Tag: ZINGERMAN’S BAKEHOUSE
Deliciously beautiful bread made with freshly milled grain
One of the great things about artisan food is that every day, or every batch, is just a little bit different. And while the Country Multigrain Bread (formerly known as Country Miche) is always really good, every once in a while all of the many elements involved conspire in the best possible way to yield an exceptional loaf. For that to happen, the weather, the grain, and the culinary spirits over on the Southside come together to create a loaf that is over the top, amazingly good!
I had one of those especially excellent breads last Friday evening. It was from the bigger, 4-pound loaf, which comes as a round miche (French for “loaf”)—which, to my taste, offers an even deeper, more complex flavor and moister interior crumb than the smaller size. It had a beautiful super dark crust like I like—the darker crusts have far, far more flavor thanks to the caramelization of the natural sugars in the grain, aka “the Maillard Effect.” The crust, the crumb, and the salt level were so terrific that they made me want to write about it here and remind everyone just how darned delicious this bread is.
The Country Multigrain Bread might be a near-perfect manifestation of French food writer Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s statement in History of Food: “… really good bread makes you feel happy just to smell it, look at it, bite, chew and swallow it.” It is one of the breads that debuted after we began the wonderful work of milling our own grain at the Bakehouse in 2018. It’s a blend of four grains: Regionally grown and stone-milled organic hard red spring wheat, organic rye and organic spelt from Janie’s Mill, and organic buckwheat from Natural Way Mills. While the first one is slightly sifted (i.e., high-extraction flour), the other three are whole-grain flours, all capturing the true essence of the grains they come from. Like I said above, the quartet comes together to make for a compelling set of flavors.
The Bakehouse’s Country Multigrain Bread is so exceptionally marvelous it would be wholly at home in a top-notch French country bakery circa 1880. Beautiful chestnut-colored crumb with big holes (which artisan bakers are always working to make happen) with lovely flecks of bran. The aroma is lively, slightly sour, substantial but not strong, and comforting. The bread’s flavor is big, almost meaty, very wheaty, complex, and fascinatingly full. I love it simply as is, toasted with great olive oil. Perfect for sandwiches. It’s terrific with the Creamery’s Cream Cheese, olive oil, and our 5-Star Black Pepper blend. Being naturally leavened (with nearly 20 hours of rise time), the Country Multigrain stays marvelously moist for days. You can buy the 4-pound loaf as a quarter, half, or whole, or choose the smaller 1.5-pound batard. All of which also makes the Country Multigrain Bread perfect for Mail Order shipping or for taking to cottages or on cross-country drives.
If you’re feeling stressed these days, good bread could be a big help. As the great Spanish scribe Cervantes once said, “All sorrows are less with bread.”
Marvelous multigrain
This year, Erev Purim began on the evening of Thursday, March 13 and continued on through Friday the 14th. The Bakehouse had a head start on hamantaschen season, though; we make them all month long because the truth is that hamantaschen taste great at any time! They’ve certainly been hugely popular so far this month! They also happen to have been my business partner Paul Saginaw’s favorite pastry for as long as I can remember!
If you don’t know it, Purim is the Jewish holiday that celebrates the occasion of the Persian Jews outwitting the wicked minister Haman, who was out to annihilate them. (Parallels, I see now, with Putin and Ukraine and maybe more …) Haman was determined to have all the Jews of Persia put to death, but the queen’s uncle (Mordechai) found out about Haman’s evil intentions and passed word to his niece (Queen Esther), who in turn told the King, who then put Haman to death instead of the Jews. The triangular shape of modern-day hamantaschen was said, in some stories, to be derived from the three-cornered hat that Haman wore.
The beautiful little triangularly shaped, all-butter cookie dough crust pockets are stuffed with an array of fillings: cream cheese (from the Creamery) and vanilla bean, apricot, Hungarian prune preserves, and, Paul’s favorite, Dutch poppy seed. All are excellent. The two newest flavors—both introduced last year—are winning raves: Apple Pie and, yes, you read it right, Chocolate Birthday Cake. Stop by the Bakehouse before the end of the monthWe happily ship hamantaschen all over the country, so log on and place your holiday orders soon to get them there before Purim!
