Tag: ZINGERMAN’S BAKEHOUSE

The cookie corollary to an “espresso shot” of sesame

Sometimes we work hard to craft a new product so it can make a big impact almost immediately. Other times, we start something for a good reason (like we love it and think it’s terrific) but don’t actually expect it to garner much attention. And then, suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, it turns out to be one of the tastiest things we make!

The latter is the lead-in to these terrifically tasty new Miso Tahini Cookies in the Bakeshop! During the time we’ve been making them, they have probably gotten the least attention of all of the many lovely cookies in our famous Fancy Schmancy class, a class we offer seemingly countless times as we come ever closer to the holidays. While the public at large has pretty much passed these cookies by, Bakehouse co-managing partner Amy Emberling and I are both of the opposite ilk. We love them! They’re delicate, delicious, slightly sweet, just the tiniest bit savory. They’re also very full-flavored, with a lovely, complex flavor and a long, delicate finish. Truth be told, I could eat a lot of them! Man, oh man! So, so good!

The tahini in the cookies comes from the three sisters who started and run Soom Foods in Philadelphia. New York Magazine deemed Soom’s tahini the best of the best back in 2019, and it’s also been praised by the New York Times, Food & Wine, and Bon Appétit. They use only high-quality Humera sesame seeds from Ethiopia. The quality of the tahini, of course, takes the cookies to the next level.

The cookies are crafted by mixing butter, brown sugar, white miso paste, and tahini with eggs, vanilla, and flour. Each cookie is garnished with both black and white sesame seeds. Put these little treats out after dinner, enjoy one with your morning espresso, or have one with a cup of the current Roaster’s Pick from the Coffee Company, the Honduras Pablo Paz. Great, too, with a dab of good jam on top—try ’em with that wonderful Apricot Jam from Olbia I opined about so enthusiastically week before last!

Check out our cookie lineup

Flaky, filled Hungarian pastry for breakfast, lunch, or dinner

The Russian theme I mentioned above is one terrific option for a winter wedding. You could also consider a winter wedding themed around the beauty of Budapest and traditional Hungarian culture. In which case, you should definitely consider including the Bakehouse’s flaky, beautiful, delicious, hand-rolled rétes! When I think of winter eating here in the ZCoB, Potato Bacon Rétes comes most quickly to mind! I love it!

Rétes is the Hungarian word for what many of us in the Western world know as strudel. Rétes comes from the Hungarian word réteges, meaning “layered.” Potatoes, like paprika, are not native to Hungary. They came from the Western Hemisphere as part of the colonial excursion that came to be known as the Columbian Exchange, at the end of the 15th century and into the 16th century. Potatoes became important in Hungarian cooking only when the government ordered people to grow them after famine led to widespread hunger from 1770 to 1772.

Our rétes are made with Nueske’s applewood smoked bacon; the sweet smokiness of the bacon offsets the creamy texture of the pretty much perfectly cooked potatoes and the flakiness of the delicious pastry that the Bakehouse staff stretches incredibly thin. Amy says of the strudel-making process: “The dough is one of those wonders of the baking world that is rewarding to make. It’s like a magic trick!” 

The Potato Bacon Rétes is terrific for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It’s easy to bring to work for lunch, or you can even eat in the car while you’re driving. Tammie and I enjoy it at our house for dinner once a week or so, usually accompanied by soft scrambled eggs. When she first moved here from San Francisco 15 years ago, she told me that “the rétes are like God’s gift to the Bakehouse!” 

You can get the rétes every day—while supplies last—at the Bakeshop on Plaza Drive and at the Deli downtown. FYI, if you’re feeding a family, you can also buy a whole, unbaked frozen “log” of them to finish off at your house. I guarantee your whole home will be filled with wonderful aromas, and in about 50 minutes, you’ll have a marvelous meal! Either way, Potato Bacon Rétes will make your entrée into 2026 all the more flavorful!

Reserve a rétes

P.S. If you want to make these marvelous rétes at home, you can find the recipe in the Zingerman’s Bakehouse cookbook (it’s on page 237). Or, if you want a hands-on lesson in the craft of making rétes, check out the classes at BAKE!

Great gluten-free eating to welcome the New Year!

One of my favorite Bakehouse sweets just came back on the newly released January specials list!

Nina’s ’Nolis are named for one of our longtime Bakehouse managers, Nina Plasencia. The Roadhouse, as I mentioned above, celebrated its 22nd anniversary this year. Nina started one year earlier. She’s quietly been a big part of making the Bakehouse what it is for all this time, so naming these incredible little cookies for her is a small but fun way to honor her wonderful work.

