A light touch of citrus to sweeten a winter day

This stuff is super! Light, refreshing, bright, delicate, and delicious. In the dark dog days of winter, we can all use a bit of brightness—this super tasty sorbet serves up a little bit of metaphorical culinary sunshine!

If you aren’t familiar with the satsuma, it’s a variety of Chinese mandarin that came to the U.S. via Japan. Its original Chinese name means “honey citrus of Wenzhou,” a fitting description of its gently sweet flavor. “Satsuma” is a more modern name, taken from a former province of Japan (now Kagoshima Prefecture) on Kyushu Island. The region holds significance in what I wrote about 20th-century art critic and philosopher Soetsu Yanagi’s The Beauty of Everyday Things and his passion for mingei—the beauty of the many small, handcrafted items commonly found in Japanese kitchens and workshops of the time. (Kagoshima: Stories in Craft from South Japan, published a couple of years ago, explores the story of mingei in the Satsuma region.)

Satsumas today are well established in the United States. Satsumas came originally to a Jesuit plantation up the river from New Orleans early in the 19th century, and from there spread across the South and out to California. The towns of Satsuma in Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Louisiana were all named after the fruit. By 1920, Jackson County in the Florida Panhandle started to call itself the “Satsuma Capital of the World.”

You can serve the satsuma sorbet for a dessert or a light afternoon pick-me-up. Better still, take advantage of the slightly warmer weather that means spring really is coming, swing by the Cream Top Shop at the Creamery, and get a small cup to share with a friend. Pair it with vanilla gelato to make a dreamy Dreamsicle. You can play around with it at home, too—its citrusy, not-too-sweet brightness makes it a nice touch to serve a small bit on the side with some fresh oysters! Or top small scoops with a garnish of chopped fresh tarragon—it’s an interesting combo and a great palate cleanser between courses. It’s great, too, with a twist of really good black pepper on top, like maybe the Elephant Valley pepper we have from the folks at Épices de Cru in Quebec!

Procure a pint

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A taste of Italian tradition in Central Wisconsin

We’ve got a great new spicy-sweet jarred bit of wonderful deliciousness on the shelves at the Cream Top Shop. The confection in question is a terrific old-school style Pear Mostarda made in the style of Cremona in northern Italy. It’s made by the crew at Quince & Apple in Madison, the same artisans from whom we’ve been getting that great Pickled Zucchini that goes on the Roadhouse’s really good Carolina Gold Rice Bowl.

Cremona, located smack dab in the middle of northern Italy, south of Milan and a bit to the east of Piacenza, is probably most famous for its violins. The town’s role as a center of musical instrument-making dates back to the 12th century. Most famously, it’s the home of Stradivarius, named for the highly esteemed luthier Antonio Stradivari. Mostarda is also a significant part of Cremona’s culture, though certainly a distant second to music-making. It’s essentially fruits cooked in mustard oil and sugar to make a condiment that could be at least roughly compared to an Italian sort of chutney. Jess Winn from Quince & Apple writes:

We’re the only American producer of this style that we know of. We make it with real mustard oil rather than just mustard seeds or mustard powder, which is how most American companies make it. This leads to a far more pungent and spicy mostarda than other American mostardas and most Italian mostardas sold in the export market.

One of Quince & Apple’s two founders, Matt Stoner Fehsenfeld, shares some backstory:

When we were creating the mostarda, I drew inspiration from a recipe that I found in a cookbook from the Italian Middle Ages. The author suggests fermenting the mustard seeds first. I had been struggling to get good complexity in my test batches, but when I tried that, it totally elevated our mostarda and that’s how we still do it!

The name “mostarda” has nothing to do with it being flavored with mustard. The Italian word for mustard is actually senape. It’s called mostarda because it was originally sweetened with grape must, which was much more readily available in the old times in Italy than sugar. The fact that it sounds like mustard is just a coincidence.

Also, when I first started working with mustard essential oil in the early days of recipe development, I significantly underestimated its potency. I added maybe 1/4 tsp to a simmering pot at home and in seconds was crying my eyes out and fumigating our entire house. Fortunately, I was home alone. I could barely function or see, so I ran to my kids’ bedroom and found a pair of tiny Finding Nemo swim goggles, strapped them on, and ran back to the kitchen so that I could navigate back to take the pot outside and throw it out. I only made that mistake once!

