Tag: ZINGERMAN’S COFFEE COMPANY
Terrific vegetable spread from Bulgaria with Bakehouse bread
One of my favorite foods in the ZCoB has, over the last five or six years, developed quite the cult following at the Coffee Company! It’s what we call Bulgarian Toast. If you’re already one of its many advocates, you’ll be well acquainted with the reasons why I’m such a big fan. If you don’t know it yet, swing by soon to taste it for yourself.
The Coffee Company’s Bulgarian Toast features the Bakehouse’s very wonderful Sicilian Sesame Semolina bread, Zingerman’s handmade old-school Cream Cheese, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, and a generous spreading of lutenitsa (read on!). We top the toast off with a coarse grinding of Zingerman’s 5-Star Black Pepper blend. The golden Semolina bread, just the right amount of the lutenitsa, and the pale white of the Cream Cheese make the toast as lovely to look at as it is to eat!
Dignity, a topic very close to my heart and high on my personal priority list, is, is very much integrated into the current constitution of Bulgaria, the land from whence lutenitsa originates. It’s also deeply ensconced in the country’s culture. In late November, tens of thousands of Bulgarians began peacefully demonstrating in the central square of the capital city of Sofia, and it’s still happening today. They’re speaking out against the Russian-leaning, corruption-supporting government. On December 11, the government resigned. Elections are now scheduled for early 2026. Since the citizens of Sofia are standing up for dignity, and given the integrity of the ingredients on this great dish, the Bulgarian Toast would be a good way to bring a bit of dignity into your day!
While lutenitsa is hardly ever found in the U.S., regulars will have likely heard of it. Every Bulgarian I’ve ever asked about lutenitsa has lit up with excitement at its mere mention. Food and sustainability writer and author Jill Lightner wrote in the Seattle Times that lutenitsa is “a contender for the crown in a late-summer contest of deliciousness,” and I would eagerly agree!
Most Bulgarian cooks make their own lutenitsa at home, but a little over a decade ago, we stumbled on the very good bottled version made by a company called Deroni. Named after an ancient Thracian tribe that thrived in Bulgaria centuries ago, the company is clearly devoted to crafting super high-quality vegetable products. Deroni does its own seed selection in house, runs its own nurseries, and farms its own fields to grow the vegetables. The company has been crafting this artisan recipe since 1966, and it’s won multiple awards for its quality-control systems and the flavor of its products. Deroni says that its lutenitsa will “wrap you with the warm embrace of your beloved grandmother, take you back in your smiling childhood and the forgotten smell of autumn, with the aroma of roasted peppers, coming from the gardens of every Bulgarian house.”
Swing by the Coffee Company for breakfast or lunch and lean into a slice of Bulgarian Toast, a bit of both dignity and deliciousness served in one lovely combination! And toast to a positive 2026!
Try this toast
P.S. We sell jars of the Deroni Lutenitsa at the Coffee Company, Deli, and Mail Order. It’s become a staple at our house. Spread it on toast, toss it with pasta or rice, add it to a grilled cheese, or serve it as a side dish! It’s delish!
An annual tradition from the Coffee Company continues
Every year, the Coffee Company crew convenes to come up with a way to bring together some of the year’s best single-origin coffees in an exceptional blend. I look at it as something akin to a rock supergroup where each member has made great music on their own but still decides to get together with a handful of other great players for fun, to produce music they couldn’t create by themselves. The coming-together isn’t permanent—it’s a special short-term collaboration that creates some really cool outcomes!
This year’s Holiday Blend is a duo—beans from our long-time friends at Daterra in Brazil and also from Hacienda Miramonte in Costa Rica. The crew at the Coffee Company says this about the combo:
Their flavors are playing especially nicely together this year, leaving us with an unmistakable richness and smooth finish. Think toasted nuts, caramels, and a silky smooth texture. Comfort and joy in a cup!
I tasted the Holiday Blend in several ways recently. As an espresso, it was beautifully nutty. Brewed as an AeroPress, it was beautifully round and remarkably smooth. Holiday Blend from a Siphon pot was clear, lively, well rounded, nutty, and chocolatey in the finish. The bottom line is that however you brew it, the Holiday Blend tastes pretty darned good!
The Holiday Blend is designed to appeal to both serious coffee aficionados and those who are new arrivals to the specialty coffee scene. A bag makes a great gift. It’s a wonderful way to send a taste of Zingerman’s to a coffee-loving loved one or colleague and a beautiful addition to gift baskets! Enjoy it now while it lasts!
