march - april 2016 zingerman's newsletter

ISSUE # 254 MARCH-APRIL 20161

Every spring bacon lovers, bacon makers, cooking school teachers, culinary historians, writers, statisticians, sociologists, chefs, roller derby professionals and other pork-driven people from all over the globe get together to talk, taste, and toast the terrific flavors and cultural iconography of all things bacon (and bacon-related). Every year’s lineup seems to surpass the excellent group of speakers from the previous season, and this spring’s session promises to be another transcendent step in cured pork’s rising profile.

As always, this year’s Camp Bacon is a fundraiser for two of our favorite non-profit organizations—the Southern Foodways Alliance and the 4H Club of Washtenaw County. Southern Foodways, based in Oxford, Mississippi, has been celebrating and honoring southern food traditions for 15 years now. Pork, of course, takes a prominent place in the Southern culinary pantheon. Many of our best bacon connections have come our work with SFA. The 4H Clubs have been supporting the work and study of young people in agriculture since the early years of the 20th century. Our commitment to community-based agriculture makes them a natural fit for Camp Bacon. The higher the quality of American hog rearing, the better our bacon is likely to be! All the monies raised by Camp Bacon will go to help support these two important community non-profits.

Lessons From the Endzone Zingtrain Speaker Series – Bacon for the Brain! Wednesday,June1,8-9:30amatZingTrain•$50

John U. Bacon kicks things off with a presentation from his new book, Endzone: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Michigan Football.

Potlikker Film FestivalWednesday,June1,6:30-8:30pmatZingTrain$30($5taxdeductible)

A tasting of great bacon-based appetizers and short, in-teresting documentaries about the culinary history of the American South.

Bakin’ with Bacon Class Thursday,June2orFridayJune3,1-5pmatBAKE!•$125

Our nationally recognized school for home bakers brings flour and pork fat together for a couple of hands-on bacon-fllled baking classes!

The Annual Bacon Ball: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig Thursday,June2,7-9pmattheRoadhouse•$75

This year’s guest speaker will be Mark Essig sharing stories from his fantastic new book Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

Food Tour: Fresh Taste of Detroit Friday,June3,1-10pm,variouslocations•$290

Join us in a high energy "tasting jaunt" through the markets, kitchens and breweries of Detroit. Go behind the scenes with the chefs and taste-makers who are creating Detroit's vibrant food scene. Top off the evening- our "Common Ta-ble" pork-centric dinner at Detroit's hottest pop-up!

Camp Bacon Street Fair Sunday,June5th,11am-2pmattheSundayArtisanMarketinKerrytown•freeadmission

Come on down to the market – just a block down from the Deli! – to celebrate great pork with a three-hour street fair with an array of vendors selling, sampling, and showcas-ing all things bacon—a great way to have lunch, sample new bacon fares, or just have some fun with bacon-based games for kids of all ages. Free admission, but a donation to Washtenaw 4-H is suggested.

6th Annual

Adrian Miller is a culinary historian and a certified bar-becue judge. His book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time won the 2014 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Schol-arship. Adrian will speak on the subject of “Presidential Pork.”

Mark Essig has written op-eds and book reviews for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Fran-cisco Chronicle. Mark will discuss his most recent book, Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig.

Rolando Beramendi is the founder of Manicaretti, one of the world’s premier importers of fine Italian foods. He was instrumental in helping to bring Gianluigi Peduzzi of Rustichella Pasta to Zingerman’s for a wonderful special dinner in 2014. For Camp Bacon, Rolando will make his fa-mous Spaghettoni o Penne Rustiche Primo Grano alla Gri-cia.

Ari Miller is the founder of Phildelphia’s 1732 Meats, which has taken the cured meat-loving crowd in the City of Brotherly Love by storm. Ari will attempt to answer the question, “What’s a nice Jewish boy doing making bacon?”

Val Neff-Rasmussen oversees the sourcing for all new meats sold at Zingerman's Mail Order. She shares what she learns from her travels in The Feed, a weekly newsletter and blog that tells the stories of the secret life of the foods we sell and love. At Camp Bacon, she will offer some insight into the question: "What gives meat flavor?"

Chris Wilson currently serves as Director of the Ex-perience and Program Design and the Program in African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Mr. Wilson will speak on the subject of “Pork and African American Culture.”

Chef Sherry Yard began her culinary career at the venerable Rainbow Room. She is currently in the process of reviving and revitalizing the iconic Helms Bakery in Los Angeles, and will speak on the subject “Baking with Bacon.”

Fred Bueltmann, aka the Beervagelist, is a vice presi-dent with New Holland Brewing. He will tells us how “Crafts Come Together Raising Bacon and Brewing Beer.”

Fidel Galano on “The mysteries and mastery of Cuban pork cooking.”

Steve and Kirsty Carre of Swanbourne Market in Perth, Western Australia. The Carres are committed to bringing their patrons the best in West Australian and farm direct produce. Steve and Kirsty will talk about “Australia’s Love Affair with Pork and Bacon.”

Susan Schwallie brings the numbers behind the food. She draws on her expertise as one of the country’s leading consumer statistics expert to share the latest pork- and ba-con-related numbers from the marketplace. Who’s eating bacon? How much? How was that consumption changed? Susan has the answers!

Mike Zoromski, smokemaster for Nueske’s Applewood Smoked Meats, started working for the smoked meat pur-veyor in 1983, just one year after Zingerman’s started using Nueske’s bacon at the Deli. Mike will give us “A Look Behind the Smokehouse Door.”

Special Guest Appearance by John U. Bacon. Univer-sity of Michigan alum John has been very busy for the past two decades. Southeast Michigan natives will remember his early days as a journalist writing columns in the Ann Arbor News and the Detroit News.

THE MAIN EVENTSaturday,June4,8am-4pm(breakfaststartsat7:30am)•$195

Zingerman’sCornmanFarms,8540IslandLakeRd.,Dexter,MIa fundraiser for the Southern Foodways Alliance, $120 is tax deductible

An all-day event filled with meaty speakers, lots of learning, a whole lot of laughing and, of course, all the bacon you can eat! Bacon lovers from around the globe trek to the Camp Bacon Main Event each to meet and eat and share their love for really good cured pork in a day filled with presenta-

tions by bacon producers, food experts, and a few fun surprise guests.

thanks to our sponsors!

for tickets and more information, visit ZINGERMANSCAMPBACON.COM


Once upon a time spices were not a mundane stopping point mid-way down a side aisle in the supermarket. They were, by contrast, a special luxury, something that might now be considered like caviar or smoked salmon (both of which by the way, back in that era, were cheap and eminently affordable edibles eaten mostly by the poor or the middle class). Most peo-ple in Europe, six or seven hundred years ago, lived an almost completely spiceless existence At most they’d heard tell of spices coming from the East, tasted them in a small slice of Christmas cake, or smelled them from a stand at the market too costly for them to ever imagine entering. Spices then were one of the surest ways available to impress your friends, make a big first impression, bring fantasy and the flavors of faraway lands into the hands of your guests as they ate, enjoyed and imagined the exotic cultures from which they came. In a time when there was no internet, no movies, no photography, and barely any books, spices were a way that those who could afford them could take your imagination to lands you knew you’d almost certainly never actually see. On occasion, when the winds and the world and camel caravans conspired to cooper-ate, those with money might have gotten hold of the spices that could raise the bar on their cooking.

I have a hard time understanding many things in history. Although I can usually make sense of the circumstances—and in that sense I can see how things happened from an intellectual standpoint—I can’t really imagine myself doing what others did. Pepper is a different story. I get it. I would chase pepper a long ways, maybe even into the unknown, or across wide expanses of previously uncharted ocean. Which is, of course, exactly what Christopher Columbus didwhen, back in 1492, he sailed west into the unknown. His major motivation, his primary purpose was to find a direct source of pepper. Garnering great fame and getting really rich were likely accompaniments that I’m sure added to the equation. But pepper was pretty clearly the direct object of his affection.

The de Vienne family, like Columbus, has also travelled the world in search of spices. But drive is totally different. Columbus, his crew, and those who followed him, essentially eradicated the traditional ways of life and the health of the native peoples they encountered. The de Vienne family, from who we buy our spices, work long and hard to do the opposite. Where Columbus went west across the Atlantic, the de Viennes travelled from the West, Montreal to be exact, back to the East, to India, China, Indonesia,. Instead of exploiting, they enhance. Rather than extract they embellish. Rather than take wealth to another world, they work to improve the lives and the economy of those who do the plant-ing, grafting, growing and harvesting of the spices on site in the producing countries. Everywhere they go, they’ve been able to help growers—of pepper and many other spices—to get higher prices for their product by raising quality standards. The impact that that work has had on the families and villages of the grow-ers is quite amazing. And thanks to all their efforts their spices enhance our cooking, and our lives, here in Ann Arbor. Unlike the work of the early spice traders who served only an elite, the Épices de Cru spice line that we get the from the de Viennes is for everyone!

Secret Jews, Pepper Smuggling and Transcontinental TradeOne of the names you probably don’t know is, to me, one of the most interesting of pepper traders, the converso Jewish Mendes family. Fleeing the Spanish Inquistion for Lisbon, they eventually spread their influence all over Europe, and indirectly, the rest of the world. The Mendes, as had so many of their brethren, faked conversion, and lived for many years, secretly as Jews. Gracia Mendes Nasi, wife of the patriarch of the family, known also as Dona Gracia, led the House of Mendes for decades after her husband’s death. With her leadership the family built its wealth dealing in spices, over three quarters of which was pepper. Over the years, Gracia Nasi led the family to establish outposts in most of Europe’s capitals. Working behind the scenes with a majesty that Machiavelli, a generation ahead of her, would likely have admired. On the one hand, Dona Gracia has gained admiration as an early woman entrepreneur in an era when men dominated commerce even more than they do now, and as covert Jew making her way exuberantly in an almost exclusively Christian part of the world. On the other hand, her single-mindedness and Mendes-family-first focus were not exactly a model of progressive busi-ness as we now try to model. In her day she helped build the fam-ily holdings into what writer Gary Nabhan calls, “the first trans-

national corporation to perform as if it were above the law of any country country in which it worked.” Reading her story, it dawned on me that what we think of today when we imagine “the power of petro-dollars” was, five or six centuries earlier, the “power of pepper pesos.” She was apparently exceptionally focused, willing to fight behind the scenes to make happen whatever she wanted, ready to change direction as needed to get the family firm to the wealth and power she sought. Eventually, she led the family to resettle in Ferrara, Italy, at the invitation of the Duke of Este. Envious of their wealth, he offered them the chance to openly practice Judaism if they would relocate onto his lands. Interestingly, while Ferdinand and Isabella had near-ly bankrupted Spain by funding both the Inquisition and Columbus, the Mendes family grew wealthy, all the while working in the background. Later it was learned, Gracia Nasi used her network and her financial resources to help secret Jews and Muslims escape from the Inquisition in Spain.

A Dish for Dona Gracia—Pasta with Pepper, Honey, and Olive Oil This is a dish I can well envision being served in Dona Gracia’s home in her later Italian years. As with almost everything else we cook, the quality of the ingredients is critical. I imagine it along the lines of an Italian version of the noodle kugel my grandmother used to make for us so regularly when I was a kid. The dish is simple but deli-cious. Really good pasta, dressed with excellent extra virgin olive oil and some really good honey. On top, grate some Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese on top and then add a very generous dose of freshly ground pepper. I like it with long pepper because of its delicacy. It’s nice with a short, flat, pasta shape like the Rustichella sagne e pezzi so the honey and oil coat both sides of the noodles.

Assuming that you’re using a really great pasta to begin with, the dish works very well with leftover pasta, (This is one of the little known facts of the pasta world—really great pasta tastes terrific even at room temperature a day later; commercial pasta in a similar state has almost no flavor whatsoever). In the era in which the Mendes were making hay, sweet and savory dishes were not separated as we generally do in the west today so this could have been an appetizer, a main course, a side dish or dessert. I’d forecast that these days it would a great hit with kids, though perhaps with less pepper on it than I would person-ally prefer. In Dona Gracia’s home, they would I’m sure have put prodigious amounts of pepper on the dish and it’s quite delicious that way. If you’re feeling really luxurious and want to get into character, add a bit of ground Épices de Cru # 00000 Ceylon Cinnamon. I’m not a big sweet eater but I think I could eat this dish almost every day!

The passionate pursuit of pepper by Europeans impacted not only economics, politics and cultural conversion, but also—both directly and indirectly—the culinary world. Although Columbus unwittingly went the wrong way, his “discovery” of the Americas brought tomatoes, potatoes,

PEPPER ONCE CHANGED THE WORLD; IT CAN STILL MAKE A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE IN YOUR KITCHEN

While pepper has become readily available and relatively inex-pensive, the sad reality is that few Americans have ever enjoyed peppercorns at their best. Most experience pepper only in its pre-ground—and by definition, nearly always stale—form. If you think about all the foods you’ve come to appreciate at a high level of quality—chocolate, olive oil, wine, whiskey, cheese, cof-fee, bread, pastry—there’s no reason not to treat pepper with the same high regard as all the rest. In fact, there might be even more reason—unlike those other items pepper has high odds of making at appearance at almost every meal!

1. BUY WHOLE PEPPERCORNSThe absolute most enormous qualitative leap to make in the pep-per world is to simply insist on eating only freshly ground whole peppercorns. Regardless of the quality of the corns, the results of grinding fresh are guaranteed to be better than you’d get from almost anything pre-ground in a tin or bottle. I’d say, “there’s no comparison” except that that’s one of those euphemisms that never makes sense to me because the comparison is as clear as can be. Freshly ground pepper is about twenty-five thousand times better. The gap is so great that they could almost be classi-fied as different products.

2. GRIND TO ORDER On the other hand, go get your pepper grinder. If you stop to notice, grinding whole black pepper is an exceptional sensory experience in almost every sense. Pull out a tin of peppercorns. I have a half dozen different peppercorns from Epices de Cru on my counter, but all you need is one to get going! Before you use them to fill the grinder, give ‘em a good looking over. Black pep-per is an amazingly strange “animal.” Wrinkled, charcoal-colored little rounds. Pour ‘em in. Then close up the grinder. Give it a good twist, pause, then give it another. Pre-ground pepper sits pas-sively, silently. But freshly ground pepper is alive; you can hear the peppercorns crunch and crackle as you shift the gears. Almost immediately you’ll experience the aroma. Freshly ground pepper doesn’t just make you sneeze—it actually perfumes the entire area in which it’s been ground. Pick up a bit and push it between your thumb and forefinger. Where pre-ground feels flat, fresh pepper will feel moister, livelier. You should be able to feel the essential oils as they move back and forth between your fingers.