The cookies are made with ground almonds and hazelnuts, some great butter, and a touch of honey, and they’re garnished lovingly with toasted pine nuts. It just so happens that Nina’s ’Nolis are naturally gluten-free because they have no flour. In Italy, pine nut cookies are a long-standing staple. They make a great accompaniment for your morning espresso, or for a delicate dessert after dinner!

Longtime Zingerman’s supporter Carol Field, who wrote The Italian Baker and a host of other great books, says that pine nut cookies like this have been eaten since Roman times. Amy Emberling, co-managing partner at the Bakehouse, says, “We’ve made them off and on over the years, and for a variety of reasons, I think they’re going to take off this time. They get positive reviews from practically everyone. Delicious! Traditional! Can’t beat a combo like that.” I think she’s right—they really are wonderful! Need more convincing? On Food52, Food Blogga wrote:

Biscotti may be the stars of Italian cookies but pignoli are the talented understudies just waiting to be discovered. Pignoli cookies are mildly sweet yet have a full-bodied nutty flavor from almond paste that lingers pleasantly on your palate. The crispy exterior reveals a chewy interior that gently pulls away as you bite it. Once you taste a pignoli cookie, you may just think it’s a star.

It’s not hard to imagine using these cookies to make a delicious dessert pasta or an Italianate noodle kugel. Or, if you like your salad on the sweeter side, crumble some on top of it. Crumbling a couple onto some of the great Italian egg pasta we have at the Deli, tossed with delicate olive oil like ROI from Liguria and freshly ground black pepper, would make a lovely lunch or brunch. Buonsissimo!

Preorder pignoli

P.S. While the ingredients of the cookies are wheat-free, the cookies are made at Bakehouse, where wheat flour goes into other products. In other words, you may want to check in with your doctor before eating them if you’re allergic to gluten.

A 2025 holiday-season hit at Mail Order

This time of year, a lot of Americans are watching the college football rankings to see who falls where with playoffs, top-10 lists, and so on! Here, we pay more attention to the top 10 list that comes out from Mail Order—folks around the ZCoB are always curious as to what’s selling especially well. There’s still a little while to go in our season, but right now, the amazing Bakehouse Stollen is at the top of the list!

I’m excited to see the Bakehouse Stollen getting this kind of national recognition! I really think this is one of the all-time best things we make at the Bakehouse. It’s always been good, and to my taste, it continues to get a bit better every year. The dedication to steady improvement, mastering technique, and always trying to take things to the next level comes through in the flavor!

Stollen, as you probably already know, is the traditional German Christmas cake. It’s made with an incredible array of ingredients, including sweet butter, Bacardi rum, candied orange and lemon zest, fresh orange juice, Michigan dried cherries, citron, currants, almonds, golden and red flame raisins, organic wheat flour, Indonesian cinnamon, lots of real vanilla, and more. The whole thing is brushed with rum butter—not once but three times—and then dusted with powdered sugar.

The Bakehouse Stollen’s complex flavors are so balanced and also so big. You get a touch of creaminess up front from the powdered sugar. Then you taste the butter and dried fruit as you break through the thin crust, followed by the tartness of the dried cherries and the sweetness of the raisins. The citrus stays in the background, and the vanilla and cinnamon come through subtly but meaningfully in a really nice finish. I’ll run with what Amy Emberling, one of the two managing partners at the Bakehouse, said about it: “When you taste it, you understand why it’s been a German Christmas tradition since 1545! Who can argue with 480 years of customer appreciation?”

My suggestion? Keep a few stollen on hand in case company comes by unexpectedly! It also warms up beautifully on Christmas morning—or any other morning, for that matter. If you want to take a holiday brunch to the next level, try making stollen French toast. It’s seriously good! Serve it with Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter (always at room temperature) and some apricot jam!

This year, the stollen are packaged in Zingerman’s-designed cloth bags, making them look as exceptional as they taste. There’s still time to ship a stollen or six to friends, relatives, clients, or neighbors!

Ship some stollen

Wonderful chocolatey deliciousness in a cultured butter crust

Here’s the latest in my long list (per the opening essay) of already great Zingerman’s products that have been made even better in the last few months through the addition of the Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter. Word from the Bakeshop crew, by the way, is that these terrific Chocolate Chess Pies are selling better than ever this year. It’s more evidence that momentum is building!