Buy a bag of beans
Special Saturday morning pancake pop-up
Julia Child once said, “Everything can have drama if it’s done right. Even a pancake.”
Drama and pancakes will indeed come together next Saturday morning at a special one-time pancake pop-up that Cornman Farms chef and managing partner Kieron Hales will be doing at the Coffee Company over on Plaza Drive.
Pancakes, it turns out, are beyond popular! Last Saturday morning, people were lining up at the Coffee Company while Kieron cooked bacon and cheddar pancakes. With five to the stack and a bunch of butter and maple syrup on the side, it’s hard to convey the excited look in the eyes of most of the folks eating them! This coming Saturday, Kieron is coming back, and he’ll be making some super-special Maize and Blue(berry) pancakes.
W.C. Fields reportedly once joked, “The laziest man I ever met put popcorn in his pancakes so they would turn over by themselves.” Kieron will be turning these pancakes himself, and, being one of the hardest-working people I know, he’s definitely not lazy. He is, though, putting a bit of popcorn into the pancake mix, but in a far tastier way than W.C. Fields joked about. The blue in the Maize and Blue(berry) pancakes comes from Kieron’s homemade blueberry jam, which is mixed into the batter. Maize comes from a special popcorn he made, glazed with caramel, and then dehydrated to make a sweet/savory “corn powder” that gets sprinkled over the tops of the pancakes. Kieron told me, like, five times in five minutes, how delicious these are! Swing by and find out for yourself—supplies are limited and when we’re out of batter, we’re out!
This all reminds me of “The Pancake Supper,” Donald Antrim’s Christmas-week, 1999, essay in The New Yorker. Antrim writes, “The pancake is a childish pleasure, smothered in syrup. … We eat pancakes to escape loneliness.” Saturday morning will be your chance. Less loneliness, great pleasure, more loveliness, and a wonderful fall weekend ritual in the making!
A wonderful way to start your day
When I first wrote about this terrific toast combination, it was in the context of something you might make at home. A few months later, the Coffee Company crew ran with the idea—they adapted it slightly for their setting and featured it as a special with my name on it. This month, it’s back on the menu, more delicious than ever. Just as important, for me in the moment, it puts apricots front and center. The combination of nicely toasted Bakehouse Farm Bread, Zingerman’s Cream Cheese, apricot jam, and Cinnamon Spiced Peanuts from the Candy Manufactory is truly irresistible!
As many of you know, I’ve been writing a lot about my work to make apricots the peaceful and positive symbol for dignity and democracy. I’ve been wearing my apricot pin for a couple months, and a number of lovely conversations have come from curious folks asking me what it is. In concert with Underground Printing here in town and with an amazing scratchboard illustration of an apricot by our own Ian Nagy, apricot t-shirts are now up for sale as of the release of this enews—proceeds will go to Democracy Now! I just placed my first order for myself today and will be sending some gifts later this week.
This much deeper appreciation of apricots was one of the unexpected outcomes of my deep studies of Ukrainian culture and history while working on “The Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace.” I had no idea apricots were such an essential element of Ukrainian culture and cooking. As I’ve shared, Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk, who fled the region with her family when Russia invaded in 2014 (during what became the Revolution of Dignity), wrote in one of her poems in her book Apricots of Donbas,
Where no more apricots grow, Russia starts.
In any case though, come by the Coffee Company and enjoy some of this amazing apricot-forward toast—dignity and democracy manifesting in a marvelously delicious edible form! The small bit of beauty from the great combination of flavors on the Coffee Company’s toast can brighten one’s day in surprisingly wonderful ways. With that in mind, I’m inspired to eat—and pay far more attention to—apricots than I ever have in the past. When I eat this toast, it helps me move through whatever emotional difficulties—even on dark days—that I’m struggling with. It’s terrific and delicious! Hope to see you soon!
Tree Town Blend: a fantastically flavorful cup of coffee that does the town proud
Looking for a good coffee to perk up your mornings this month? Something to welcome fall and sip while you watch some football? The Coffee Company crew has crafted a blend that’s caught my attention. The 2025 “vintage” of our annual, autumn-only Tree Town Blend is especially remarkable. This year, they’ve added some exquisite African coffees, bringing even more depth and complexity to an already outstanding blend.