Now loosen the bolt or the bit on the top of the grinder. After a couple of turns you should be getting a coarser grind. (If you’re not, there’s likely something wrong with your grinder.) One of the great things about grinding fresh is that you get to adjust the grind “to order.” If you’re looking for a more pronounced flavor, keep it coarse. If you want just a hint of pepper to blend in with other flavors, keep it fine.

Lastly, take a taste. If you eat it on its own, freshly ground pep-per can be a bit much unless you’re a pepper addict like I am. On the other hand, on a salad or slice of fresh mozzarella, or really just about anything else you can imagine, its flavor is fantastic. Big! Bold! Beautiful. There very definitely is a comparison: in my world, freshly-ground is the only way to go.

3. TASTE AND COMPAREAs with anything else, it’s a lot easier to understand the difference from one offering to the next when you have four or five to taste one after the other. I think it can be an interesting part of enter-taining. Next time you have company over for dinner, don’t just put out one pepper grinder—fill four, each with a different pep-percorn and make the evening one of culinary education as well as conversation and eating. Or, here’s another way to test it out, courtesy of Philippe: “Just for fun taste the same pepper ground yesterday, one hour ago and one minute ago.” He’s correct. The difference is very noticeable.

4. BUY BETTER PEPPERLike every other ingredient you buy there are big differences from one peppercorn to the other. While low quality whole pep-percorns are surely better than bad preground pepper, one can do a lot better than just the basics. The average American offering though is rarely particularly good. Here at Zingerman’s, of course, we’re always going after the most flavorful, traditional offerings we can access. Which is where the three decade long ‘voyage” of the de Vienne family has been so wonderful. By linking up our spice fortunes with theirs we almost overnight gained access to some superb pepper offerings.

4 KEYS to BETTER PEPPER


corn and cacao (just to name a few) back to Europe. It was actually the Portuguese, a few years later, who really finally found the direct route to the source, arriving in India by sea in 1498. Their success established new trade routes, and more plentiful supplies. Slowly but surely, pepper prices fell; by the end of the 17th century spices lost their supremacy in world trade. Gradually pepper became more affordable, and hence more readily available to the middle classes.

In India, peppercorns had always been pretty readily avail-able to anyone interested in cooking with them. But everyday people in Europe came to pepper pretty late in the game; it didn’t become readily available or affordable until the 19th century. In fact, because of pepper’s high price, many cul-tures—Calabria, Spain, Hungary—came to use some version of chiles, or often ground into what we now call paprika. Because chiles could be grown in southern Europe—where peppercorns could not—they were a much more affordable option for poorer people who want to add a bit of spice to their everyday eating. In many ways, the 1000 salt and pep-per shakers on display at the Roadhouse demonstrate the change. What was once the province of wealthy, pepper lov-ing princes, has, in the last few hundred years, become the property of every day people. Pepper, by name and presence, is now passe. Everyone has access to it. What they don’t have are the exceptionally interesting, single source peppercorns of the highest quality, the ones that do for the pepper world what great estate wines do for grapes.

Black, White and Green: The Colors of the Peppercorn RainbowBlack pepper is a berry, the botanical name of which is piper nigrum. The vine needs to be 10° to 20° on either side of the equator where it can get needed heat and a long rainy season as well as some shade. India, Indonesia, Brazil and Malaysia are the most prominent producers. Like vanilla, the pepper plant is a vine; it has green heart-shaped leaves, and produces small white flowers each spring. Like vanilla, it is often planted at the base of “tutor trees,” on which the vine can climb. The tutors need to have rough textured bark so that the tendrils can take hold: mango, silver oak, rosewood, white teak and coffee trees all have “second jobs” serving to guide the growth of the pepper plants. In fact, at least in India, pepper is usually itself a secondary crop—most who grow it have some other primary product they produce, often coffee.

A more modern technique for growing pepper is to put the plants next to simple wooden posts hammered into the ground. The vine has tiny little tendrils that will attach them-selves to most anything that stays in proximity long enough for them to take hold. Allowed to grow unchecked, the plants can reach heights of nearly two hundred feet, but most mod-ern vines are trained to stay between nine and twelve feet (again, like vanilla) for easier access at harvest time.

Like every other man-managed food product, there are wide variations in agricultural practice for pepper growing around the world. The de Viennes are buying pepper is basically “forest-farmed”—pepper is grown intermingled with many other plants, trees, bushes, etc. This intermingling of crops is not unique to Wayanad. Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills has spoken extensively about the increase in flavor that comes from this sort of “intercropping.” The flavor of each plant is embellished by the others with which the root systems are in contact. Hence the quality of the pepper we have from Épices de Cru is not just the variety or the soil but also the growing methods. By contrast, a great deal of modern day commer-cially grown pepper comes from giant mono cropped (where only pepper is planted) farms that plant huge fields full of nothing but pepper, in much the way corn is commercially grown in here in Iowa.

Pepper, to be clear, isn’t a quick cash crop; from the time of planting, a grower is looking at a wait of two to five years before the new vines bear fruit (about as long as it takes to get olive oil from a new tree). From that point on, you’ve got another twelve-to twenty-five years of productive activity. In March, the pepper plant puts out a series of small flow-ers. Later in the spring, pollinated flowers produce a series of roughly three-inch long spikes, each of which holds about thirty to fifty small greenish berries, something like a quarter of an inch across. Inside each berry is a single seed which, after curing, will become—about nine months later—the dried peppercorn.

Ain’t It BlackBlack pepper is, far and away, the biggest part of the pepper crop. To produce black pepper, the berries are plucked when they have attained their full size, but are still greenish, just turning to yellow, in color. At this point the fruit is not yet actually ripe. Because the berries ripen at different rates (even on the same plant), the harvest may continue for weeks.

One odd linguistic aspect of the trade is that although we refer to whole, freshly ground peppercorns as “fresh pepper,” the reality is that it’s not fresh at all but rather dried. The just-picked berries are removed from the stems, then laid out on bamboo mats in uncovered courtyards where the tropical sun has its way with them. Some estates now dip the freshly picked peppercorns in boiling water first, which speeds the maturing process. After a stretch of three to seven days, the heat has shrunk the berries into their well-recognized wrinkled state, and turned their outer skin a flat black color. The peppercorns are then cleaned of the usual stones, stems, sticks and other assorted agricultural debris. Later, the pep-percorns are sorted by traders who run them through a series of screens, then sort and pack them into sacks of roughly 150 pounds for shipment.

A Whiter Shade of PaleAncient peoples often wrongly assumed that white and black pepper came from two different plants (much as westerners incorrectly imagined green and black tea), an inaccuracy that was widely accepted up until the 14th century; most Europeans didn’t get their pepper color facts straight ‘til the middle of the 15th century. In fact, black and white peppercorns come from the same plant just as green and black olives come from the same tree. True white pepper is made from ripe (instead of unripe) berries, picked a week or so later than those gathered for black pepper, when the berries are almost all yellow to orange in color. Bags of ripe berries are left submerged in streams—or now in man-made vats—for a week to ten days. This unusual underwater cure essentially “rots” away the outer skin of the fruit, which would otherwise turn black during curing. After drying, what’s left is the white core of the berry, which is what we know as white pepper.

White pepper has a subtler flavor than black. It’s used most often when you want the pepper to be no more than a subtle blip on your spice screen. Visually, of course, it’s well suited to lighter colored sauces. You rarely see anyone grind white peppercorns fresh for a recipe, but I can’t really say why. Just as black pepper is better ground just before use, so too is white pepper.

Go GreenGreen peppercorns have a fruitier, slightly sweet pungency to them. They’re excellent with beef, chicken or fish, and very good with fresh goat cheese as well. What are they? They’re simply the fresh, undried version of black pepper, related to the black peppercorns we’re used to in the same way that roasted almonds are to the fresh ones. In both cases,the taste of the dried versions are very familiar to us, while the fresh product is almost unknown in North America.

Green peppercorns are unripe berries harvested a few weeks before black pepper would be picked. At this stage, the core of the fruit isn’t yet fully developed. The young berries are not cured in sun. Because they are traditionally consumed only in their fresh state, green peppercorns were essentially unseen in the west until the middle of the 20th century. They have a pleasantly crunchy texture, a flavor that hints of green fruit and eucalyptus, and a commensurately short shelf life. In India, they’re sold soft enough to be mashed into a paste—unlike vanilla which requires extensive curing before it develops any flavor, the basic characteristics of the pepper are already present in the form of the raw berries. Today, for export purposes, they’re either freeze dried, or packed in brine to keep ‘em from turning black.

It’s easy to use green peppercorns. In France, it’s quite com-mon to mix them in with black pepper in one’s grinder, getting a more varied set of pepper flavors onto your food. You can crush them lightly with a mortar and pestle. Or you can use them in sauces as is, since their flavor is far less pungent than that of their cured black cousins.

PEPPER ONCE CHANGED THE WORLD; IT CAN STILL MAKE A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE IN YOUR KITCHEN

MARCH Mr. Rose's Hamonious Woodland $14.99Rosemary ham, cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato slices, red onion, mayo and oil & vinegar on grilled sesame semolina.

APRIL NY's Tempyay! $11.99Grilled tempeh, barbecue sauce, melty cheddar and coleslaw on grilled sourdough.

MARCH Ortiz MackerelNow$9.99/eachwas $14.99/eachGorgeous, slender little fillets of heaven packed upright in a beautiful red and gold labeled jar soaking in luscious extra virgin olive oil. One taste, and you'll see that their texture,flavor and versatility is unforgettable.

APRIL Ortiz Ventresca Yellow Fin Tuna Now$10.55/each was $15.99/eachVentresca tuna is consid-ered by many to be the tasti-est and most exquisite of all tinned tuna. Coming from the belly of the fish, it has a but-tery mouth feel that simply melts on the tongue. Amazing on a cracker, by the forkful, or as an upscale tuna salad.

MARCH Peppercorns all types on sale, 25% off!Épices de Cru has helped the Deli source the best pepper on the Planet! We have 17 types of peppercorns on sale, from custom blends to single-estate grown. Stock up now and refill those pepper grinders with something new to elevate your cooking to the next level.

APRIL Apicius Spice Blend Was $13 Now $9.75A faithful attempt at recreating a blend that would have been popular during the Roman era. Featuring long pepper, rosemary, and celery seed, among others, this rustic mix of herbs and spices goes well with sweet and sour dishes. It’s great on braised meats and slow-cooked vegetables.

MARCH Colcannon & Boxty Plate • $13.99This potato-centric plate fea-tures a pair of our favorite Irish fare, both sporting incred-ibly festive names. Comes with your choice of side salad from our deli case. Available start-ing at 11am.

APRIL Pörkölt Plate • $14.99Stewed pork shoulder and onions smothered in stone ground Hodi paprika piled high on a bed of nokedli dumplings. Comes with your choice of side salad from our deli case. Available starting at 11am.See page 11 for Spice Week Events at BAKE!,

the Roadhouse and the Delicatessen, April 11-16!


BLACK PEPPER TELLICHERY RESERVEPhilippe de Vienne says, “Tellichery is probably the

most famous and abused name in the black pepper trade. The town is one of many harbours on the south-western coast of India known as the Malabar Coast. The justly deserved reputa-tion grew during the British period when the town was the export point for the area pepper. Over time the word Tellichery became synonymous with quality pepper. In those days the pep-per from the surrounding mountains was exported through the now disused port of Thalassery as it is now called. The great peppers still come from the hills, most notably from the Wyanad area. Today other ports are used but the name remains, a sure sign of the reputation of the black pepper from this area. As the name does not benefit from an A.O.C. protection, it is greatly abused by people who want to project a quality image for their second rate pepper.”

The real thing is an inspiration. How do you know you have it? One obvious answer is buy from people you trust, as we do with the de Viennes. Another is to learn to know the smells and fla-vors that accompany the authentic article. The aroma of the de Vienne’s Telicherry Reserve is BIG. Stick your nose inside the tin and take a deep breath. Surprisingly, it doesn’t make me sneeze. It reminds of burnished old wood, of eucalyptus, of walking through the woods in northern California. The flavor is big too. Supermarket pepper by contrast, is rather one-dimensional, hot in a narrow and not all that enticing if still better than nothing kind of way. . It’s spicy but it’s hardly habanero-hot. This is a spice that livens the tongue, that continues to resonate without really ever taking over. The heat is rich, well-rounded, well off, worldly.

MLAMALA BLACK PEPPER FROM INDIA

The Mlamala pepper comes from the Cardamom Hills, near where the great green cardamom we get from the de Viennes (try it in the Armenian coffee at Zingerman’s Coffee Company) is coming from. It’s harvested in the hills facing the areas near the Periyar river where the de Viennes semi-wild Tribal black pepper (also amazing) come from. “Unlike tribal it is from a domesti-cated variety of pepper vines; hence the larger berries. Similar terroir, different varietal,” Philippe explained.

Part of the quality comes from the altitude—these Mlamala pepper vines grow at 2500 to 3000 feet above sea level. The area gets a lot of sunlight which, along with the good local soil, naturally fertilized by the farmers, yields large and full flavored berries. Careful and timely harvesting and processing complete the picture. It’s a delicious, full flavored, spicy regional black pepper. Use it any way you would use other black peppercorns, which, if you’re like me, means on almost everything. Salads, pastas, meats, seafood, soup, tomatoes. Honestly it’s even good on vanilla ice cream.

SHIMOGA PEPPER FROM INDIAAn especially interesting, lively black pepper from the

Shimoga district in the Indian state of Karnakata. Also known as Mysore, it’s north of the Telicherry region. At times we’ve gotten some terrific coffee from the region. Today it’s the leading loca-tion for India’s burgeoning biotechnology businesses. Where Tellicherry goes big, wide and deep, Shimoga is focused, narrow, intense with an almost electric set of high notes, a sensual spicy warmth and a very long and lovely finish.

WILD TRIBAL PEPPER FROM INDIA

Speaking of the Cardamom Hills, here’s a wild offering—wild grown, black peppercorns, hand harvested in the Periyar Tiger Preserve in the Cardamom Hills. Why “tribal pepper?” Philippe de Vienne explained, “The Tribals, as they are called In India (not in a pejorative way) are the indigenous or first nations of India. They are essentially animists and live a semi- settled life. The government affords them a degree of protection—outsiders are not permitted without passes to the areas. When the Preserve was established the people where hunting tiger for the black market. They were encouraged to grow pepper in their villages using cuttings from wild vines that still grow in the surrounding jungle. So essentially, when you eat tribal pepper you have the original taste and flavor of wild pepper. The ‘wildness’ explains its quick hot bite and rustic flavors.”