Tasty and terrific with vegan vanilla ermine frosting
The Bakehouse team has unveiled a newly created vegan chocolate cake! That’s right—lots of flavor and verifiably vegan!
Ermine frosting may be new to most 21st-century Americans, but its origins go back to the 1880s, when it was also known variously as “milk frosting” or “boiled milk frosting.” It was made as frosting for the then-popular mahogany cake that later came to be called red velvet cake. The frosting is basically made by starting with a flour-based roux—it would typically be made with butter and flour cooked together, but for this vegan cake we’re using oat milk. The chocolatiness comes from cocoa powder crafted by the Dutch firm of Bensdorp, one of the first in the world to make cocoa powder. The vanilla is the real deal—from the island of Madagascar.
The results are terrific! Great any way you like to eat your cake—alongside an AeroPress-brewed cup of the January Roaster’s Pick at the Coffee Company, the marvelous Mexican Chiapas. Or enjoy it with a cup of great tea, like the Milk Oolong (which, vegans rest assured, has no milk in it), that we have at the Deli. Be sure to serve your cake at room temperature to get the full flavor!
P.S. If you’re looking for other vegan desserts, try the terrific Chocolate Millet Muffins we make at the Bakehouse and the Italy Meets San Fran dessert platter at the Roadhouse—fresh fruit, warm Better Than San Francisco sourdough bread, and the terrific Noccioliva hazelnut and dark chocolate spread.
A wonderful bit of chocolatey deliciousness in a buttery pie crust
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—what I imagine as essentially a “lemon curd” pie—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 only towards the latter part of the 19th century. Most likely, it would date to the early years of the 20th century. Which means that while Marie Curie was winning Nobel Prizes, some far less famous, and actually anonymous, American bakers began putting a chocolate custard into their pie shells in place of the more typical lemon. And the rest is culinary history! I’m not sure it’s Deep Understanding, but it is definitely delicious!
Our Chocolate Chess Pie is a rich and creamy baked chocolate custard in an all-butter crust. We use a very special local dark chocolate from Mindo Chocolate Makers in Dexter, Michigan that takes this pie over the top. It’s 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. And/or you could gild the lily by serving a small scoop of chocolate or vanilla gelato on the side. Better still, adopt the Vermont tradition of pie for breakfast and start your day with it! However you eat it, it’s luscious, creamy, sweet, and wonderfully chocolatey!
P.S. Looking ahead, Lemon Chess Pie will be emerging from Bakehouse ovens in January, just after the start of the new year—a great way to brighten a winter day!
Soft hazelnut meringue and a whole bunch of buttercream
One of the planet’s premier pastry makers and baking book writers, the Paris-based American David Lebowitz offered, “Yes, marjolaine is a project, but worth it!” He’s writing, of course, about making marjolaine at home. Happily, for folks like me who like the idea of marjolaine but have enough other, not-related-to-pastry projects on our daily dockets, the crew at the Bakehouse has done all the work for us. The only project we need to undertake is to plan a drive over to Plaza Drive this month and purchase as much marjolaine as we want. Single slices work well for an individual dessert or an afternoon pick-me-up; whole tortes are terrific for family gatherings, office parties, or pastry-loving football fans. It also lasts really well!
In mid-September of 1987, the author of A Food Lover’s Guide to France—a book that influenced me enormously back when I was working in the early years of the Deli—Patricia Wells wrote a piece about the party she threw at her Provencal farmhouse for her 40th birthday. The dessert she chose was, as you’ll have guessed, marjolaine: “a marvelous, multilayered chocolate cake that, thank goodness, tastes best when aged for two or three days.”