“Tree Town,” as many of you know, is the long-standing nickname for Ann Arbor. Founded in 1824, it was named for the wives of the village’s founders, both named Ann, and the stands of burr oak trees in the area. The “Tree Town” moniker derived from the high volume of trees in the city. Until the arrival of Europeans, most of this part of the world—originally home to the Ojibwe people—would have been fully forested.
Like the town for which it’s named, the Tree Town Blend is a medium roast that’s marvelously well-rounded with great personality. This year’s blend includes beans from our friends at the amazing Daterra Estate in Brazil, along with coffee from Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, and Guatemala. The Coffee Company crew says,
It tastes of caramel, stone fruit, cocoa. Complex and juicy. Clean, crisp and balanced in filter methods. We love both the V60 Pour Over and Chemex. A press pot yields a bright and juicy cup.
The 2025 Tree Town, to my taste, has a nice roundness that makes it really accessible to most any coffee drinker, but also a lot of complexity that makes it appealing to connoisseurs. Brewed as espresso, the Tree Town is especially toasty! A pour over is fruity! In every form, it has a great chocolatey finish. It makes you want to come back for more—like a visit to Tree Town! The Tree Town Blend is available brewed at the Coffee Company on Plaza Drive, as well as at the Roadhouse and Roadshow, and in bean form at all three locations plus the Deli. You won’t see the Tree Town Blend on the Zingermans.com Mail Order site, but if you email us at [email protected], we’ll be happy to send this taste of the town your way!
Try the Tree Town
Twenty years of brewing up beautiful cups of coffee
If you’ve never tried one of the “alternative brew methods” on the Big Brew Board at the Coffee Company, let me invite you here to try one. Each really does yield its own flavor characteristics, and if you have a couple extra minutes to wait while the crew custom grinds and brews your beans to order, I think you’re in for a treat! You really can taste the difference.
Lately, I’ve been particularly enamored of what’s known as AeroPress brewing. Historian Timothy Snyder notes that “anniversaries take hold of the imagination, especially the round ones.” This is a “round anniversary” in every sense of the word—it’s about a round brewing tool, the coffee from which will be served in round cups. And this year marks the 20th anniversary of Alan Adler’s AeroPress. To this day, the AeroPress remains one of the best methods of brewing coffee yet to be developed.
By the time Alan Adler was 13, he had invented a new electronic measuring technology. He loved sailboats and aerodynamics, and, among others of his dozens of inventions, he created what’s known as the Skyro, a long-distance flying ring. Back in the early 2000s, Adler found himself repeatedly frustrated by how bad his experiences with home coffee makers were. A couple years and over 30 prototypes later, Adler released his work into the world when the AeroPress debuted at a show in Seattle in the fall of 2005. Adler figured out how to use air pressure to shorten the amount of time needed to brew and, in the process, cut down on bitterness and increase the flavor.
Shortly after its introduction, AeroPress began winning raves and continues to have a big following two decades down the road. Last year, the World AeroPress Championship celebrated its 15th anniversary with over 5,000 people coming to compete in nearly 200 events! Matthew Bodary, long-time manager at the Coffee Company shares,
I remember in the early days here at our cafe, around 2011, we served the AeroPress and were one of the first places in town you would see them around. People would sometimes meet it with apprehension. At first glance, it can look a little gimmicky. “The frisbee guy created a giant plastic-ish syringe thing that brews coffee?”… But the results spoke for themselves. It makes really tasty coffee consistently with minimal brewing fuss or cleaning. It’s also more or less indestructible. For that reason, it has developed a strong following among travelers, backpackers, campers, and people who just want to move on from breaking another glass French press.
Maybe more than any other single-cup brewer I know of, the AeroPress rewards experimentation in recipe development. Dose, grind size, stirring and turbulence, brew time. With the AeroPress especially, you can get great results from a wide range of starting points. You also have that added element of applying gentle pressure. Some examples here. We do the “inverted” method in the shop to extend the full immersion brew time a bit.
If you want to treat yourself to a terrific cup of coffee to kick off the New Year, swing by the Coffee Company in the next couple days and order some of your favorite beans brewed using the AeroPress method. I had a cup of AeroPress Roadhouse Joe the other day and it was so good.
Have your brew waiting for you
P.S. If you want to start doing AeroPress brewing at home, we sell the brewers at the Coffee Company and the Deli!