At the same time, part of what’s making this wild Tribal Pepper so engaging to me right now is that it’s new—as in, “new crop,” just harvested a few months back. There’s a freshness and liveliness to its flavor and aroma that comes from being new crop—it’s actually been air-shipped to Montreal for the de Viennes, then boxed and sent south over the border to us. It’s got a lot of deep, balanced, long lasting pepper heat. High notes in the nose, low notes to underwrite those, and a really long slow lingering finish.

MUNTOK WHITE PEPPER FROM SUMATRAWhile white pepper is less overtly popular in the U.S.,

it’s highly prized in Europe where its more delicate flavor fits well with many dishes. It’s here in Indonesia that the process has been essentially perfected over the centuries. “It is impossible to ignore the fact that it is thanks to the ancestral knowledge and practices in places like Bangka throughout South east Asia, that we learned how to transform perfectly ripe peppercorns into white pepper. This product so intrigued the Dutch that they went on to monopolize the trade of this most sought-after commodity, which they called Muntok after the harbour from which it was transported beginning in the 18th century.”

You can use white pepper really any place you’d use black. It’s a bit subtler, softer, less likely to take over a dish. Be careful. It can creep up on you slowly from behind if you put too much in. Philippe adds, “White pepper is often used ground in white dishes where black pepper would show black fleck. The French love white pepper for that reason, cream sauces, white fish and for the lighter flavour that balances well with subtle ingredients.”

8-PEPPER BLENDThis might be the best of all peppercorn worlds for the cook who values diversity of flavor. Most pepper blends are a waste

of time because they mix white, black, green and pink and it’s silly. They don’t work well

because the black and the white overtake the deli-cacy of the other two. But I still really wanted a pepper blend. I bugged my dad for years. But he didn’t like the idea. And then, literally, it came to him in a dream. He had the idea to add all-spice to the blend. I love it. It’s one of the few original blends we have but it works with everything because it has so many aspects it works with almost everything.

PINK PEPPERCORNS These are actually not peppercorns at all, but the pink-

ish-red berries of another bush, Schinus molle. Many Americans are familiar with their flavor, which contributes to the spicy taste of Teaberry gum. The de Viennes have sourced some especially excellent ones from the east coast of Madagascar. An intriguing and enticing addition to fish dishes, fresh cheese, lobster, or

cocktails.

VOATSIPERIFERY BLACK PEPPER

Voatsiperifery does have a bit of otherworldly flavor, an aroma that for some reason I associate with old and long abandoned stone churches. Like cubeb, black and long peppers, voatsiperifery is a true pepper. Voatsiperifery comes from “Voa,” meaning “the fruits” and “tsiperifery,” Malagasy for this pepper vine. I’ve yet to go in person but one day—from what I know, the wild pepper grows very high on the trees and the berries appear only on the new grown shoots that appear annually. The Voatsiperifery berries look a lot like Java cubebs (known as comet-tails)—small round spheres about 3 mm across with a thin tail that’s a bit longer than the ball is round. Voatsiperifery has been used in Malagasy cooking for centuries and is ideal for seasoning fish and seafood recipes. The woody, floral fragrance of these dense, red-brown, peppercorns evoke citrus. Its subtle sweetness and moderate heat are great for desserts and choco-late. For a great red meat seasoning, blend Voatsiperifery pepper with other pepper varieties. A rare taste of Africa’s biggest island and an exceptional way to add some magic to your cooking.

LEMON PEPPER BLENDMost “lemon peppers” out there are made be

seasoning black pepper with lemon extract. The Epices de Cru offering is something else altogether—an all-natural lemon pepper. A

combination of black and green peppercorns with Szechuan pepper, Thai lemongrass and the

citrusy Andaliman pepper from Sumatra. The aromatic blend was born from Ethné de Vienne’s obsession with the bold and pronounced citrus flavour of Andaliman pepper. Its tongue-numbing capacities combine beautifully with green and black peppercorns as with Szechuan peppercorns and lemongrass. Ideal for seafood, fish, salad dressings and poultry. I really love it on fried seafood—shrimp, clams, oysters, or fish are all fantastic

when you toss some of this blend—ground of course—on top just before serving.

SICHUAN IMPERIAL RED PEPPER

This is one of Marika de Vienne’s favorites. “It’s remarkable!” she told me not long ago. Sichuan

Province is surrounded by high mountain ranges which means its historically been apart from the rest of China, and its food is quite different as well. While black pepper enlivens, Sichuan pepper turns your taste buds upside down. It has a lively lem-oniness that plays tricks with your tongue, numbing and it and opening it to other flavors at the same time. Its frequently used in the region in conjunction with some wonderful spicy chiles. The region's food is based on seven flavors (rather than the five that are generally thought of elsewhere): salty, sweet, bitter, acid, pungent (generally from garlic and ginger), nutty and spicy. While its known for its hear, it’s really ultimately about harmony. Chef-owner Danny Bowien of SF’s renowned restaurant Mission Chinese says, "the more I dove into Sichuanese cooking, [the more I realized] it's really about balance and restraint and not having things be over-the-top spicy.”

LONG PEPPER FROM INDIALong peppers are about an inch or so long series of little black “peppercorns” that merge together into one

“cone” as they grow. You can use long pepper whole in anything you’d do with black pepper. The flavor is

clearly in the same family as what currently comes out of the pepper mill that’s permanently ensconced on my din-

ing room table, but with some seriously interesting high notes and a sweet, round fruitiness that’s really lovely. I keep trying to think of a good way to describe it but . . . where Telicherrry black pepper’s flavor is a bit more direct with nice winy under-tones, the Balinese long pepper is more of a roller coaster ride, sort of an accordion full of exotic flavors that play out in twists and turns as you eat it. I don’t know . . . those analogies may not get the idea across. Let me just say that it makes for some very interesting, very sensual, very spicy eating.

To use it, a spice mill is your best option. Long pepper is too long to work in most pepper mills. A chef’s knife can do the trick too if you’re careful, and a hammer and clean towel can work fine. It’s great sprinkled on the rounds of the fresh goat cheese from the Creamery. Spice fresh fish with it or use it to make a steak “au poivre.” Get Medieval and make a sweet-spicy dessert by poaching pears in white wine, vanilla, a touch of sugar and lots of long pep-per.

LONG PEPPER BACONMade especially for us in central Arkansas by our friends at Ham I Am—wonderful hickory smoked bacon coated ina nice crust of long pepper. Try it for breakfast, with

eggs, diced and added to soups or stews, tossed with pasta, fish or probably anything else!


What follows is an advance, slightly adjusted version of the Preface from Ari’s next book. Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 4; A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to the Power of Beliefs in Business should be out in the spring of 2016. You can check out Parts 1, 2, and 3 at the Deli, Bakehouse, Roadhouse, Coffee Company, and Creamery shops; or on line at zingtrain.com

Each time I sit down to do one of these Prefaces—this is the fourth in the series—I struggle. It’s not easy to strike a balance between sharing enough to help you understand our organizational eco-system and boring you with the same old story that Zingerman’s veterans have heard—or even been an active part of—before. The challenge, I’ve come to think, is laid out beautifully by writer Rebecca Solnit’s so-poetically put question: “Where,” she won-ders aloud, “does a story begin? The fiction is that they do, and end, rather than that the stuff of a story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea and poured back into it . . .” Her query, like all good questions, gives me pause. Clearly, the book starts here, at its beginning. But the story goes back quite a ways. Which piece, I began to wonder, is the one to properly put forward first? It’s hard to know the ideal answer.

In fact, there isn’t one. Years ago, that reality probably would have proven fatal; my perfectionism would have put an end to the project before it ever really began. I would have gotten stuck in my own uncertainty, believing that there surely must be some right answer (or at least a near-ideal option), but that I just wasn’t wise enough to work out what it was. I would surely, if quietly, have alternated between agonizing and being angry, getting next to nothing done in the process. “Anxiety,” Anaïs Nin notes, “is love’s greatest killer.” Worry leads nowhere, I’ve learned, at least nowhere I want to go. The critical voices we internalize along the way almost always impede the expression of our innate creative spirit. I know, because it happened to me.

Fortunately, per what follows in the rest of this book, we can effectively alter our beliefs to align with the way we want to live. Or, in this case, write. There are, I’ve come to believe now, no perfect answers. Only imperfect people like me putting forth imperfectly formed ideas in the hope that others around us will complement and perhaps complete our original thoughts; the dialogue that has emerged from the essays in these books has made all the difference. As Walt Whitman worded it, “the audi-ence writes the poetry.” Although I can still hear a bit of a grumble from the persistently perfectionist voices in my head, I can use my now strongly held belief in the benefits of creative, caring, well-crafted imperfection to push ahead and be productive anyway. I believe now that all of us—me included—have the ability to do amazing things.

Happily, over the years, I’ve learned to shift out of active worry into more creative and rewarding writing. The insightful Brenda Ueland observed: “Creative power flourishes only when I am liv-ing in the present.” These days, I’ve come to believe that the best thing I can do when I start to stress is simply to keep typing. It works. Instead of stopping, I just need to go faster! Even writing words that feel foolish while I’m putting them down is far bet-ter than not writing. I can block out writer’s block, I’ve learned, by just continuing to type. My fingers, if I keep them moving, can usher out my unproductive energy. As Ueland adds, “I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a moun-tain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten—happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.” In the end, insights emerge, doors open, beliefs change, and—all the way along—it’s far more fun.

Which is why I’m going to begin building this version of the Zingerman’s story with beads, with Ueland’s reminder at hand, pulling from a pile that’s been gathering in my mind over the last thirty-three years. I’ll start this time with the little two-story red brick building where we first opened in 1982. Though we’ve added onto it three times so that the original building is only about a quarter of the Deli’s current square footage, it’s still at the spiritual center of our organization. In that context, the story of Zingerman’s here will begin not with me, or Paul, or a Reuben sandwich, but with Rocco Disderide, the man who had the build-ing built back in the spring and summer of the year 1902.

CAN A GREAT BUILDING BUILD A GREAT BUSINESS?The idea isn’t as strange as it first seemed when it entered my mind. Now that I have this bead in hand, I’m wondering whether buildings might play a much bigger spiritual and inspirational role in creating great businesses than most of us suspect?

While I believe we live best by moving forward into our desired futures, it’s also true, as Kierkegaard says, that “Life can only be

understood backwards.” With the benefit of hindsight, I won-der now, as I pick up the bead of the building, if maybe the main reason we were able to establish the creative, caring, community-focused business that we’ve built is because we were lucky enough to begin our project in a space that’s both unique and, yet, just another part of the neighborhood. You might walk right by it without noticing. Or, if you’re paying close attention, you might find a wealth of interesting, one-of-a-kind details to draw you in. In that sense, the building was wholly aligned with the aesthetics of what we wanted to create when we first envisioned what the world now knows as Zingerman’s.

In a sense, Disderide’s was nothing remarkable—just “another corner grocery” in a country that was once filled with them. Ann Arbor, back then, had a population of about 15,000 (it’s approximately ten times that today), and probably a dozen similar stores spread around the town. And, yet, the build-ing was, like you and me, completely unique—there is truly no other, anywhere in the world, that’s exactly like ours. Or I should say, like Rocco’s. The building, I believe, is one of those that architect Christopher Alexander is imagining when he writes that great buildings are “beautiful, ordered, harmoni-ous—yes, all these things. But especially, and what strikes to the heart, they live.” And, I humbly hope, so too is the business that we built within and, later, out from it.

Can a building impart its life force to the business opened within it? Solnit refers to that kind of spirit as “genius of place.” While we might well have made a successful go of it in another location, most people’s visual image of Zingerman’s remains the little two-story red brick building at the corner of Detroit and Kingsley in which we started. Zingerman’s day still begins there, at 7 am, with the smell of Nueske’s* applewood smoked bacon in the air and the sun rising to the east behind us, every single morning. “Every love has a landscape,” Solnit says. This was the place where my career and I had our first date. Nearly thirty-four years later, our love affair is still going strong.

I never met the man myself, but I do know that Rocco Disderide was an immigrant, born into a farming family to the east of Genoa, in the Italian region known as Liguria, back in 1859, the same year the modern Italian state was first unified. In 1882, he crossed the Atlantic and came to New York, where he worked as a day laborer on building projects, and his wife, Catherine, gave birth to their five daughters. They moved to Ann Arbor ten years later—he’d heard that Michigan was a good place to find work and to raise a family. The mountains in Liguria start close to the sea, so farming is done on small, tightly terraced plots that make growing crops possible on the steep inclines. It must have been quite a change to become part of the overwhelming hustle, the intensity of New York City. And then equally shocking to emerge into the flat, wide, squared-off streets of small town America.

Things were far less settled in Ann Arbor then than now. For context, consider that the country was only a bit over a hun-dred years down the road of independence from England—and Michigan, while not quite wild, was still referred to by people like Malinda Russell, author of A Domestic Cookbook (the first African American cookbook in print), as “the garden of the West.” After a failed attempt to get to Liberia, Russell moved north to the town of Paw Paw where she published her book in 1866, in an effort to raise funds to go back home to Tennessee where she had once operated a pastry shop.

Mid-nineteenth century Paw Paw seems to have been a place wel-coming of progressive beliefs. Sixteen years before Russell’s now historically significant publication, in 1850, Jo Labadie was born in the same town. Of French and Native American heritage, young Labadie lived on what was still considered the western frontier, at times among the Potawatomi people who remained in the area. Since they were both in the town at the same time, it’s not unlikely that a teenage Labadie and a middle-aged Mrs. Russell would have walked past each other, or even spoken, at some point during their years in Paw Paw. Given his progressive beliefs about people of all backgrounds, I’d like to think Jo would have treated her far more respectfully than many others of European origin might have done in that era.

In 1872, Labadie moved to Detroit where he became a labor activ-ist, known locally as “the gentle anarchist.” In the summer of 1911—while still alive and relatively well—Labadie offered to contribute his large collection of anarchist pamphlets, books, and posters to the University of Michigan where, sixty-five years later, I would sit and study his work. One of the three original copies of Malinda Russell’s cookbook is stored down the hall in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, where I’ve also spent a fair bit of time studying over the years. Perhaps I’ll add the bead of the University

of Michigan Graduate Library to this history then—many of my own most strongly held beliefs have begun with books found in its stacks.

