Tag: ZINGERMAN’S CANDY MANUFACTORY
Exceptional artisan caramels from southern Vermont
These totally terrific handmade goat milk caramels just came into the Candy Store last week! Everything about them exudes excellence. They’re made by hand at Big Picture Farm, which was founded in 2010 by photographer and artist Louisa Conrad and her husband, the poet and writer Lucas Ferrell. The two met as students at Middlebury College, went to the West Coast for grad school, and then got married. Fifteen years ago, determined to make their dreams come true, they took out loans to buy an old nine-room farmhouse back near the southern Vermont village of Townsend.
Today, the two manage a working goat farm, raise kids (both the goat and human kind), make caramels, and craft artisan goat cheese. They are actively playing their part in making a positive story about American farming. As Louisa says, “The stories behind what’s going to happen in American agriculture are largely dependent on how these transitions go from all of the older farmers to the next generation.”
Louisa and Lucas are very values aligned with what we do here: Regenerative grazing, 100% solar power, and the boxes into which the caramels are packed are beyond beautiful. And most importantly, the caramels taste great. The quality is truly exceptional. Louisa gives credit where credit is definitely due: “The secret ingredient is 100% the milk that we use from our goats that are extremely spoiled.” They’ve won a wealth of awards at the Fancy Food Show and the Good Food Awards over the years. Food critic Florence Fabricant writes in The New York Times, “The candies are simple and irresistible.”
Lucas is also a poet—the blue-collar sun won the 2020 Sundog Poetry Book Award. Although the work of caramel making and poetry writing could seem a strange juxtaposition, he points out that they work in parallel. In the spirit of what I wrote about in “The Art of Business” pamphlet, an interview with the Vermont weekly newspaper Seven Days (founded 30 years ago and still run by Paula Routly, the good friend of my good friend Molly Stevens,) Lucas says,
Poetry and caramels aren’t so different. They share a process of boiling down their material (milk or language) in an attempt to distill, sculpt, or otherwise express the fundamental components of life — in small but sweet and wondrous form! … I think of the farm as art. I think of our caramel as art. They’re things that we’re actively making,
Of his writing, poet Joanna Klink writes in Raptus, “Lucas Farrell throws a spell over everything his voice touches.” I think these artisan goat caramels could do something similar to your taste buds. We have three flavors of the caramels at the Candy Store right now, and all are terrific—Sea Salt & Vanilla, Maple Cream, and Brown Butter Bourbon. They’re all super silky, surprisingly soft and buttery, not too sweet, complexly flavored with a wonderful, lovely, long finish, and a gentle hint of sea salt. (In a way, they remind me of what would happen to the Roadhouse’s remarkable Butterscotch Pudding were it to cook it all the way down to this texture!) Fantastic gift for anyone who loves confectionery like this! Or for that matter, for yourself!
Orange and chocolate come together to make something super special
If you like orange and chocolate, this exceptional bar from my good friend Shawn Askinosie and the crew at Askinosie Chocolate is an awesome option! It has become a widely appreciated staff favorite across the ZCoB over the four or five years that they’ve been crafting it!
Four hundred years ago in Europe, the combo of orange and chocolate was completely cutting edge. If one wanted to impress a couple of your royal cousins, catch the attention of upper-crust colleagues, or get in good with a high-ranking court dignitary, chocolate with orange might well have been the almost-impossible-to-ignore ticket. Both ingredients were then relatively new on the European culinary scene.
But that was then, and this is now. Orange and chocolate in some form are everywhere. They’re on my mind, though, because of this very special iteration of the combination in my good friend Shawn Askinosie’s incredible chocolate bar. The bar begins with the relatively rare (it accounts for less than 10% of the world’s chocolate) and very carefully crafted Trinitario cacao that Shawn brings from the Philippines. It’s a 58% dark chocolate—very smooth and gentle—that comes from grower Peter Cruz. Thanks to Shawn’s good work, Cruz became the first Filipino farmer to export cacao since the country’s land reform in the mid-1970s. Shawn shares that “Peter is known nationally as an expert in organic and regenerative cocoa farming,” and his skill comes through in the quality of the cacao. The beans are conched and blended with turbinado sugar and cocoa butter (made by the folks at Askinosie from the same beans), and then a nice bit of orange pulp and orange peel. The finished flavor is something special.