The Pear Mostarda is marvelous with cheese like the Rogue River Blue, Parmigiano, Piave, sheep’s milk cheeses of all sorts, and the Creamery’s Manchester. Great on grilled cheese sandwiches or served on the side with roasted meats of all sorts. My longtime friend, food writer Elizabeth Minchilli, had the marvelous idea to add it to a cocktail—you can pour a bit of the liquid syrup in the jar into the drink, and/or stick a piece of the pear onto a toothpick-skewer for a garnish:

As I was digging into the spicy, syrupy goodness of the mostarda I had a thought: cocktail ingredient! I use flavored syrups all the time for cocktails. And here I was, with a jar of sweet and spicy syrup studded with jewel-like pieces of fruit just asking me to mix it into something. Ok, I know a lot of you out there don’t like it when I bastardize the classic martini. So I’m not calling this a martini. A completely different name: Mostardini. That ok?

Pear Mostarda also makes a magical combination spooned onto the Creamery’s Cream Cheese, either as is, or atop one of those wonderful, world-class Potter’s Crackers (which are also made in Madison). I love it on a toasted Bakehouse Zinglish Muffin. It’s terrific with the Pit-Smoked Chicken (a regular item at our house) from the Roadhouse, roast beef, pork chops, or pâté. Because its shelf-life is long, you can keep the mostarda in the fridge for a good long while. It’s also fantastically addictive—I’ve been putting a bit of it on almost everything, and my meals are a bit better for it. I’ll give you a heads-up that if you’re sensitive to heat, the mustard is slightly on the hotter side, so start slowly. Personally, I eat it by the spoonful.

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Handmade Tunisian Harissa combined with handcrafted Creamery Cream Cheese

Fifteen years or so ago, we did a T-shirt at the Roadhouse to promote our then-new Pimento Cheese. In a bit of one-line visioning, we wrote “Pimento Cheese Capital of the Midwest.” (The T-shirt is a Zingerman’s classic and one of my favorites, and as of last month, you can buy one!) At the time, we were just getting going with Pimento Cheese and hardly anyone in Ann Arbor even knew what it was. Today it’s one of our top-selling items at the Roadhouse and Deli. Mail Order ships it regularly, and the Creamery wholesales it to retailers and restaurants all over the country.

Given that there are many thousands of pimento cheese recipes in the U.S., I started to think about other cultures that have created similar spreads that combine cheese and chiles. They don’t call them “pimento cheese,” but they could. Our long-standing love for Liptauer at the Creamery, I realized, was actually an affinity for what we could well be calling “Hungarian Pimento Cheese.” What follows is a “recipe” for a pimento cheese we aren’t yet selling, but I’m pretty sure we probably ought to be. In the meantime, you can make it at home in a matter of minutes, as I did the other day. It’s incredibly easy to make something so delicious that you might well find yourself, as I have, making it over and over again.

The “Tunisian Pimento Cheese” calls for two world-class ingredients, products that are so special that the choice of brand to be used will, to be clear, make a BIG difference. Each is exceptional. First up is the handmade Cream Cheese from Zingerman’s Creamery. Using milk from the herd of the good folks at Calder Dairy in Carleton, it’s made simply with rennet (to separate solid curd from liquid whey), a bit of added cream, and sea salt. I had some again the other day for the first time in a few months and was reminded anew just how amazingly excellent it is. Creamy, full-flavored, mouth-filling, and a really fine long finish.

The other ingredient is the traditional Harissa from the Mahjoub family in Tunisia. It’s a family recipe that goes back for generations. Majid Mahjoub shares, “From a very young age, my parents taught me that this recipe comes from very far away. We, the children, learned a lot, but I believe that our parents learned even more, from theirs.” Other than the spices, all of the ingredients in the harissa are grown, organically and sustainably, on the Mahjoub family farm. Three different peppers, all carefully hand seeded and sun-dried; tomatoes handled similarly (the sun-drying makes a big difference); extra virgin olive oil (the one Tammie and I cook with daily at home); with a small bit of garlic, coriander, caraway seed, and some sea salt.

If there is one star of this savory confection, it would probably be the Baklouti pepper. While all chile peppers arrived in Africa only after Columbus’ first encounter with the Americas, over the last few hundred years the Baklouti has become as integral to Tunisian cooking as the Piquillo to the Spanish Basque Country or Paprika to Hungary. It’s named for the town of Bekalta, on the country’s east coast, which, since it’s a port city could well be the place the pepper first made its presence known on Tunisian shores. Large red tapering pods, hot but not mind-blowingly so, and appropriately very flavorful.

The creamy mildness of the cream cheese is an ideal foil for the spicy complexity of the harissa. Making the spread is about as simple as it gets. I like a ratio of about two parts cream cheese to one part harissa, but you can vary that up or down depending on how intense and how spicy you like your food. Thin with a small bit of extra virgin olive oil. Garnish if you like with some chopped fresh herbs—dill, mint, basil … any or all would be good. Eat and enjoy!