Not long after arriving in Ann Arbor, the Disderides lived at 424 E. North St. (now known as Kingsley), a few doors to the east of where the building was later built. That first Disderide house, like me, and like Zingerman’s, had educational roots—well before the family bought it and moved in, it had been the neighborhood school. Then, in 1895, Rocco and Catherine purchased the prop-erty at the corner of Detroit St., which stands at the center of this story. The building that already stood there belonged to her brother, Charles Caramella—the first Italian immigrant to settle in the town—and housed a small grocery shop.

It was a good spot for a store. There was a popular farm imple-ment business across the street. The building kitty corner from the Deli was built in 1899 by Frances Stofflet, designed as apart-ments for his children to live in. (In 1981, Rick and Deann Bayless, who would later go on to found the Frontera Grill in Chicago, one of my favorite restaurants anywhere, lived in one of those apart-ments while Rick was getting his PhD in linguistics at U of M.) And the train station, considered the finest on the rail line between Buffalo and Chicago, was just two blocks up—the corner of Detroit and Kingsley would have been right on the walking route from the station into downtown. The building was in the heart of Ann Arbor’s Catholic neighborhood—the first mass said in the city was held on the other side of Detroit Street in 1835. The new St. Thomas church had just been built a couple of blocks up Kingsley St. in 1899; the Disderides, always good Catholics, were very active members. Of course, beliefs and behavior change—if you ask peo-ple in town today where to find the “Catholic neighborhood,” they will surely look at you quite quizzically.

In 1901, Rocco decided to build a new, two-story brick building on the same spot to house the new grocery he had been envisioning. Artisan mason Bill Suchman, who recently did some restoration work on the old brick, estimated it went up pretty quickly. “They probably had it built in a month. Maybe two,” he told me calmly. I was surprised. “Could any construction move that quickly?” I was mistakenly applying my modern day beliefs to a world chrono-logically and culturally quite far from my own. “Codes then were nothing like they are today,” Bill responded. “You could build pretty quickly. Back then they were getting 1000 bricks down in a day. Now it might be 500.”

Cleaning the weather worn bricks a century later is much slower work. A skilled mason can restore and replace only a hundred or so in a day. After forty some years of renovation work, Bill has an impressively intuitive feel for what he works on. Talking to him, I felt like he could see right into the soul of the building and under-stand it in a way that I, who’d spent years working in it, had not. He pointed out what I wasn’t knowledgeable or attentive enough

Zingerman's Guide to Good Leading, Part 4: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to The Power of Beliefs in Business

Preface:Beliefs,Beads,AndBuildings


to have noticed. We stood together out front on a sunny spring morning 113 years after Bill’s bricklaying brethren had completed their work. “They did a nice job on it,” he said. Although I’d always liked the building, and I’d certainly walked past the details he was pointing out thousands of times, I realized I’d never really seen the building as it actually is. And that while I’d most cer-tainly spent more time inside that place than in any other struc-ture I’ve been in my whole life, I had never understood it.

Although he speaks quietly, Bill’s passion for the building is pal-pable. “Look at the quoins,” he said, pointing at the rows of bricks on the corners of the structure that are alternately set in and

then layered back out. In case you (like me) know nothing about brickwork—I had to look up the term to know what he was talk-ing about—the word is pronounced “coins.” He showed me the granite blocks at the base of the front windows and also the cop-per flashing that frames them. “That detailing above the windows on the second floor is nice, too.” As is true for everything in life, when you really look, you notice the nuance.

A few months after this conversation, Paul shared with me the Disderide’s original, 113-year-old construction contract. It looks as if the building work began in May and was done by the end of July. The shop would then have opened the first week of August. Coincidentally—or not—our fiscal year at Zingerman’s begins annually on August 1.

BACK AT THE BEGINNINGBuilding Disderide’s grocery did require a good bit of rearrang-ing—the old wood framed house that had originally stood on the corner had to be hauled to the back of the lot to make room for the new brick building. Skids would have to be set down and the house jacked up off the foundation. A capstan (in case you were wondering, that’s a vertical drum that can be rotated to pull a rope) would have to be set up beyond the new resting place of the house. Horses would then be hitched up and walked around the capstan, tightening the cables attached to the house. With the men guiding the process, the building would be slowly shifted back a few hundred feet to the oddly angled spot it still sits on today, nearly 120 years later. I can imagine the Disderide and Caramella families all standing by, the men helping the workers push as the horses strained to pull the older structure to its new spot.

Today you hardly ever hear of a house being moved unless it has great historical value. This one was the opposite—it gained his-torical value mostly because it was moved to such a seemingly strange location. Such a scenario would never happen today. Beliefs about buildings have changed. We’re at the heart of one of Ann Arbor’s historic districts, and I can’t imagine anyone ever allowing a wood frame house to be set at the back of a lot at an acute angle to the street and a two-story building of a totally incompatible architectural style to be built in its place. This odd setting, I’ve realized, is a good metaphor for beliefs. Our beliefs often develop without us knowing what’s happening at the time. But, once they’re formed, they remain with us, frequently for the rest of our lives. We assume that their perhaps odd orientation is, in fact, “normal.” Over time, they’re taken as facts.

Although the Caramella’s grocery can’t now be repositioned, our beliefs most definitely can. A core belief may stay as is, but other beliefs can—and probably should—shift around it. For years, we believed we were stuck with that strange and fairly impractical configuration created in the spring of 1902. We used the house—by then probably a century and a half old, sagging in most every

part of the floor—mostly for storage. But, again, beliefs change. Grace Singleton, one of the managing partners at the Deli, decided not to let past precedent keep the Deli from growing and set her mind to getting permission from the city to add on to the building again. It wasn’t a quick process. It took four years just to get the go ahead and then—in contrast to the three months it took to construct the original building—another three years to build. But the work eventually allowed us to renovate much of the old foundation and infrastructure Rocco’s crew had put in. The old house now holds the Deli’s cash and pick-up station for call-ahead orders and is connected, literally, not just spiritually, to the brick building that was built in its place.

HOPE, GENEROSITY, AND JAWBREAKERS Backing up again to 1902, I can see Rocco standing out front as the construction came close to completion. It was at the end of July, so the sun would have been high and hot. I imagine him watching and wondering, hopeful, but maybe a bit anxious, smoking a cigar (as he loved to do), excited, envisioning success, believing that he had done the right thing. Who would construct a building without positive beliefs about the future? Immigrants like Rocco who head out from home, by choice, to find a better fit for themselves in the world, are almost always full of hope. If they didn’t believe there was a better place to put down new roots, they wouldn’t have emigrated in the first place, right? (Refugees, on the other hand, often depart under duress, and many long to return to the home they hold in their hearts for years, even generations, after leaving.) Rocco, leaving Italy, clearly had a vision: first, of a better place to live; then, of a better way to make a living. It worked. Twenty years after arriving in America, he was building the two-story red brick home of his soon-to-be business.

On January 1, 1902, while I’m sure Rocco was already think-ing of constructing his building, the very first Tournament of Roses game ever was played in Pasadena’s Tournament Park. It took the Michigan team eight days to travel to California; they would have left from the train station at the end of Detroit St. It was worth the trip. National Champion Michigan beat Stanford a whopping 49–0. Stanford’s team completely lost hope and conceded the game with eight min-utes left to play. You can imagine the excitement back in Ann Arbor; the Disderides and their neighbors laughing and shar-ing the story as the news made its way back to Ann Arbor. Beliefs change, even in football. The field was 110 yards long,

a team needed to move five yards not ten to get a first down, and forward passes were prohibited. Eight thousand people attended the game, and three-quarters of those had to stand throughout.

The energy in Ann Arbor after the big win must have been out-standing—1500 people (ten percent of the town) greeted the Michigan players at the train station when they got back. Positive beliefs go up when good things happen. I’m imagining 1902 as a very upbeat year in Ann Arbor history. Hope is contagious, and when we’re hopeful, we’re far more likely to make decisions to move forward than when we’re suffused in fear. In fact, the flood of good civic energy that emerged from the tournament game might have been the thing that convinced Rocco to finally pull the trigger on his construction project. Who knows? If the foot-ball team wasn’t so good, maybe the building would never have been built.

Having held this bead of the building in my mind a good bit of late, I grew increasingly interested in the man behind the building. I decided it was time to find out who Mr. Disderide really was. I got ahold of Diann Boik, Gayle Pastorino, and Steve Pastorino, three of his great-grandchildren, to learn more. Rocco was a tall man—over six feet—with a big mustache, and a happy, upbeat attitude toward life. He never spoke English all that well, but he insisted that his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren use it every day. “He was quite a character,” his Diann told me. “He used to sing to us in Italian. He liked posing for the camera. He would get with my great uncle and they would pose for all these kooky pictures with silly hats on.” He was also a “handy” guy. “Everyone called him Mr. Fix-it,” she said. “He loved art, dancing, and sing-ing. He was all about that.”

Rocco seems like a guy Paul and I would have gotten along with quite well. Milo Ryan grew up in the neighborhood in that era and remembers Disderide’s shop in his book, A View of the Universe. The store, he says, was, “the neighborhood’s favorite institution.” Its “variety and range of two-for-a-penny candy has never been matched in the history of retail marketing.” It seems like a spot I’d have happily shopped in. Ryan recalls that the Disderides “lived behind and above the store, which itself served as their family room. They slept upstairs, when they slept. The store was open from early morning, to sell milk, butter, and eggs, until late at night, for those who needed tobacco.” Rocco is described as “florid, full-cheeked” a man who “cared more for love than for money.” Eighty years before Zingerman’s opened, he was doing, it seems, what we now refer to as “extra miles” for his own cus-tomers. “More than once,” Ryan writes, “he would slip in a jaw-breaker or a piece of peanut brittle into the stack of groceries, or hand it to us with the change.”

Rocco Disderide was hardly a household name anywhere other than in the Kerrytown neighborhood, or maybe in his family’s vil-lage back in northern Italy, but here in Ann Arbor he was some-thing of a local hero. I like his story because it’s what I believe

history is made up of—a significant act, sandwiched around mil-lions of small decisions, visions, risks, insights, and accidents that might get little notice from anyone other than the people who are making them, or who happen to be directly impacted at the time. Red bricks and mortar, laid one atop the other in practical, subtly elegant ways, and candy and peanut brittle shared with kids aren’t the stuff of history books, but that’s the kind of history that wins my heart.

The tale of Rocco Disderide, in whose spiritual and commercial shoes we clearly, if unknowingly, followed, is one of the main messages of this book—that stories rarely start where they seem to at first glance, and that we would do well to dig deeper and learn more about what’s going on and why it’s happening. Would Zingerman’s still have become Zingerman’s if it had opened in a building other than this odd, well-suited-to-our-unconventional-outlook, trapezoidal red brick building, with its catchy, then-state-of-the-art quoins on its anything-but-right-angle front cor-ners, that Rocco built just after the turn of the twentieth century?

DID YOU EVER IMAGINE . . . People regularly ask me if I knew back when I graduated from U of M that I’d eventually be part of creating the unique Community of Businesses that Zingerman’s has become, nearly a fifth of the way through the twenty-first century. The flippant part of my personality wants to say “Yeah, exactly!” But truly, the only thing I knew for sure about the future was that I didn’t want to move back home to Chicago. Although I didn’t really believe it, I assured my mother that after a while I’d go back to school and get another, more advanced degree.

The next bead to add to the story is the one that unexpectedly became the beginning of my vocation. After graduating with a degree in Russian history, I got a job as a dishwasher in a local restaurant. Neither food, nor business, nor anarchism was par-ticularly in the front of my mind. In the words of Terry Tempest Williams, “only uncertainty was certain.” I guess in that sense I was a small bit like Rocco Disderide after he arrived in the United States. We were each determined not to go back to where we’d come from. And, although we both had high hopes for our new homes, neither of us had much sense of how things were actually going to work out.

It helped that I got to start learning my craft with some great people at that restaurant—Paul was the general manager, Frank Carollo (one of the managing partners at the Bakehouse) was a line cook, and Maggie Bayless (managing partner of ZingTrain) was a cocktail waitress. Paul left a few years later, but we stayed in touch. Four years of pretty good restaurant work down the road—most of which was spent cooking, running kitchens, and learning the basics of the food business—Paul and I reconnected and opened the Deli. It was a cold Monday morning, March 15, 1982 to be exact. It would have been the opposite of the day Disderide’s opened, in the first week of August, eighty years earlier. Rocco got rolling in the sun; we started in the snow. No leaves on the trees, just a bit of brown grass showing through in the space between the street and the sidewalk, and that dim gray sort of sky that barely lights the day around here in the last week of winter. The weather, coincidentally, reflected much of the country’s mood: the economy in 1982 was not in good shape, and interest rates were at 18 percent, the highest, by far, that they’d been in the 100 years since Rocco Disderide disembarked at Ellis Island. To make matters even worse, Michigan had lost a close game to Ohio State the previous autumn while we were in initial discussions about the Deli and, consequently, failed to make the Rose Bowl that year. None of which did much for the energy of the town as we embarked on our new little venture.

Backing up a bit, when we opened in 1982, we most definitely did not envision, or even imagine, anything on the scale of a Community of Businesses. You might as well ring up Rocco Disderide in retail heaven and ask him if he could tell back in 1902 that his building would come to house a nationally known shop that would sell specialty foods from all over the world, including many from the land he left behind to come to the United States; that the pesto his grandmother probably pressured him to eat so often would become a menu item in posh restaurants; and that the president of his adopted country would one day walk in the same front door he did every day, to sit down and have a sandwich.

We did, however, have a clear sense of what we wanted to do. To be sure, what we imagined was a much narrower scope than what we have going today. But, like Rocco Disderide, and anyone else who’s started anything, we definitely had a vision. It wasn’t writ-ten down the way we now do it, but we knew from the get-go that we wanted a unique deli, serving really tasty, traditional fare—Jewish and otherwise—in a down-to-earth setting that featured great food, great service, and a great place for the few people we could afford to hire to work. Our dreams were modest by the world’s standards, but they sure felt big to us. We knew that we wanted it to be a cornerstone of the community, in much the same way—as I’ve since discovered—that Disderide’s had been. As I’m sure was true for Rocco, everything we had to our names was on the line. I tried to act nonchalant about it at the time, but unlocking that old front door for the first time at 7:00 on the morning of the 15th was, for us, a monumental occasion.


Everyone asks us this question. The short answer is, we made it up. The long answer goes like this. When we first started talking about opening the business back in fall of ’81 we wanted a name that would convey the sense of a good local deli something that would sound “Jewish,” and offer anyone who heard it the sense that this was a real delicatessen. In theory I suppose that, since we’re both Jewish, we might have opted to use either my last name or Paul’s. But, unfortunately neither of our last names were of any value in this area. Mine is unpro-nounceable—not a great way to go into busi-ness. Paul's last name is Saginaw, an angli-cized version of "Sagin Or," which is Hebrew for "seer of light.” In Michigan “Saginaw” is anything but “Jewish.” Instead the name is immediately associated with either the city of the same name, a mid-sized industrial town north of Detroit, or the Indian tribe after which the city was named. Nobody hears Saginaw and thinks “corned beef sandwich.”