Writing for Epicurious, Genevieve Yam liberally sings the praises of the magical marjolaine. In a piece entitled, “This Classic French Cake Tastes Like the World’s Best Candy Bar,” Yam writes:
The majestic marjolaine—beloved by chefs all over … ask any chef who is well-versed in classical French cuisine and it’s likely they’ll start going on and on about how delicious this layered dessert is. The marjolaine … was created by celebrated French chef Fernand Point. During its heyday in the 1930s, Point’s restaurant La Pyramide, located in Vienne, France, was a culinary temple for many—including famed chefs Paul Bocuse and the Troisgros brothers.
Thomas Keller, of French Laundry fame, says the marjolaine torte is “a cross between a cake and a meringue, one that’s creamy, with a slight crunch, both chewy and cakelike, fully flavored … All those components in one bite.” Co-managing partner at the Bakehouse (and co-author of the widely acclaimed Celebrate Every Day) shares that it’s one of her long-time favorites.
Here at the Bakehouse, we make our Marjolaine Torte by alternating layers of a lovely soft, hazelnut meringue with a rich chocolate Swiss buttercream. The cake is iced with espresso-scented Swiss buttercream and then covered on the sides with a whole bunch of chopped toasted hazelnuts. It really is a uniquely magical combination of flavors and textures!
The Marjolaine Torte is terrific as is. Be sure to let it come to room temperature so that you can access its fine full complex flavors. If you want to gild the marjolaine’s magical chocolate-hazelnut-meringue marvelousness, consider putting a smear of the lovely Noccioliva Italian artisan hazelnut chocolate spread on the plate—we have jars of it for sale at the Coffee Company, Deli, and Roadhouse! Or try it with some of the Georgia Grinders Hazelnut Butter smeared across the plate and put the torte on top!
Custom cakes make the mundane into the magical!
One of the best and easiest ways to joyfully brighten someone’s day I’ve learned in recent years is to give them a custom-designed cake from the Bakehouse’s Cake Studio. Seriously, their custom cakes are something else! We’ve been making these beautiful cakes for a bit over 20 years now, and the Bakehouse Cake Studio crew has won well-deserved praise for their wedding cakes. Having gorgeous custom-designed cakes for your big day that actually taste terrific is a big deal!
While wedding cakes are wonderful, you do not need to get married to enjoy one of these great creations! Most any occasion can be radically enhanced by the unveiling of a cake that has been custom-designed. I ordered one recently to share with staff for the start of our new fiscal year! And the photo above is the one created for Tammie’s birthday last spring that featured one of the dogs she rescued last year, Little Frankie Lee! Tears of joy ensued as soon as she got her first look at it.
The Bakehouse’s custom cakes are guaranteed to bring joy to anyone you give them to! Everything is created to order and made by hand! In fact, if you give one as a gift and joy does not ensue, we will be glad to give your money back! Consider it our investment in inspiring joy around Washtenaw County.
For big events, schedule a cake consult. If you’re thinking ahead, it’s never too early for custom cakes! If it’s last minute, we have our regular layer cakes in the Bakeshop, and we can almost always add a message if you can wait for five to ten minutes. For bigger projects, Cake Studio manager Alyce Machcinski says,
It’s always good to plan ahead; with only a few days’ notice, we can make something that is personalized and still very special for their celebration; and if something comes up last minute or you’re not able to plan in advance, we can add inscriptions to our everyday cakes that we have in the Bakeshop case. If someone is looking for a truly over-the-top cake, it’s never too early to reach out and start planning!
A couple weeks ago I had the honor of teaching a ZingTrain Community Event to a group that had gathered in Julia Child’s teaching kitchen at Boston University in Cambridge! It was both a little intimidating and a lot inspiring to be able to stand in the same spot Julia so famously presented from for so many years! Thinking about her here, I’m reminded of a line of hers I always loved: “A party without cake is just a meeting.” This week I want to imagine an inversion—a meeting with a cake can easily become a productive and joyful work party! They’re great for work anniversaries, amazing office birthday parties, impressing a big client you have in for lunch, or just adding a little vitality to your regular weekly meeting!