Because both of these products—the Creamery’s Cream Cheese and the Mahjoub’s Harissa—are made very much as they would have been a hundred years ago, what you and I will taste when we try this is much the same as we would have experienced back in 1896 when the Mahjoub family first started to sell the public what they had long been making and eating at home. It’s great as is on crackers. Beautiful on a baked potato. Lovely stuffed under the skin of roasted chicken. Super tasty on a sandwich and it makes a great grilled cheese. You can even use it to toss with pasta. This “Tunisian Pimento Cheese” is spicy, creamy, and, like the original Pimento Cheese, pretty much darned good on everything! It’s also, I’ll warn you, addictive!

You can find the Cream Cheese at the Creamery, Bakeshop, Deli, and Roadhouse, as well as on Zingermans.com. The Moulins Mahjoub Harissa is both at the Deli and online for shipping as well.

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A wealth of wonderful creamy cheese to enrich your table

I’ve been eating and loving the ricotta from the Callahan family’s Bellwether Farms for probably fifteen years now. For most of that time, I could only get it when I was out in the Bay Area. Happily, a few years ago we started to have access to it at the Cream Top Shop. Now, we’re barely ever without it at our house.

Although I’d read about ricotta many times, I really understood it for the first time thirty years ago last month. Here’s what I wrote a few years later:

I can almost tell you to the day when it was that I had this ricotta revelation. It was the first week of November 1992, right before Bill Clinton defeated George Bush I for president. I was down in Rome to visit the people who make our Pecorino Romano. As we toured the Pecorino production, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a couple of workers stirring a large, steel, steam-shrouded kettle off to one side of the room. A few minutes later they start to slowly scoop out small mounds of soft white cheese from the kettles. These in turn are set softly into a series of small baskets—some white plastic, some natural wicker—sitting alongside each vat.

“What are they doing over there?” I asked my host, not wanting to seem as if I hadn’t been listening to his presentation. “Oh that? That’s ricotta,” he said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Of course. That’s ricotta. I’d read about it two thousand times but seeing it in person it finally started to hit home what ricotta was really all about.

Longtime specialty food guru Darrell Corti from Sacramento told me years ago that “eating great fresh ricotta is like eating clouds.” Light, fluffy, creamy, and delicious, I often just eat a bit of the Bellwether ricotta by the spoonful. Terrific on toasted Bakehouse bread of any sort—and I love ricotta on rye. Or just eaten for breakfast, a small bit at a time with olive oil and/or honey and fresh fruit. It’s also great both on pasta, and in pasta (super great for stuffing ravioli or tortellini). Topped with a bit of honey (the Deli has some amazing ones—we have an incredible new orange blossom honey from the folks at Miele Thun) it’s a fabulous dessert! Michael Zyw, the artist-farmer who makes the equally delicious Poggio Lamentano olive oil from western Tuscany, told me that his father, the Polish-Jewish-British-Italian artist Alexander Zyw, used to mix ricotta with finely ground espresso (before it’s brewed, to be clear) and honey and eat it for dessert. Delicious!

It’s no accident that the Bellwether ricotta is so special. Everything about it is done with care and a huge commitment to quality. Liam Callahan says:

When ricotta is made in the traditional way it is one of the most delicious dairy products you could have. We buy all of the milk from our neighbor just down the road from us. They milk all Jerseys and feed mostly grass/silage grown on the farm. This ricotta gets its flavor and necessary acidity from being cultured rather than adding acid (vinegar, citric acid, etc.) I think this lets us have the best texture and by far the most flavor of any ricotta out there. Ricotta is a deceptively simple cheese. Each time I see the expression on a person’s face the first time they try it I am reminded how fortunate I am to be able to do what I do.

How to Enjoy Ricotta

The next time you’re entertaining, consider taking their suggestion to simply turn a basket of the Bellwether ricotta over onto a decorative platter, take off the plastic basket in which it’s packed, and then surround it with olives, roasted peppers, cured ham or salami, some toasted Bakehouse bread (True North would be terrific). I’d drizzle the ricotta with a great olive oil and a bunch of really great cracked black pepper. Or, sprinkle on a handful of the Marash red pepper from Turkey and pour over a good bit of that outstanding olive oil from the Moulins de Mahjoub and a wreath of fresh basil leaves. Or if you prefer sweet to savory, use some American Spoon Early Glow Strawberry preserves instead of the red pepper.

While you’re at the Cream Top shop scoring some ricotta, consider handmade Cream Cheese for your bagels at breakfast. We also have gelato for dessert (my top pick is the Sicilian pistachio), really cool custom-made Gelato Cakes, a range of other artisan cheeses, wine, beer, and a wealth of other good things to eat!

Right this way for ricotta!

P.S. The Bellwether Jersey Yogurt at the Cream Top Shop is equally amazing!

P.P.S. Check out this post about Blu, the amazing dog Tammie rescued earlier this year, that she just happened to post this week!  As you’ll see, he is gently and happily eating Bellwether Ricotta off her finger!

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