To be clear, developing an offering of this quality is not an overnight activity. Natural Law #10 (see “Secret #01: Twelve Natural Laws of Building a Great Business”) is that “it takes a lot longer to make something great happen than most people think.” This bar is no exception—Shawn says it took about 20 iterations to get the ratios right, all done in a series of experiments that took about 18 months. I appreciate all the hard work, and I’m betting that, if you like orange and chocolate, you will most definitely want to buy a bar too. Or five. The flavor is fantastic. The chocolate and the orange are beautifully balanced. Like any good partnership, they bring different things to the table. The chocolate is the bass line—dark, nutty, cocoa-y. The orange comes at it from the other end—it’s the violin playing over top. Light, bright, sensual, ethereal. Together, the combo is otherworldly. The royal court of Spain, which brought cacao to the Philippines early in the 17th century, would likely have swooned over it
Can a chocolate bar make that much difference? Both Shawn and I are big fans of the work of the Irish philosopher John O’Donohue, so I’ll close this piece with a quote of his that conveys what I’m thinking after eating and reflecting on how good this bar is. Share a bit of your bar with anyone you care about. Or even someone you don’t yet know. As O’Donohue writes, “The time is now ripe for beauty to surprise and liberate us.”
An amazing old-fashioned food from the women-focused firm in Kabul
While writing about apricots as a metaphor for good things to come, I was reminded to pick up some of these dried apricot kernels from Afghanistan. To my sense of things, these uncommon little toasted and salted sweet-apricot treats are one of the tastiest additions to our collective Zingerman’s pantry to show up in ages.
As I’ve mentioned before, apricots are native to China. Afghanistan lies, of course, to the west, sandwiched between Iran and the border with China, so apricot trees would have likely been grown there for many thousands of years. We know Afghanistan today mostly, unfortunately, because it’s been ravaged by war for so many decades, but we also know that more positive futures are possible. The Irish theologian John O’Donohue wrote that “all the contemporary crises can be reduced to a crisis about the nature of beauty.” In fact, the name of the company making them available, Ziba, means “beautiful” in Dari (the Afghan dialect of Persian).
Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, Ziba’s founders began with the express purpose of helping women in Afghanistan to make a sustainable living. As the Ziba folks say, “Our mission is simple: to introduce people to the splendors of one of the world’s most inaccessible countries while actively working to improve the lives of its women and rural farmers.” In practice, their goal of supporting “the development of women in business so they can gain independence” is already making a big difference in the lives of many women. The workforce is primarily women in the Kabul factory. This isn’t about charity—it’s about independence, good work, care. And beauty.
I will say that if you look up apricot kernels, you’ll find that bitter apricot kernels can have a high degree of toxicity. These, though, are sweet apricot kernels, which have a different chemical makeup, making them safe for you and me to eat. While they’re not certified organic, they essentially are in practice since these small-scale Afghan farmers don’t use pesticides.
The Ziba Apricot Kernels are nutty, almondy, slightly smoky, slightly sweet, a beautiful bit of bitter. (FWIW, apricot pits like this are the key “secret” flavor that makes Italian Amaretti cookies what they are.) The dusting of Afghan salt makes them as irresistible as a great American peanut, but with a flavor all their own. Because they aren’t nuts—they’re the pits of sweet Afghan apricots—people with nut allergies can eat them. They’re super versatile—the little packets make them perfect airplane food. You can send them with your loved one (or yourself) to school or work. They’re a superb addition to salads. They’d be great in that Couscous and Apricot dish I wrote about last week, rather than almonds. Add ’em to granola, trail mix, or oatmeal. A lovely little addition to the wide mix of artisan foods that make up the Zingerman’s Community!
P.S. The Deli doesn’t have the apricot kernels on their own, but they do have bags of Ziba’s terrific trail mix—apricot kernels along with the amazing Afghan Gurbandi almonds, Kishmish raisins, wild pistachios, and dried mulberries.