Instead we decided to name the Deli after Hannah Greenberg, a regular at the fish market. As Paul describes her, she was an elderly Jewish woman, no more than four foot ten inches tall and about 95 pounds, with an assortment of pink curlers seemingly permanently attached to her head. She used to stop by the market every Saturday to pick up some smoked chubs. Each week, almost like clockwork, she'd complain about how bad the chubs had been the previous week with lines like, "Oy, you almost killed me with all the bones . . . Give me two more.”

Getting ready to open we had a neon sign Greenberg’s sign—green of course—made up for the front window. We designed our first print ad to run in the local paper announcing the impending opening of Greenberg's Delicatessen. And then about ten days before we were due to open —which would put us in the first week of March, 1982—the phone rang. I answered politely, “Good afternoon Greenberg’s, can I help you?”

A sort of rude, pushy-sounding guy on the other end demanded, “Let me talk to Mr. Greenberg.” "There is no Mr. Greenberg," I answered honestly.Not put off in the least, he pushed ahead: "Well where'd ya get the name then?""Do you like it?" I asked all too innocently."Yeah I like it," he shot back. "It's mine and you can't use it."

I distinctly remember getting one of those sort of really sick, sinking feelings.

Turns out Mr. Greenberg had registered the name "Greenberg's Delicatessen" with the state office up in Lansing a few weeks before we'd decided to use it. He was planning to open in the Detroit suburbs sometime in the spring. We pleaded, reasoned, and begged him to let us use it. After all, we weren't going to open any other stores—just the one in Ann Arbor a good thirty miles from where he was. We were nice guys, we assured him. And we certainly wouldn't give him any grief. But he was adamant. He was on his way to national fame and franchising.

Greenberg's was his name and there was no way in hell he was gonna let us use it.

Frustrated and, probably a little flipped out, we retreated to Paul's house to figure out what to do. We'd already run the Greenberg's ad in the paper. We already had the neon sign for the window. And now, a week before we were supposed to open, we were suddenly nameless. We sat on the floor of Paul's living room, drank a couple of beers and tested out hundreds of dif-ferent names. After a few hours, we still didn’t have one but we had at least decided that we wanted to go with a name that either began with an “A” or a “Z” so that the store would be easy to find in alphabetical lists and in the Yellow Pages. Finally, we opted for Zingerman's. It sounded Jewish enough. And, as everyone now says with a chuckle, it had “zing.”

One thing we still weren't sure about was whether we should spell it the European way, with two “n’s” or with one. Paul called his grandfather to ask his opinion. Didn't take him but a second to decide: “with one 'n', of course, so it'll be easier for them to write the checks.” Paul's grandfather was a very wise man.

The story culminated in sandwich #1—Who’s Greenberg Anyways; your choice of corned beef or pastrami along with homemade chopped liver, Russian dressing and let-tuce on double baked Jewish rye from the Bakehouse. All these years later, it’s still my favorite sandwich.

422 Detroit St. • Ann Arbor, MI 48104 734.663.DELI (3354) www.zingermansdeli.com

Starting in April:

Buy 1, get 10% OFF Buy 2, get 20% OFF Buy 3+ get 30% OFF

Our annual olive oil sale gives you a chance to stock up on your favorite olive oils and get great deals on some that you may not have discovered yet. Select 2014 harvest olive oils from Italy, Spain, France and

California are on sale.

1-2-31-2-3Look

for t

he 1-2-3 sticker and stock up!

How Did You Get The Name?

Whether you are hosting a party for graduation or need food for your next office gathering, we are here to save the day by bringing the Zingerman’s experience to you!

Choose from an assortment of Deli sandwiches with sides of our potato salad and coleslaw. We’ll include pickles, fruit salad, pimento cheese with pumpernickel and celery sticks, and finish it off with a tray of our delicious brownies and cook-ies. We throw in an assortment of sodas so you don’t have to worry about a thing.

* Pricing and menus are designed for 10 or more people. We can accommodate smaller groups upon request. Per person price may vary. Please place your catering order 48 hours or

more in advance. This will help us to secure your desired delivery time and menu selection.

Deli at your Door

We’ve been in the business of selling traditional, full-flavored food for over 3 decades now. Every month our two full-time artists design and hand paint new posters that hang in the Deli promoting our fabulous food and fun events. These one-of-a-kind posters are available for purchase on our website at any time.

In order to celebrate the Deli's anniversary we are offering our posters at a discounted price! Use the code HAPPYBIRTHDAY! on our website to receive a $50 discount on any poster for the entire month of March. But wait, there’s more…

We love having a good time at the Deli and a regular ol’ sale just isn’t gonna cut it. The Deli came into existence on March 15, 1982. In honor of that year, EVERY poster on our website will be $82 on March 15!

Shipping to the continental U.S. is included in the purchase price or come on over for a nosh and pick your poster up. View available posters on our website: zingermansdeli.com (click on "Art for Sale"), pick your favorite and own a piece of Zingerman’s history!

Celebrate the Deli’s Anniversary

withaone-of-a-kind,hand-paintedposter!

Another Wonderful Greenberg

Hannah Greenberg, it turns out, was not the only great Greenberg.

Although we didn’t know him at the time, Hugh Greenberg would have been worthy of the same name as well. Hugh passed away in October of 2013—I’m pretty sure I must have met him on one of his many visits to the Deli but I know about him directly now only because of the wonderful words shared by his friends and family.

Hugh clearly was a very positive figure in the community, a caring entrepre-neur and a nice guy. He was one of the leaders of the Jewish community in Detroit, founder of three differ-ent successful businesses. One writer referred to him as “a giant of a leader.” Another said “he was a giant in his ser-vice to goodness.”

Next time you order a Who’s Greenberg Anyways, maybe hold half of the sand-wich up and raise a “toast” to Hugh’s generous soul.

$23/per person

Call 734.663.3400 or visit www.zingermanscatering.com to view our many other tasty menu offerings!


SHARING ZINGERMAN’SUNIQUE APPROACH TO BUSINESS

PROBING INTO OUR ROLE AT PROBILITYIf a client-provider relationship could be richer and more rewarding than the one that ZingTrain (and Zingerman’s) has with Probility, we are hard pressed to tell you what that might entail. Our relationship with Probility seems practically perfect.

What follows is an interview with Patrick Hoban, co-founder of Probility and an incredibly thoughtful and mindful leader, whose organization has just gone through a major change. In this interview, Patrick talks about ZingTrain’s role at Probility (of course!) but also discusses some key lessons for leaders of intentional businesses, particularly ones that are experienc-ing major transition.

1. Can you tell us a little bit about Probility and your role there?Probility is a Physical Therapy (with some Occupational and Speech Therapy) company whosefocus is to make a positive difference in people’s lives. We have 12 clinics in Washtenaw, Livingston and Lenawee counties and 150 employees. I am privileged to be the President of the company and hopefully the biggest servant to the company and to the staff.

2. Probility Recently Went Through A Very Major Change. Can You Tell Us A Little Bit About That?Healthcare is going through some big changes that make it very difficult for small therapy companies to be able to serve and treat as many people as they used to. Because of this, there is a lot of consolidation occurring in the profession.

Over the last couple of years, Probility had been approached by multiple larger companies that were hoping that we would sell to them, but we never found the right fit until I had a con-versation with Rob Casalou, of St Joseph’s Mercy Hospital. We found that our values aligned very well and at that point my partners, Tony Castaldi and Brandon Lorenz, and I decided to sell Probility to St. Joe’s.

What is truly unique about it is that St Joe’s wanted to keep Probility as it is and fold their clinics into our company, instead of the typical case where the acquired company gets rolled into the larger organization and converts to their cul-ture and practices. We then embarked on a huge transition process to integrate our two cultures and help people to learn our core values and create a vision together for the future.

3. How did you first come to know about ZingTrain? What was it that you heard about us that led you to attend one of our semi-nars?I had the honor of meeting Ari 4-5 years ago and learned that Zingerman’s has a training /

education business, ZingTrain. I took one seminar and pretty much fell in love with it (as so many people do). So much of what Zingerman’s does and what Probility does is similar and it was awesome to learn how to improve our processes with the great tools that Zingerman’s has acquired over 33 years of evolution and refining and that ZingTrain teaches.

4. Over the years, both you and your staff have been to ZingTrain sessions many, many times. Can you tell us a little about that?Most recently, I’ve attended just about every session of the ZingTrain Speaker Series [a seasonal suite of presentations featuring business/leadership experts sharing their wisdom]

Over the years, the Probility team has attended The Art

of Giving Great Service, Bottom Line Training, Creating a Vision of Greatness and Leading with Zing! The last two are the seminars that I’ve tried to send most of our key leaders to.

The trainings I have chosen are focused on the service and culture side of Zingerman’s since, it seems to me, that this is one of the main reasons that you have been so successful.

5. What impact do you believe ZingTrain has had on Probility? What changes do you see in behavior/organi-zational systems? OR Why do you keep sending more and more of your team to our seminars?The most significant impact that I have seen with myself and my staff attending the seminars is how we have been able to create a greater organizational consistency around what we believe and the processes that we have to implement those beliefs.

As a leader, I have learned the importance of consistent com-munication of expectations, values, processes and vision. From the Zingerman’s recipe for rolling out organizational changes, Bottom Line Change®, I have learned to use micro-cosms to help gather information, build consensus and share information.

I have learned how to write personal and professional visions and how to help staff to do the same and that has made a big difference in my life and in many others’ lives.

6. Most recently, you took your relationship with ZingTrain to a new level and asked us to facilitate a session where you rolled out your long term vision for Probility to your team and asked for their feedback. Can you share your thoughts about Visioning with us? And tell us a little bit about the role we played in the roll-out!I first learned about Visioning at a ZingTrain seminar, and I loved it. I have also had a highly unique and life-changing gift where Ari and I decided to see each other and talk once a week, every week for the last 3-4 years. I’m sure that there are literally thousands of people who wish that they could do this. Through the ZingTrain class and talking with Ari, Visioning has become something that I do regularly. And yet, even with all of the Visioning that I’ve done, I knew that I wanted ZingTrain to facilitate the Vision Roll Out for Probility since they are simply so amazing and boy, am I glad that I did.

The feedback that I received from the Vision meeting was that everyone was very inspired by both the Vision and the fact that the presentation made them realize that it was a collaborative process. Everyone was excited to see where the company is going to go over the next 4 years and to see how each of them fit into that Vision. As far as the transition goes, this was incredibly important.

7. If you could give one piece of advice to a business owner or organizational leader, par-ticularly one going through a major transition, what would it be?The absolute suggestion that I would make is that you have to take the time and be willing to put in great effort to get everyone on the same page.

The new people to the organization will not necessarily buy into the company’s Vision if you don’t work hard to make it happen. You can do that by asking lots of questions. In the case of a transition, that means asking questions so you can get to know what people are excited about when it comes to the transition and also what they are concerned about.

At Probility, after asking lots of questions and meeting indi-vidually with every single new person to the company, we took the time to bring everyone together (all 150 people) at all-staff meetings. At those all-staff meetings, we played games to allow people to get to know each other, we talked about what was important to us and we set out new Core Values that we all created together over the course of 3-4 months. We then added in the Vision and our next step is to create our Strategic Plan together. We are doing this in small groups as well as the larger group meetings. This costs a lot of money in the short term but we know that it will create great buy-in and the buy-in will lead to greater degrees of revenue, profits, and employee satisfaction down the road.I think that what ZingTrain does is truly a

gift, sharing the greatness that Zingerman’s and its people live by.

Now, I have staff begging to be allowed to go to the upcoming seminars and work-shops because they see the difference that it has made in the lives of the people who go.

My staff loved having Maggie and Ari at the meeting and as a key leader I absolutely loved not having to both share the vision and facilitate the meeting. I shared the vision. They facilitated getting feedback and having me answer questions. This is what they are great at and the best thing I did was to let ZingTrain via Ari and Maggie do their thing.

Most importantly, though, it is just the right thing to do, and that is a core value that we try to live every day

I wanted people to see how they are all impor-tant, how they play a role in where Probility is going, and how we are all going towards that Vision together. They had never experienced anything like that before.


MARCH CREAM CHEESE$2 off per pound at the Deli or Creamery, $1 off the 6oz containerOld fashioned cream cheese made much as it was in small dairies a hun-dred years ago. Crafted completely by hand from fresh local milk mixed with nothing more than a little rennet, salt, a generous dose of cream and the patience to let it drain naturally for a good six hours. In the spirit of traditional cheese making Zingerman’s Creamery Cream Cheese is made without vegetable gum; the curd is ladled completely by hand; and it contains no preservatives or artificial additives. Most importantly it has a delicious, fresh milky flavor and a wonderful, light, fluffy texture.

APRILLITTLE NAPOLEON IN CHESTNUT LEAVES

$2 off at the Deli and the CreameryThis lovely little package of goat's milk goodness starts off as a mild soft-ripened round, but just as soon as the cheese starts to develop a rind we wrap it in some Michigan chestnut leaves soaked in Michigan red wine. Aside from looking amazing, the leaves alter the taste and texture of this little goat round, giving it an amazing density and a tangy finish. An excellent and visually attractive cheese, the Chestnut Little Napoleon makes an excellent table cheese, and pairs wonderfully with all sorts of breads, fruit, and crackers. We like this cheese with a subtle, less hoppy ale or any kind of sparkling wine.

Zingerman’s Creamery Wholesale Manager

3723 Plaza Drive, Ann Arbor • 734-929-0500 • zingermanscreamery.com

3723 Plaza Drive, Ann Arbor • 734-929-6060 • zingermanscoffee.com

March

LAVENDER LATTE Made with lavender syrup that we make in house. It's sweet, floral, and delicate. Great way to get spring started.

April

"TAP THAT" LATTE Made with real maple syrup. Cozy way to stay warm in April Showers.

March CONGO - MUUNGANO COOPERATIVE Since its founding in 2009, the Muungano Coop has grown from 350 to over 4100 farmer-members. Rich sweetness, syrupy body, and flavors of dried fruit.

April INDONESIA - BLUE FLORES This coffee comes from the island of Flores, part of the Lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia. Velvety body with flavors of citrus fruit and herbal spice.