Over the 20-plus years we’ve been making it, Chocolate Chess Pie has quietly become a big favorite here at the Bakehouse. As The New York Times wrote a few years back, chocolate chess pie is “the perfect move for a gathering where some people want pie, some want chocolate and everyone wants something sweet.” Closer to home, it’s one of longtime Bakeshop manager Jake Emberling’s favorites out of the hundreds of terrific treats we make regularly.

The original recipes for chess pie call for lemon filling and appear in the English author Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy from 1747. The history of chocolate chess pie is far shorter since chocolate came into popular use in cooking and everyday eating in the U.S. only toward the latter part of the 19th century. Most likely, it would date to the early years of the 20th century, when American bakers began putting what would then have been a cutting-edge chocolate custard into their pie shells in place of the more typical citrus. And the rest is culinary history!

Our Chocolate Chess Pie is basically a rich and creamy baked chocolate custard in an all-butter crust. We use a very special dark chocolate from Mindo Chocolate Makers in Dexter, Michigan, to take this pie over the top. The Chocolate Chess has been described by some as “a brownie in a pie shell,” and it’s definitely a staff favorite. I like to top it with toasted walnuts or hazelnuts. Great with a big dollop of homemade whipped cream. You could gild the lily by serving a small scoop of chocolate or vanilla gelato on the side.

The pie’s crust—like the Sour Cream Coffee Cake—has been made better by the addition of Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter. In fact, the crust has become so tasty that I would be happy to nibble it on its own with a cup of our good 2025 Holiday Blend coffee. Better still, now that it has this terrific butter in the crust, consider adopting the Vermont tradition of pie for breakfast and start your day with it. This pie is sort of like a cold plate of super-tasty hot chocolate to get your morning going. However you eat it, it’s luscious, creamy, sweet, and wonderfully chocolatey!

Preorder a pie

The classic Christmas pastry of Budapest

Over the last 15 years—well, almost—the Bakehouse’s wonderful Walnut Beigli (pronounced “bay-glee”) has become one of our biggest holiday hits. In Hungary, it’s almost impossible to imagine or experience Christmas without beigli. It seems that everyone either makes their own at home or has a favorite bakery that their family has been buying from for generations. Over the years, our beigli has continued to gain more and more loyal fans around here as well. Ann Arbor isn’t Budapest, of course, but seemingly everywhere I go—inside the organization and around our guests—I bump into someone singing its praises. Staffers ooh and aah when beigli first emerges from the Bakehouse ovens for the season, and customers do the same! If you try our beigli, I have a feeling you may be joining us in delicious amazement! Amy Emberling, co-managing partner at the Bakehouse, shares:

I love making and eating Walnut Beigli but I might actually enjoy the way beigli looks more than anything else (you know that expression of eating with our eyes). It has a rich mahogany exterior with distinctive cracking from the particular egg wash method traditionally used. Each beigli has its own unique and captivating pattern.

A long-standing holiday tradition in Hungary, beigli is pretty much a staple in every house in the country at Christmas. A yeasted dough rolled up with a filling of walnuts, the outside of each beigli has a beautiful sheen to it and a unique, slightly mottled, crackly crust. Inside are swirls of a thick walnut-sugar filling that’s so good, I literally had a hard time not eating more of it. The richness of the butter in the dough and the walnuts on the inside are comforting and compelling at the same time. A great host or hostess gift, or just something special to bring home to liven up a dark winter night! Sip some good coffee—I’m high on the 2025 Holiday Blend right now, brewed in an AeroPress or pulled as a shot of espresso at the Coffee Company—and nibble slowly on a bit of beigli. It’s a beautiful way to start or end your day! And, in the spirit of bringing together the complementary flavors of fruit and nuts, and given my focus on apricots as the symbol of dignity and democracy, I like to put some apricot jam alongside the beigli. You can choose any good jam—the point, the enjoyment, will be the same. The walnuts, the buttery crust, and the sweetness of the jam are a wonderful combination!

We’ve got one beigli-loving customer who comes in weekly during December to fill her freezer with multiple rolls and then eats a small bit of beigli regularly throughout the coming year. I understand her drive to have it on hand. Really, the flavor is so compelling that it’s hard not to want a slice! You can buy our beigli at the Bakeshop and on the Zingerman’s Mail Order website as well!

Walnut wonderland

P.S. Want to bake Walnut Beigli at home? The recipe is in Zingerman’s Bakehouse, the marvelous book written by Bakehouse managing partner Amy Emberling and retired managing partner Frank Carollo.