Really good chocolate made from raw cacao in the world’s happiest place
One place that we don’t—yet—take you on a Zingerman’s Food Tour is Finland. I forecast that down the road, there may well be one. About a year ago, BBC Radio reported that “for seven consecutive years, Finland has been named the happiest country in the world, followed closely by its Nordic neighbours Denmark and Iceland.”
While we’re thinking about making our way to Helsinki to try out the terrific local food scene, here’s an easy opportunity to try a really tasty artisan offering. Made in the city of Sisu (the almost mystical Finnish term that is something akin to “inner strength”), Goodio is a craft bean-to-bar chocolate with a really good brand name. Goodio was founded a decade ago by designer Jukka Peltola, who also developed games at Rovio, the company responsible for Angry Birds. After a creative career in technology and entertainment, Peltola came to food through a personal journey for better health. He started by thoughtfully challenging himself to answer the question: “What if there was a food brand you could trust?” Goodio was his answer.
The chocolate line was designed around the principles of sustainability, well-being, and supply chain transparency, with the idea of incorporating Nordic-inspired ingredients and flavors into artisan chocolate bars. All the bars are made with organic raw cacao, which means they’re especially high in antioxidants. They sweeten the bars with raw coconut sugar, which also gives a subtle difference in the flavor profile from the majority of chocolates made with cane sugar.
The Dark Chocolate 71% is my top pick. It’s made with hard-to-find Nacional heirloom cacao from Peru. Highly prized for many years, the already rare Nacional beans suffered tremendously in a blight back in 1916. They were thought to have essentially disappeared until some trees were found growing wild in the jungle. From that small source, the bean has been brought back. It has a creamy, non-astringent flavor.
We also have a Finnish Wild Blueberry Chocolate—in a great way, the blueberries are present in the flavor, but chocolate remains what you taste first. We also have their lovely, lighter caramelized Finnish Rosemary Chocolate, very creamy Coconut Milk Chocolate, and Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt. All are vegan, gluten-free, and very good. Each, in its own Finnish way, is wonderful! Eat some and see if, indeed, a small bit of happiness doesn’t follow.
Available at the Candy Store, inside Zingerman’s Coffee Company, on Plaza Drive!
Classic confection, influenced by Cuba, handcrafted in Turin
Rocco Disderide, who along with his wife Katherine built the building we now know as the Deli back in 1902, was a lifelong lover of tobacco. He smoked a pipe and also cigars throughout his remarkable 105 years. Tobacco was so close to his heart that even when the Disderides sold the Deli’s building to the Diroff Brothers in 1921 when he was 64, at what might have seemed roughly a reasonable age for “retirement,” Rocco still kept his small cigar store at 125 E. Ann Street in Ann Arbor for many decades more. He did not stock these delicious handmade chocolate cigars from northern Italy, but if we could condense time, I’m pretty sure his young great-great-great-granddaughter, who I had the honor of meeting this year, would have been very happy if he had!
The origin story of these cigars goes back to the time before Rocco and Katherine Disderide arrived in Ann Arbor with their three daughters. In the town of Turin, in 1878—about 100 miles from where a then 19-year-old Rocco would still at the time have been living near Genoa—a 20-year-old Torinese by the name of Silviano Venchi scraped together all the cash he could come up with to buy two bronze cauldrons. Venchi’s vision was to start a chocolate shop. Back in that era, chocolate in finished form for eating in this way was relatively new, and cacao consumption was all the rage amongst the European cognoscenti. Young Silviano Venchi was very much caught up in the buzz around cacao beans and was willing to risk all he had to make his dreams come true.
A few years into his chocolate work, Venchi made a creative contribution of his own to the confectionary world when he came up with the idea to craft what came to be called “nougatine.” Made from chopped caramelized hazelnuts coated in dark chocolate, it’s essentially a different way of bringing together two of the main products of Torino’s culinary scene—ancient Italian hazelnuts, and the relatively novel chocolate which had come not all that long before from the western hemisphere. Soon, Venchi had created what came to be called “the most elegant chocolate shop in Piedmont.” The company grew from there and has long been one of Italy’s most admired and inspired chocolate makers. If you go to Turin with Zingerman’s Food Tours, you will see Venchi’s confectionery and gelato shops all over the city!