Milkshakes and Malts now available at Zingerman's Creamery!One of the things that we believe here at Zingerman's Creamery is the value of tradition. In that spirit we are honoring two tradi-tions in one delicious cup; that of the American Soda Fountain, with its nostalgic memories of milkshakes and malts enjoyed with friends and first dates, and the Italian tradition of our rich Sicilian-style gelato made right here at Zingerman's Creamery! Stop in and we'll hand-spin your choice of gelato flavors with Calder Dairy milk, with or without the addition of malt powder, for a tasty trip down memory lane.

16oz $8.00/each

Waffle Cones!One of my favorite memories from childhood is getting permission to ride bikes with my best friend and get an ice cream cone at the corner store. Walking in, the smell that hits you wasn't of the sweet, milky ice cream confections, but rather the sugary, toasted aroma of the freshly made waffle cones! We are bringing that sweet smell to the southside of Ann Arbor at Zingerman's Creamery with our waffle cones, made on-site! Taking the best ingredients we can find including milk and butter from Calder Dairy, and eggs from Harnois Happy Hens, we make the cone and hand-roll them to just the right size for a scoop or two of our gelato or sorbet.

1 scoop cone, $4.50/each2 scoops cone, $6.50/each

monthly speciaLScheckoutthesemontlyspecials,

exclusivelyfromthebaristasatzingerman'scoffee

americAn cheEse SocietywinNer


BOOK A SPOT AT ANY ZINGERMAN’S EVENT AT EVENTS.ZINGERMANSCOMMUNITY.COM

Zingerman’sRoadhousehostsregularspecialdinnersthathighlightoldfavorites, new finds, celebrated chefs and traditional American food-ways.Ourdinnersarefamily-styleaffairsthatdeliverreallygoodfood

withalittlehistoryontheside.

A PARMA FARMHOUSE DINNER Tuesday, March 22, 2016 @ 7:00 pm $80 per person (price includes dinner, tax and gratuity)The family-owned and operated Pio Tosini company has become one of the most credible and sought-after producers of Prosciutto di Parma and has been in operation for over 80 years. There are only four ingre-dients that go into this ham and they are Italian pigs, salt, air and time. At Pio Tosini, a curing time of over 500 days (more than 100 days longer than typical prosciutto production) allows for slow and even salt penetration, assuring the sweetness of the hams. Each ham is trimmed, deboned by hand and personally selected.

Today Pio Tosini is still a family company, with the founder's great-grandson Giovanni Bianchi carrying out the traditions of the 111 year old company. Chef Alex and Giovanni have collaborated on a menu that highlights the complex flavors of the ham throughout the meal, each course celebrating the sweet-ness of the hams. Giovanni will be at the Roadhouse to share his family’s story and lead us through a tasting of these delicious hams.

MOUNTAIN CHEESES THAT MAKE US MELT!Thursday, March 3, 6-8pm, $30Join us for a cozy evening of melted cheese! The ultimate in comfort food, melted cheese helps chase away the last chill of winter in anticipation of spring. At this special event, we'll make two kinds of fondue, well as learn about and taste a tra-ditional Swiss raclette. You'll leave with a warm, happy belly, the recipes for our favorite fondues and raclette, and FIVE exciting ideas for putting a twist on the classic grilled cheese!

SHOUT FOR STOUT!Thursday, March 10, 6-8pm, $35Come explore the varied and delicious world of stout beers, paired up with our favorites cheeses to enhance their most flavorful characteristics – just in time to celebrate St. Patrick's Day! Stout-style beer originated in the British and Irish Isles and is now popular around the world in many distinct sub-categories, such as Irish (or dry), imperial, and oatmeal, to name just a few! We'll sample different stout styles from some of our favorite Michigan breweries, served with spe-cially selected cheese pairings from our shop. Sláinte!

RAW MILK CHEESE APPRECIATION DAYSaturday, April 16,2-5pm, $40Raw-Milk Cheese Appreciation Day is an international cel-ebration of raw-milk cheese and the individuals who bring it from the pasture to the plate. Because we are so passion-ate about it, we are paying tribute to raw-milk cheesemak-ing all week long! We'll wrap up the week of festivities with special guest Ari Weinzwieg, co-founder of Zingerman's, join-ing the Creamery's head cheesemaker Aubrey Thomason to learn about and taste the raw-milk cheeses we love, and talk about why it so important to us to preserve traditional raw milk cheesemaking for the future. A flavorful and educational afternoon for the cheese enthusiast!

MICHIGAN WINE CELEBRATION Thursday, April 21, 6-8pm, $35Join us to celebrate the diversity of great wines produced in our state! We'll sip samples of sparkling, red, and white wines for this event, as well as explore the grape varietals grown Michigan's four federally recognized viticulture regions by some our most beloved vintners. In keeping with theme of honoring our state, we are pairing each wine with spe-cially selected cheeses made in small batches right here at Zingerman's Creamery.

COMPARATIVE CUPPINGSunday, March 6 or April 10 • 1-3 pm $30/personSample coffees from Af-rica, Central and South Americas, and the Asian Pacific. We will taste and evaluate these coffees using the techniques and tools used by professional cup-pers. A brief under-standing of coffee will also be presented high-lighting different processing and growing methods. This is an eye-opening introduction to the world of coffee.

BREWING METHODSSunday, March 20 or April 24, 1-3 pm $30/personLearn the keys to successful coffee brewing using a wide variety of brewing methods from filter drip to syphon pot. This tasting session will explore a single coffee brewed 6 to 8 different ways, each producing a unique taste. A demonstration of the proper proportions and techniques for each meth-od and a discussion of the merits and differences of each style will take place.

3723PlazaDr734.929.6060www.zingermanscoffee.com

Whether we’re pulling a shot for you in ourcafé on Plaza Drive or sending you off with abag of fresh roasted beans, our passion is tosource,roastandbrewgreatcoffee.Ourclassesare designed for the coffee novice and nerdalike and aim to help everyone learn abouteverything it takes to turnagreatbean intoagreatcupofcoffee.

191 ROMANTIC ITALIAN RICE WITH CHEF WALLOWednesday, March 2 6:30-8:30pm • $35/person Zingerman's Events on 4th (415 N. Fifth Ave.)

Italians love their pasta, but it would be a mistake to stop there. They also love their rice. While it’s not as well known or cooked as regularly as pasta dishes, a creamy bowl of risotto is tough to beat. Join us as Chef Wallo walks us through a cook-ing demonstration for making this beloved dish. Along with the risotto, we will also sample a few other treats made with rice. It promises to be a great evening that will have you wanting to cook more rice at home very soon.

422DetroitStreet•734.663.3400www.zingermansdeli.com

Zingerman’sDelitastingsaredesignedtogiveyouaninsider’sviewofthefoodsthatwe’vesearchedtheworldfor.You’lloftenmeetthe

folkswhomakeitandleavewithamouthfulofflavorandanewunderstandingofeverythingfromoliveoiltosardines,cheesetochocolate.

CheeseClasses,Tastings&Tours!Oureventsareintimateaffairswhereourcheesemakersandcheesemongerssharetheirpassionforgreatcheeseandgreatcheesemaking.Weholdtheseclassesrightnexttowherewemakeourcheeseandgelato,andsometimesbringinourfavoritefoodmakersfromaroundtheareatosharetheirstorieswithyou.Togettheinsidescooponallofourevents,signupforoure-newsatzingermanscommunity.com/e-news.

3723PlazaDrive•734.929.0500•zingermanscreamery.com

ROADHOUSE PASSOVER SPECIALSApril 21st-27thfeaturing Creole Matzoh Ball Soup, Gefilte Fish, Southwestern Tsimmes, Sephardic Lamb, Chocolate Orange Cake and Macaroons

TEA & CHEESE Thursday, April 28, 6-8pm, $30You might not think of tea as being a typical pairing for a slice of cheese, but the two can be exceptionally good at bringing out the best flavors of each other. Like wine, cer-tain teas contain tannins which result in full-bodied fla-vors and make for a perfect accompaniment to a variety of cheeses. Our cheesemongers have teamed up with our neighbors at the Zingerman's Coffee Co. to showcase spe-cially selected teas from Rishi that pair most deliciously with an assortment of cheeses hand-picked by our cheese mongers. Join us for this unique take on tea time!

THE PARMIGIANO REGGIANO SENSORY EXPERIENCEWednesday, April 20 7-8pm • $15/person Zingerman's DeliJoin our cheesemongers as we taste through three different age profiles of our best selling cheese. You will learn how we taste and talk about Parmigiano Reggiano, learn what and why real parmigiano is so special and irreplace-able, and explore ways to use the king of cheese beyond the grater.

EASTER BRUNCHSunday, March 279am-2pm Reserve now! We fill up fast!

2501JacksonRoad•734.663.3663www.zingermansroadhouse.com


BOOK A SPOT AT ANY ZINGERMAN’S EVENT AT EVENTS.ZINGERMANSCOMMUNITY.COM

8540IslandLakeRoad,Dexter734.619.8100•cornmanfarms.com

FarmTours,SpecialDinnersandClassesYoudon’thavetobepartofabigcorporateeventor lavishwed-ding to enjoy Cornman Farms (although we certainly host those,too!)Throughouttheyearwehostnumeroustours,dinners,classesandmorethatallowpeopletoexperienceouruniqueeventspaceinDexter,MI.

TEA TIME CAKESWednesday, March 30th, 5:30-9:30pm, $125Take your tea time, or anytime, to the next level with these distinctive cakes. You’ll make raspberry ricotta coffee cake, a yeasted tea ring and the new Bakehouse favorite the New Deli Crumb Cake topped with pistachios and sweet Indian spices like cardamom and ginger. Learn all about the great ingredients that makes these cakes special, as well as techniques that give them great texture. You'll leave BAKE! with our recipes, the knowledge to recreate them at home, three cakes and great coupons.

SAVORY PIES 2.0 Friday, April 1st, 1-5pm, $125A new batch of recipes for tasty savory pies from around the world: Tourtiere, Canadian pork pie; Fatayer. Middle eastern spinach pies; Piroshki, farmers cheese filled pie from Russia / Ukraine. We’ll share the history and cultural significance of these baked goods too! You'll leave BAKE! with our recipes, the knowledge to recreate them at home, all the food you made in class and great coupons.

GERMAN BREADSSaturday, April 16, 8am-noon • $100Come and learn three breads our German friends taught us: Dinkelbrot, a spelt bread and sunflower loaf; Wurzelbrot, a rye and wheat baguette; and Vinschgauer, a savory seasoned mountain roll delicious with ham and cheese. You might want to have some at home ready for your return from class!

3723Plazadr.•734.761.7255www.bakewithzing.com

Hands-onBakingClassesBAKE! is our hands-on teaching bakery in AnnArbor, tucked between Zingerman’s Bakehouse andCreamery.AtBAKE!weshareourknowledgeandloveof baking with the home baker community, seekingto preserve baking traditions and inspire new ones.We offer dozens of different bread, pastry and cakeclassesinourveryownteachingkitchens.AllofusattheBakehouseknowthe joyandexcitementofbak-ingsomethingreallygoodandsharingitwithfriendswhenit’shotoutoftheoven.You’llleaveBAKE!withthe food you made in class and the inspiration and

skillstobakeathome!

IN PURSUIT OF PEPPERTuesday,April12•7-9pmatZingerman'sRoadhouse•$75

For this special meal we’ve put together the culinary talents of Roadhouse chef and managing partner Alex Young and Philippe de Vienne, master pepper trader for over thirty years. Together they’ve created a menu that features some of THE finest pep-percorns the world has to offer, all right here at the Roadhouse in form of one delicious meal. Each dish will feature a differ-ent pepper—exceptional Telicherry black peppercorns from India, white peppercorns from Sumatra, cubebs from Indosia, long pepper from Indonesia, Thai Mah Kwan Chinese Sichuan Red Peppercorns from the village of Niine Dragons grown at nearly 10,000 feet, Japanese Sansho pepper, wild pepper from Madagascar, Tribal black pepper from India, pink peppercorns from Madagascar and more

SPICE-OLOGY 101 Wednesday,April13•6:30-8:30pmatZingerman'sDeli•$35/person

Anxious when recipes call for anything more than salt and pepper? Don’t know how to tell whether what you’re buying is the best or only slightly better than bad? Not sure what to do with great spices anyways? Or maybe you just love to cook and eat good food and want to find out more about how to make that hap-pen in your kitchen? In any or every case, this class is for you! The de Vienne family will teach you more about spices in 90 minutes than most of us learn in a lifetime: where spices come from, how to use them in your everyday cooking, how to store them, grind them, serve them and how to tell the difference from one brand to the next to ensure that what you’re buying is really some of the best, not just something in a nice bottle. Guaranteed to change your cooking—for the better—forever!!

INDIAN COOKING DEMONSTRATION

Wednesday,April13•6-8pm•atBAKE!•$45

The de Vienne family shows you how to make three Indian recipes with intoxicating aromsa. We'll end class tasting their Indian dishes together. You'll leave BAKE! with the recipes, the knowledge to recreate them, a happy tummy and great coupons.

GREEK ISLANDS COOKING DEMONSTRATION

Thursday,April14•6-8pm•atBAKE!•$45

The de Vienne family teaches you three Greek recipes with savory herbs and spices. You'll leave BAKE! with the recipes, the knowledge to recreate them, a happy tummy and great coupons.

COCKTAIL CLASS: WHEN IRISH EYES ARE SMILING Thursday, March 17 • 7-9:30pm • $70Join us at the farm as we explore this regional whiskey, which is balanced, approachable, and infinitely mix-able. We’ll taste 3 different Irish Whiskies, then each guest will make three distinct cocktails while we discuss the history of the liquor and stories behind St. Patrick’s Day itself. Guests will end the evening with an appreciation of Irish Whiskey, the recipes for all cocktails made, and the confidence to rec-reate the drinks at home.

COCKTAIL CLASS: THE GREEN FAIRY Thursday, April 21 • 7-9:30pm • $75This evening we will discuss the history of absinthe (and the wormwood it contains) while crafting three classic cocktails that were created around the previously-maligned spirit. The class includes instruction and discussion, three cock-tails, tasty snacks prepared in the farmhouse kitchen, and recipes.

EDUCATIONAL TOUR: WELCOME TO CORNMAN FARMS Sunday, March 6 • 4-5:30pm • $20Our Welcome to Cornman Farms Tour is an exciting 90 minute introduction to the rich history, agricultural proj-ects and humane raising of animals. Join us for a look at our vegetable and herb gardens, goat milking operation and historic restored Farmhouse and Barn—and enjoy a meet-and-greet with our visionary Managing Partner, Kieron Hales. We’ll even throw in a taste of one of our seasonal vegetables!

