take ours pretty seriously, too. We use buckwheat honey to give it big, bold flavor. Kind of like an exclamation mark at the end of the meal.

And, hey, if you want to add a little oomph to your apples and honey display, Ari has a tip for you: make it a spread. Lay out a few different varieties of apples and a couple of types of honey. “It makes for great conversation. Plus, they’re delicious!” he says.

Our honey sale starts today and lasts two whole weeks (September 26 – October 9)! Get 20% off all honey at the Deli—we have a big selection, so come and have a taste! Perfect timing for Rosh Hashana or a fall pantry stock up! Also check out our special Rosh Hashanah Catering menu here.