The history of the Venchi chocolate cigars dates to the 1960s when Pietro Cussino, then one of the owners of the company, took a trip to the Caribbean. He was driven by his passion for finding the finest cacao and the best rum to enhance the quality of Venchi’s already exquisite chocolates. Natural Law #8 reminds us, “To get to greatness you’ve got to keep getting better, all the time!” And Sr. Cussino was practicing it. When he arrived in Cuba, he quickly became enamored of the handcrafting that went into the artisan Cuban cigars. In the spirit of nearly all great creative work, Cussino combined these two previously unconnected crafts—artisan cigars with the artisan chocolate making for which Venchi had by then already been famous for nearly 90 years.
Here in 2024, Venchi’s chocolate cigars are still produced and wrapped, beautifully, by hand. We have four types at the Candy Store (inside the Coffee Company):
- The classic original Venchi Chocolate Cigar – Dense and delicious cocoa paste, hand-covered in a double layer of dark chocolate, then foil-wrapped to look almost exactly like a handmade cigar.
- The powerfully good Pistachio Cigar – These have a delicious filling of white chocolate and pistachio paste that’s mixed with chopped pistachios, almonds, and raw cane sugar. A double layer of 60% dark chocolate on the outside!
- Venchi’s signature Nougatine – Silviano Venchi’s original, late 19th century, confectionery creation is at the heart of this one. Dark cocoa paste is mixed with PGI (protected by law) Piedmont hazelnuts that are ground into a coarse confection that’s then laced with caramel chips. The nougatine center is coated with a double layer of chocolate and, again, hand-wrapped in foil in the style of a fine cigar.
- The terrific Orange and Chocolate – Dark chocolate cigars, filled with milk chocolate combined with cocoa paste and seasoned with candied orange peel. The cigar is covered with a double layer of milk and dark 56% chocolate to preserve the aroma to the fullest.
The Venchi cigars are great for any gift for anyone who likes chocolate! You can slice a small bit off to enjoy or serve the cigar whole. They really do look like a fancy cigar—and they taste terrific!
Terrific, toasted cashews in a lovely sheet of caramelized sugar
A tasty treat if you’re in the mood for something sort of sweet, a touch savory, and mostly, just really, really good. It’s been a bit of a surprise sleeper on the Candy Manufactory scene—it showed up on the shelves 10 years or so ago without a lot of fanfare. And then one day, it started to pop up—and kept on popping up—on our customer compliment report week after week. The Cashew Brittle is done with a lot of slow cooking to carefully, patiently, and maybe poetically, caramelize the sugar—with a bit of butter and a pinch of sea salt—as we also do with our already pretty famous peanut brittle.
While pecans are native to North America, cashews came originally from Brazil. The English name “cashew” comes from the Portuguese, caju. The tree is a tropical evergreen that can grow as tall as a four or five-story building. It was brought to India in the middle of the 16th century by Portuguese sailors working the spice routes. Wherever it’s grown, the nut, or more formally, seed, actually grows on the outside of the fruit, which, in English, are known as “cashew apples.”
The Candy Manufactory’s Cashew Brittle is both beautiful and delicious. A dark amber-colored confection, studded with sections of straw yellow, gently toasted, cashew nuts. Put it out on a plate for folks to nibble on for a snack, after a meal, or with morning coffee. The Cashew Brittle pairs really well with cheese. It’s super delicious with Parmigiano Reggiano—I had some on a plate with small, broken-up pieces of the cashew brittle—and it was a huge hit! It’d be terrific with the Street Ched I wrote about last week from Cincinnati. The Cashew Brittle is, of course, also a superb snack or something to stick in your pocket if you’re getting on a plane for a long flight or into a car for a long drive. And, oh yeah, I almost forgot—Cashew Brittle also comes covered with dark chocolate!
It’s great, too, coarsely chopped and tossed onto a salad—sort of like you’d use croutons. Right now the Roadhouse has its amazing fresh arugula, barrel-aged Greek feta, apple, and cashew brittle salad on the monthly specials menu. It’s a terrific coming together of savory and sweet, crunchy and creamy, nutty and nice! Pretty certainly, worthy of a poem. If you’re inspired to write one, send it my way!
Come by the Candy Store, the Roadhouse, or the Deli to pick some up.