ANNUAL SERIES OF SPECIAL EVENTS WITH THE de VIENNE FAMILY FROM ÉPICES DU CRU


ChocOlate Orange TorTE AZingerman'sclassicWe take a layer of chocolate cake made with matzo and ground almonds, flavor it with real orange oil, cover it in dark chocolate ganache and sprin-kle it with toasted almonds. This 6" cake serves 6 to 10.

Lemon SpOnge CakeAlightandlovelyendtoanyfeastWe've baked up a modern twist on the traditional Passover sponge cake! We've dressed up this tasty holiday standard with fresh lemon zest and our own lemon curd inside and caramelized me-ringue outside. This 6" cake serves 6 to 10. Wheat free!

We've been preparing and serving full-flavored Passover dishes since we opened in 1982. We make everything from scratch in our kitchen and use the best ingredients we can find. Over the years, our annual Passover menu has built up a loyal local following thanks to traditional dishes like our homemade gefilte fish (try it if you think you don't like gefilte fish!), mahogany eggs, and beef brisket. Call 734.663.3400 to order!*

Afewfavoritesonthisyear'smenu:

Seder PlateCharoset, Mahogany Eggs, Fresh Horse-radish, Roasted Lamb Shank, Passover Greens, Parsley, and Matzo Crackers

Other Menu HighlightsCharoset, Fresh Horseradish, Chopped Liver, Jewish Chicken Broth, Matzo, Chocolate Orange Passover Tortes, Bakehouse Macaroons and more!

Gluten FrEe gefilte FishOur handmade Gefilte Fish is made with freshwater fish, matzo meal, fresh eggs, sea salt and white pepper, then poached in fish broth. And, now they’re available gluten free!

*None of our Passover foods are kosher.

100% of the profits from our Complete Seder

Meal for 4 goes to FoOdGatherers!

Complete Seder Meal for 4

Choose from Roast Beef Brisket OR Whole-roasted Free Range Chicken

with Housemade Golden Mashed Potatoes and Gravy, four handmade Gefilte Fish, Potato Kugel, and Pass-over Greens, Jewish Chicken Broth

with Matzo Balls, and a 6" Chocolate Orange Passover Torte made at

Zingerman's Bakehouse.

The full menu is available at the Deli or online after March 22. www.zingermansdeli.com Order ahead at 734.663.3400

Call734.761.2095toreserveyours!

Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter & Jelly Fudge EggsMade with browned Kerrygold butter & whole Guernsey milk!

Chocolate Almond Fudge EggsA NEW treat from candyman Charlie Frank with marzipan and chunks of toasted almonds

Special Easter Chocolate Covered Peanut BrittleFor the ultimate Easter basket! Our fresh, crackly brittle dipped in luscious dark choco-late.

Easter themed Zzang!® Bar 4-PackThe perfect way to sample all four of our

handmade candy bar flavors

Easter Super Zzang!® OriginalA foot-long version of the candy bar that Oprah said "puts the vending machine stuff to shame."

Hot CrOSs Buns 3/24-3/27onlyA traditional treat on Good Friday, this soft, yeasted bun is made with raisins, currants, candied orange peel, and decorat-ed with an icing cross.

SomOdi Kálacs (sho-mo-dee-ko-loch)everyweekendinMarchA traditional Hungarian Easter bread we learned to bake in a village in Transylvania on our trip there last year. This soft, golden loaf is made with fresh eggs and a sweet butter and cinnamon sugar swirl. The smell is amazing. The taste is even better. Enjoy it while you can!

FirstpickupFriday,April22•11amFull menu available starting March 22 at zingermansdeli.com

PaSsoverSpecials

MarshmalLow BunNy TailS!Handmade marshmallows in two delicious flavors: raspberry and co-conut. Pure flavor from raspberry preserves or Italian coconut paste and toasted coconut. You could say they're from Italian bunnies! Each half-pound package contains both flavors.

BakehousePassoverspecialsareavailableallAprilatZingerman'sBakehouse,DelicatessenorRoadhouse

Golden ChOcolate EgGFrom Veruca Chocolates in Chicago comes this spectacular chocolate egg filled with salted caramel, chocolate-peanut ganache and a crunchy salted pretzel center. The egg is hand dipped in edible gold luster dust making it desirable to any Veruca Salts you might have lurking in your family.

ChocOlate and Hazelnut Stuffed Easter EgGsA magic trick moonlighting as an Easter sweet. It started its life as a perfectly proper egg. Then the insides were removed, deployed for dinner, the shell rinsed. Next it was filled with two ounces of Venchi's supremely luxurious hazelnut and chocolate gianduja, the most popu-lar sweet in the Piedmont region of Italy. The shell was decorated and remains per-fectly intact. It cracks and peels just like a hard boiled egg, albeit an egg laid from a chocolate chicken.

EASTERTREATS

Easter is Sunday, March 27Erev Passover is Thursday, April 21

Send a HopPy EAster to Loved Ones COAST TO Coastwww.zingermans.com


It’s a dream come true as you gaze over 42 acres of pastoral charm. The beautifully restored, pre-Civil War Red Barn nestles into the land-scaped grounds as the sweeping branches of the grandfather oak

beckon you onto the balcony of the cozy Greek revival Farmhouse. Outside, a gentle Midwestern breeze carries the enticing aroma of the farm-to-table cuisine lovingly prepared by Chef Kieron Hales. Bask in the effortless elegance offered by Zingerman’s Cornman Farms in Dexter, Michigan, just west of Ann Arbor.

Contact Cornman Farms to schedule a tour and plan your wedding celebration!

email:[email protected]orcall:734-619-8100

For more information, visit www.zingermanscornmanfarms.com

I grew up thinking there were four kinds of cheddar: mild, medium, sharp, and extra sharp. Oh yeah, and a fancy fifth kind: white. Though I didn’t know it at the time, those cheeses are all products of essen-tially the same methods: milk from dozens or hundreds of sources all trucked to the cheese factory, pooled together, pasteurized, and turned into enormous blocks of cheese. They were vacuum sealed in plastic and placed into refrigeration to age for a few months. The degree of sharpness, the one way the customer could choose between them, was a product of how much acidity was in the finished cheese.

In the last fifteen years, though, a few pioneering cheesemakers began experimenting with aging cheese a different way. They wrapped the baby wheels of cheddar in cloth. Soon clothbound cheddars, like the Cabot Clothbound Cheddar aged at the Cellars at Jasper Hill, were the big new thing. Only really, they weren’t new at all.

Cheddar has been wrapped in cloth in Britain for centuries.The English have made cheddar since at least 1170, when King Henry II purchased more than 10,000 pounds for his court. (His larders must have been mouse heaven!) I can’t say for certain whether that ched-dar was aged in cloth, but we do know that English cheesemakers have been using cloth since at least the 1600s. When colonial chee-semakers arrived in New England, all of the first cheddars made in America were wrapped in cloth. Those new American cheddars required a few adaptations, though: whereas England’s mild weather made for good conditions for aging cheese, the hot summers of New England made the cheese age—and dry out—too quickly. To counter-act the heat, Yankee cheesemakers started covering the cloth wrap-ping with a layer of lard—a technique that’s used today to make Cabot Clothbound Cheddar. The lard never touches the cheese itself, just the cloth. It helps to keep in the moisture so the cheese mature more evenly.

By the end of the 19th century, American entrepreneurs figured out how to wrap cheese in wax, which holds in moisture even better than lard. Wax—and later vacuum-sealed plastic, AKA cryovac—make cheesemaking easier. Not only does it keep in more moisture (which means more profit, since cheese is sold by weight), it also eliminates some of the labor of cheesemaking. While cheese wrapped in cloth needs to be flipped over regularly to mature evenly, a waxed cheese can be plopped in a fridge and left alone till its ready to sell. Cloth-wrapped cheese also needs to be brushed regularly to keep them clean. But the savings in weight and labor come at the expense of flavor. As cheese matures it releases gas, which gets locked in by wax and cryovac. That’s not good for flavor. Cloth allows the cheese to exhale, which lets more complex, interesting, longer lasting flavors not get overwhelmed.

One reason some people like wax and cryovac is that they let you age cheese for a lot longer. In the 1990s, extra old cheddars started

showing up on the specialty market: two years, seven years, a decade, even. Ages like that are only with wax or cryovac’ed cheeses. If you try to age a clothbound cheddar for more than a couple of years it would completely dry out and the flavor would become way too salty. It’s like dog years compared to human years: clothbound cheddars age faster. Cabot Clothbound Cheddar reaches its peak at about 12 months old; that’s usually how old our wheels are.

While the clothbound aging technique was developed in England, that doesn’t mean it’s widespread there today. During World War II farmstead cheesemaking all but disappeared when the govern-ment required that milk be pooled together to make wartime cheese rations. After the war not many cheesemakers took up their old craft. Today there are only three or four traditional cheddars made in England. We sell one made by Jamie Montgomery.

Cabot Clothbound Cheddar tastes a bit different than English cheddar.While English cheddars can be a bit vegetal and piquant, Cabot Clothbound Cheddar has a bit more caramelly, nutty sweetness. That sweetness is balanced with rich, brothy notes, some bright, fruity fla-vors, and that classic cheddar tang. Tying it all together is a bright acidity—what the Big Cheese Industry calls “sharpness.” (By the way, smaller cheesemakers usually avoid that word. If you want to impress a cheesemonger, next time you go to your local cheese shop ask for a nice “acidic” cheddar, not a sharp one.) The tangy-yet-sweet flavors make Cabot Clothbound Cheddar an eye-rollingly good compan-ion for cider jelly. And sandwiches, burgers, or crackers—Cabot Clothbound Cheddar turns them all up to eleven.

When wheels of Cabot Clothbound Cheddar arrive to our cheesecave, they’re still wrapped in the cloth. By the time you get a piece at home, though, we’ve taken the cloth off so the whole piece is cheese. That means that the rind on your cheese is edible, if you want to eat it or toss it into a broth or risotto for extra flavoring. But before you pop it in your mouth or the soup pot, take a look at the rind—you may see an imprint of the cloth.

ValNeff-RasmussenwritesTheFeedblogatzingermans.com

Cabot Clothbound CheddarByValNeff-Rasmussen

Check out the The Feed blog about The Secret Life of Amazing Food at Zingermans at thefeed.zingermans.com

Huge savings on meats, cheeses and sweets.

Stock up on your favorites. Try something new.

Share with your friends. Or not.

Now thrOugh March 31st

Nueske's Applewood BaconOur best-selling bacon for the thirty -four years we've been in business (happy birth-day Zingerman's on March 15). The bacon that ends all arguments about which bacon is best.

Farmhouse Parmigiano-ReggianoOur Parmigiano comes from a hillside dairy and the cows graze outsides. This means that the milk—and therefore your cheese—has more complex flavors. We cut each piece to order.

Chocolate Dipped OrangesSouthern Italian oranges burst with so much flavor that you want to eat the peel. Espe-cially when they're candied in a sugar bath, slowly caramelized in an oven at low heat, and dipped in chocolate.

seE wWw.zingermans.com for more, and to order now!

at zingermans.com

Celebrate with a gourmet dinner prepared on-site by Chef Kieron Hales and served in our Greek revival Farmhouse

$8,500 includes a dinner for up to 50 guests (including the couple). from 5PM - 10PM, Monday - Thursday

• Photographer

• Centerpiece for Head Table

• A four-course gourmet dinner

• Non-alcoholic beverages

Rehearsal Dinner Intimate Wedding PackageRelax as we arrange all key components of your wedding with as little as two weeks notice, for between 5 and 20 guests (including the couple).

$5,500 includes a half-day rental, from 9AM - 2PM or 4PM - 9PM, Monday - Thursday.

• Choice of picturesque location on the venue property for the ceremony

•Photographer

• Officiant

• Bouquet and boutonniere (one of each, or two of either!)

• A three-course gourmet meal (either brunch, lunch, or dinner) prepared by Zingerman’s Chef Kieron Hales, complemented by a bottle of champagne or sparkling cider, and ending on the sweet note of a lovingly baked, Zingerman’s Bakehouse cake.


Frank Carollo wants his guests at Zingerman's Bakehouse to taste the state of Michigan. So about seven years ago, he started working with a fellow from Michigan State University who wondered if the Bakehouse might be interested in buying some wheat grown by a local farmer. After baking a few test loaves, Frank began buying the flour. “I think we bought some-thing like 100-200 lbs in the first year.” He liked the idea of using Michigan-grown wheat flour, and it was of a high enough quality that they used it to make the Bakehouse Farm bread. “We had enough to make it through most of the month before we ran out.”

The experiment was a success, and soon Frank was scouring the Michigan countryside in search of a suitable wheat raised using traditional, sustainable methods. It wasn't easy. For decades now, farmers in the state have been incentivized by higher market prices to grow low-protein wheat, which pro-duces a softer flour that works well for making cakes and pas-tries. Bread, however, requires the higher protein content in a “hard” flour to form the gluten necessary for a loaf's dense, chewy structure. “A hundred years ago, people grew one kind of wheat and just baked everything with it,” says Frank. “There weren't any other options. So, you might make bread that's nutritious and edible, but may not have the volume and the characteristics of a mod-ern bread that we look for, and our customers expect.”

Frank is trying incentives of his own to help convince farmers to grow higher protein wheat for his bread. When he contracts with a farmer, he guarantees a certain return, or price, for the crops in order to offset the risks inherent to growing without chemical pesticides or fertilizers. In many cases, if a farmer has a successful year, it's likely that other farmers are experi-encing the same, and it can actually drive down the price due to market saturation. So, the Bakehouse locks in a fair price ahead of time that's often better than the market price. If, on the other hand, the farmer has a bad year and his crop fails, Frank's guaranteed return ensures that the year is not a com-plete loss for the farmer. In this way, Zingerman's Bakehouse provides a bit of insurance for local farmers who plant high-quality, yet potentially riskier wheat crops.

And although the search for the right high-protein flour grown in Michigan remains a challenge, there's evidence that things might be changing as the demand for naturally and locally made bread grows. About nine years ago, the Bakehouse con-nected with Westwind Milling in Linden, MI, and began buying a small quantity of their organic whole wheat flour. The qual-ity of the flour was very good and the grinding process in the old-fashioned mill left more wheat germ and bran in the flour, instilling a better flavor and texture in the finished bread. A few test loaves later, the Westwind bread was born.

Yet, even working with an established mill like Westwind, regular deliveries of quality organic flour may be difficult to maintain. This can be due to the effects of weather on a grow-ing season, but also because a naturally raised wheat is a bit more delicate than conventional wheat. Westwind Milling grows their grains without the use of synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, so they're unfortunately more vulnerable to blights or pests. If a crop is so affected, the Bakehouse may not be able to get the Westwind flour. An unfortunate situation, but it's part of the trade-off for a naturally grown food with better flavor. That means Frank is always on the lookout for other sources that might help fill the gap.

He recently crossed paths with a wheat-grower from the Traverse City area who's had a very successful year. Last year, the southern end of Michigan's Lower Peninsula experienced a higher-than-average rainfall in the critical early part of the season. The water saturation created a very hospitable

environment for certain kinds of blight, and many farm-ers saw all of their hard work go for nought. This past year, the Bakehouse had arranged for the growing of seventy acres in Saline, MI, as well as eleven acres in Eaton Rapids, MI. Unfortunately, the crops were afflicted with a blight that left the wheat inedible. In the Northwest region of the state, however, the micro-climate was favorable to the growers and their crop yield was very successful. Frank was given samples of flour ground from the Traverse City wheat, and plans to bake test loaves very soon. He also plans to attend a growers conference in that area to explore the possibility of sourcing wheat from the North.

But simply growing a successful wheat crop isn't the only chal-lenge. For example, to find good, conventionally grown wheat flour, all Frank has to do is make a phone call to his baking supply company. The company then sources flour from places like Kansas or Nebraska, where the growing season is longer. The flour is milled and stored until it's ready to be shipped. On the other hand, with Michigan-grown organic wheat the Bakehouse must pay for transportation from the field to a mill, where the wheat is ground into flour. Then they must pay to have the flour stored until its needed, and then pay once again for delivery. In the past, Purity Mills has helped out, but the logistics of this operation are expensive and time-consuming.

Ideally, Frank would like to see a semi-local storage location with a mill in which to process the grains.“A hundred years ago, every town had its own mill, so this wasn't an issue. You'd simply harvest your grains and drive them to the local mill.” But, as we know all too well, times have changed and the majority of local mills were closed decades ago in favor of large, centralized processing facilities. “If I were still 20,” smiles Frank, “and didn't have a busy bakehouse to run, I'd love to learn the craft of milling.” He hopes that an enterprising younger person will come along and make this vision a reality. This also fits nicely into his long-term vision for establishing closer relationships with local farmers. “I look forward to the day when we have several breads where we know exactly where the flour comes from - even the field where the wheat was grown - ideally within a couple hours of here.”

And Frank has plans for these special wheat flours. We've already talked about the delicious Westwind bread, which was the first to use organic wheat flour. Then last year, the Bakehouse debuted another unique bread: the Michigan Chestnut Baguette. Inspired by Zingerman's Deli chef Rodger Bowser's work help promote Michigan chestnuts, as well as by the abundance of chestnuts in the Bakehouse Hungarian foods, the Michigan Chestnut Baguette has proven to be a crowd-pleaser of the first order. The recipe calls for chestnut flour from Michigan Chestnut Growers in Grand Haven, MI, as well as wheat flour from Westwind Milling. The result is a lovely bread with a dense tan and purple crumb, and a beauti-ful dark crust.

And although Frank has a yen for local grains, he doesn't always mean local to Michigan. Flavor and tradition are a major part of the Bakehouse vision. And this will be evident in the forthcoming Pane Nero bread expected to hit Bakehouse shelves very soon. This traditional Sicilian loaf was first tasted (enthusiastically) by Zingerman's founder Ari Weinzweig over twenty years ago on a trip overseas, and had achieved an almost mythic quality at Zingerman's in the ensuing decades. That was until Frank took a trip back to his family's home-land of Sicily a couple of years back, and happened to meet the owner of Molini del Ponte, Filippo Drago. Molini del Ponte is a traditional mill in Castelvetrano that produces very high-quality ancient whole wheat Durum flour, which just happens to be the primary ingredient in the legendary Pane Nero (“the

black bread of Sicily”). The two men talked, and Frank walked away with a couple of pounds of the Durum, and plans to ship more to the Bakehouse. When Frank returned from Sicily, he promptly baked a few test loaves, and Pane Nero came to the Zingerman's Bakehouse for the first time. The grain of the flour is coarse, and a light, speckled yellow in color. The resulting loaf is dark brown, with a dense, compact crumb and topped with sesame seeds. The bread was met with enthusiastic response among Zingerman's staff, and guests can expect to see the delicious Pane Nero in Zingerman's businesses in the coming months.

Although the Pane Nero flour comes from far away, Frank's dream of a deeper connection to the growers is present in that bread. He can tell his guests exactly where their bread comes from. Frank knows the farmer, he knows the land, and the wheat. He knows the miller, and his methods. In the dream, the bread is a perfect expression of the relationship between the land, and the people who appreciate its bounty.

Flour Power:An Interview with Frank Carollo,

managing partner at Zingerman's Bakehouseby E.J. Olsen

Get your hands on the breads mentionedStopinandaskforataste!

734-761-2095 • 3711 Plaza Drive, Ann Arbor, MI

Farm bread available everyday

Michigan Chestnut baguettesavailable Fri-Sun

Pane Nero and True North breads coming soon! Ask for details.

Learn to bake bread with us!

We offer more than a dozen hands-on bread making classes at BAKE!, our hands-on teaching bakery.

734-761-7255 • 3723 Plaza Drive, Ann Arbor, MIExplore our class menu at www.bakewithzing.com

• Naturally Leavened Breads, including Farm, pecan raisin and 8 grain 3 seed

• The Power of Flour, making 4 batches of baguettes with different flour combinations

• Amber Waves of Grain: American Breads, including Margaret's Sweet Wheat, Bakehouse white and cornbread

Rockin' Rye breads, Wholey Whole Grain breads, German Breads, & more

KeEp up on our breads

Sign up for our enews at zingermansbakehouse.com

or like us on Facebook

Communications Manager


We have made some great specialty breads and pastries over the years that developed their own small followings, so we bring them back for a weekend here and there just for fun. If you’re looking for a little adventure check out this calendar.

SomodiKálacs-every Fri-Sun in March

IrishBrownSodaBread-March 1-17

MapleLeafCookies-March 18

HotCrossBuns-March 24-27

march Boston Cream pieOur Boston Cream pie is two layers of moist vanilla chiffon cake, filled with fresh vanilla bean pastry cream, covered in thin layer of vanilla butter cream and rich dark chocolate ganache. Take one bite and you'll know why it has a whole city so devoted to it. 6" cake, serves 6-8.

april Hummingbird CakeA traditional southern cake with toasted coconut, fresh bananas, toasted pecans and pineapple covered in cream cheese frosting. Available in 6" and 9" rounds and sheet cakes.

march Sicilian Sesame Semolina The bread to seize the imagination of ses-ame seed lovers everywhere - the entire loaf is rolled in unhulled sesame seeds. Golden color, great taste.

april PaesanoThe traditional bread of the Puglia region of Italy. Pass it around the table for rip-ping and dipping in great olive oil, soup or pasta.

20% off whole cakes & slices! $4.50 each (reg. $6.29)

Zingerman's Campaign forDarker Crusts

Nothing Good Ever Happens in a HurryEvery once in a while you come across what my friend Lex would call a "nugget" of wisdom, a little tasty tidbit of infor-mation that sticks with you and shines an inordinate amount of light onto the mystery of life. I picked up one of those nug-gets years ago, from Joe Linley, a seventh generation miller down in rural North Carolina. After a guided walk through the old mill he spoke of his successes and frustrations, how he was committed to bringing better flour to bakers. I wondered: How did he keep going when the mass market had so obvi-ously moved in the other direction, toward high speed, low cost, bleached white flours, away from the kind of traditional work he was doing? "Well," he said slowly, hand pulling on the bill of his well worn green cap, "I learned a long time ago that nothing good ever happens in a hurry." I find his words to ring truer and truer with each passing year.

His words are true twice over when it comes to crust color. With a year of campaigning under our belts, it's clear to me that we aren't going to change the American image of what a well made loaf of bread ought to look like overnight. Joe's words of wisdom are also relevant in the context of the bak-ing-under baked, light brown loaves emerge from the oven quickly; too quickly actually. The best loaves-those with dark brown, streaked with black crusts-simply take more time in the oven, require added patience on the part of the bakers, additional commitment to quality from those who are will-ing to leave them in the oven longer than "standard wisdom" requires, adding cost to every loaf. But like Joe said, "Nothing good ever happens in a hurry." And since the move to darker crusts is definitely good, it almost goes without saying that it's likely to take a long time.

What's the deal with these darker crusts?Well, as I've said before, when it comes to traditionally-made, hearth-baked breads like the ones we're making out at the Bakehouse, the pattern is clear: the darker the crust the more flavorful the loaf. The challenge is that from a selling stand-point, darker crusts usually seem to spell doom. After grow-ing up on lightly colored loaves of Wonder bread, and later the only light browned crusts of assorted whole wheat breads, most Americans are convinced that darker crusts are undesir-able; a sign of a bad baker pawning off his or her over-baked loaves on an otherwise innocent consumer. It's time to cast aside this inaccurate assumption-there's little to lose, and enormous amounts of flavor to gain. So, let me say it again: dark crusts are a sign of better tasting breads.

Over the years, dozens of Zingerman's staffers have told me that "customers just won't buy darker loaves." Well, what I say is that we haven't done a good enough of job of helping folks realize just how good dark-crusted breads can be. Because, in truth, the consumer who's getting shorted is the one who's set-tling for lighter crusts instead of demanding that the baker be skilled enough to hit the peak of bread-baking perfection: that ideal balance between dark, crisp, chewy, crust and moist, soft interior crumb. The darker it gets, the more the crust caramel-izes, the sweeter and nuttier its flavor. Additionally, repeated tastings have shown us that darker crusts also bring better

balance to the flavor of tra-ditional sour-dough breads, like our Farm or Better Than San Francisco Sourdough. When the crust looks too light, the sour can dominate; when the crust is nice and dark, the sour is beautifully balanced. Zingerman's Bakehouse managing partner and master baker, Frank Carollo, concurs. Having worked on this campaign for a year now, I know we've got the message across to our staff. As soon as they see Frank or I in line they start looking for the most darkly crusted loaf they can find.

But it's not just us. Michael London, the world renowned artisan who taught us to bake these breads in the first place has said it all along. Mark Furstenburg, who bakes wonderful breads at The Bread Line, his bakery restaurant in Washington D.C., once wrote a promotional piece entitled, "Why We Burn Our Bread." In fact, most every baker of traditional breads says the same thing. But when I ask why they don't bake their breads darker, most just shrug their shoulders in frustration: "Can't seem to get customers to buy them." Well, to that I say, "OK, our customers are better than your customers. And our customers are willing to look past their prejudices and learn to love the dark crust that's the apple of the traditional baker's eye." Aren't you?

"OK, I buy the dark crust in principle, but still, can't a crust get too dark?" you ask.Sure. Certainly one can over-bake a loaf, giving a nice dark crust but leaving the interior crumb overly dry. But what I'm talking here about well-baked breads, ones that are left in the oven a bit longer 'til they're darker than those most folks would find acceptable. Of course, like all questions of taste, crust color is primarily a personal issue. Everyone has their own opinion, and in the end, yours is the one that counts when it comes to spending your money. In honesty, I like our Farm Bread best when the crust is so dark it's nearly black. "Extra crispy," I call it. Is it burned? No. It's just a beautiful con-trast of crust and crumb, a perfect balance between blackened exterior and soft white interior. Basically, it tastes great; and I can-and have-eaten an entire loaf in a single sitting. The same is true for our French baguettes, Better Than San Francisco Sourdough, Pain de Montagne. The darker the crust, the better the flavor.

Try a taste of an extra dark loaf of Farm Bread and see for yourself the next time you visit the Bakehouse, the Deli, or the Roadhouse. If you want to go home and compare for yourself, we'd be glad to offer you two half loaves; one from a lighter loaf, the other from a more darkly crusted cousin. Then you can take them home and conduct a little crust comparison of your own. As always, we guarantee everything we sell you; so what's to lose? If you don't like the flavor of the extra dark loaf, let us know and we'll be glad to replace it or cough up a quick cash refund on the spot. We want you to be happy.

1. It's full of flavorGreat bread is all about fla-vor. Lots and lots of flavor. Flavor that fills your mouth. A flavor that lingers long after the loaf itself is gone.

2. We count on crustReal bread has crust. Always has, always will. We work hard to put a real crust on each and every loaf of Zingerman’s Bakehouse bread. Crust you can sink your teeth into. Toward that end we do things like bake most of our breads on the stone hearth in our steam injected ovens. For us, good crust is a must.

3. It's made with great ingredientsYou can’t make great food without great ingredi-ents. And because there are so few ingredients in our breads, we count on their quality; for the most part, flour, salt and water are we’ll we’ve got. So our flours are unbleached and unbromated, and many are organic. Our water is fil-tered. Our salt is sea salt. When we do add other ingredients, we go for the best we can get—Italian Parmesan for the Parmesan Pepper bread; big, juicy Red Flame Raisins for the Pecan Raisin; fresh eggs and clo-ver honey for the Challah; Valhrona and Callebaut chocolates in the Chocolate Cherry bread.

4. Time's on our sideWe set out to bake loaves that were so good that peo-ple would plan their meals around the breads, instead of the other way around. Bread that was so flavorful, so aromatic, so downright delicious that you’d sooner skip the rest of the meal than be left without the bread. No meeting or meal at Zingerman’s is complete without bread. We hope it becomes an essential part of your eating as well.

5. Bread so good you just want to eat it plainYou won’t see it on the ingredients list (though maybe it should be), but one of the most critical compo-nents of getting the full fla-vor we love is time. 8 to 18 hours give our doughs the opportunity to develop the complex flavors that make good bread such a treat to eat. While most modern bakeries rely on heaping helpings of commercial yeast to hasten the process along, we often work with-out added yeast altogether. This is the old way to bake—the way it was done before industrialized, commercial bakeries decided to whiten, lighten and speed up the traditional techniques.

6. The only taste that counts is yours: we guarantee itAt the end of the day, the only taste that really mat-ters is yours. Have a taste of any of our breads—it’s yours for the asking. If you don’t have as much fun eating this bread as we do, we want to replace it or refund your hard-earned money.

SIX REASONSWE LIKE TO EAT OUR OWN BREAD

ChernushkaRyeApril 1-2

BlackOliveFarm

April 15-16

BananaCreamPie April 22-24

GreenOlivePaesanoApril 22-23

PepperedBaconFarmBreadApril 29-30

LemonPoppyseedCoffeecakeApril 28-May 1

march April

available at the bakehouse, roadhouse and delicatessen.

march - april 2016 zingerman's newsletter

Documents