The Weekender Gift Box

The (mostly true) origin story of Zingerman’s

Paul Saginaw (Detroit) and Ari Weinzweig (Chicago) met while working at the same restaurant in the late 70s. They dreamed of opening a classic Jewish corner deli in their adopted home (Ann Arbor). When a century old 900 square foot building on a cobblestone street opened up it felt like fate. They opened the doors of Zingerman’s Delicatessen on March 15th, 1982. Think pressed tin ceiling and black and white tiled floor and you’ve got the picture. Five tables, some stools in the window and a menu with twenty five different sandwiches. It was a bohemian food lovers paradise, shopped and staffed by friends. It was—and remains—a bustling food oasis with an awesome mix of regulars, college students, tourists, high school students, parents, visitors, first timers, foodies, fans and adventurers. Please come visit.

We were in commerce before there was e-commerce

Historians speak of a time before the Internet made order of chaos. When cooking shows only aired on PBS. When the celebrity chef du jour was Paul Prudhomme. When no one—I mean no one—took a picture of their dinner. They called it “1992” and it was electric. 

It was the year we packed our first box. On a prep table in the basement of Zingerman’s Delicatessen. We haven’t slowed down since. Back then we took orders on carbonless paper in triplicate. We had a touch tone phone and a cassette answering machine we bought at Target for twenty bucks. There are probably adults reading this right now who have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s how long we’ve been shipping great food. 

The food is the thing

We swear the food we sell is the best tasting we can find. That’s 1,000% true. But there’s more to it. Like Alexander Hamilton we’re never satisfied. So we keep looking. We’re constantly comparing the food we sell to the new food we find. If we like the new stuff better, that’s what we want to sell. It means constantly tasting and tasting and tasting some more to make sure what was true yesterday is still true today. 

We don’t just pull food off a shelf and ship it

Take cheese. It’s a living food that keeps developing and deepening its flavors the longer it stays as a part of the wheel. That’s why we hand-cut your cheese to order directly from the wheel right before we ship it out the door. It’s more difficult than grabbing a pre-packaged wedge from a distributor. It takes lots of training. But the flavor is worth it. 

Zingerman’s Bakehouse—same story. They make all our breads and pastries by hand about a mile up the road. They don’t use any preservatives in their breads, they just let the crust be the natural protector of the crumb inside. We wrap it in paper by hand, pack it in boxes by hand, and, well, you get the idea. 

It’s all in Ann Arbor, Michigan

We started in this college town. And that’s where we’re staying. We don’t have locations around the country. We don’t have a call center in Iowa. Or India. We don’t fulfill with Amazon. We don’t outsource. We insource. 

We are real live human beings

No chatbots. No phone trees. No auto-email. Actually, there’s one, but it’s the most fun auto-email you’ll ever get, promise. When you call, you talk to us. When your order is packed it is packed by us. When we make a mistake, that’s us too. (And we’ll do whatever it takes to make it right.)

Our guarantee is rather crazy 

You know how some companies put up a bunch of rules and hurdles to overcome before they’ll give you a refund or ship out a new product? That’s not us. No rules. No returns. If you experience a problem with our food, service, shipping—or even if you simply don’t like how it tastes—let us know. We believe you. We’ll do whatever it takes to make it right. And you never have to return anything. 

Our horn, tooted by others

OK it always feels weird to share these kinds of things but they’re also kind of awesome. So here goes.

The reuben is killer.

Barack Obama, POTUS #44

Zingerman’s sandwiches are an 11 on a scale of 1 to 5.

Oprah, Midwesterner

My favorite store in the cosmos.

Jim Harrison, Writer, poet, trencherman

Arguably the best mail order gourmet food specialist in the nation.

Larry Olmstead, Forbes

Now that’s a sandwich!

Michael Ivins, Flaming Lips bassist, now retired from rock and roll

I ordered brownies for my daughter and her husband in Denver.  A coyote got into the box and ate most of the brownies. Not a very nice birthday surprise, but you came to my rescue. We came up with a new (secure) address and you replaced the brownies free of charge. 

Dave in Holt, Michigan

Zingerman’s—I think everyone around the country should love them.

Alejandra Ramos, Today Show

One of the country’s iconic food markets.

Kate Krader, Bloomberg

When it comes to the best place in America to buy cheese—OK, let’s all agree there’s absolutely no contest. It’s Zingerman’s.

Wall Street Journal

Zingerman’s is a legend.

USA Today

Thank you for having a company that ships great food overnight when children forget their parents’ 39th wedding anniversary and are in a bind.

Leah in Fredericksburg, Virginia

The Weekender is packed full of our most popular products. We pack everything by hand in our colorfully illustrated cartoon gift box and ship it with two business day shipping to ensure the food arrives in great condition.

Here’s a tour through what you can expect to find in a Weekender and how long you can keep the snacking going.

Zingerman’s Bakehouse bread

Crispy, thick crust; soft, chewy crumb inside. The loaf will arrive wrapped in a paper bread bag. Store it in its paper bag on the counter – out of reach of hungry husbands, wily wives, clever kids – for a few days. If you don’t plan on eating your bread right away, double bag the loaf–or part of it–in plastic and freeze for up to three months.

Zingerman’s Bakehouse pastries and coffee cakes

Made with really good butter, real vanilla, and toasted nuts. All of our pastries and coffee cakes are baked without preservatives, so you’ll want to eat them soon. Each baked good will have an “eat or freeze by” sticker that is about two weeks from when the package started its lucky journey from us to you. If you’ll be enjoying the treats soon, they can be kept at room temperature in the packaging they arrived in or in a plastic bag. Avoid the refrigerator, it can ruin the texture. For longer term storage, all of our baked goods freeze well for up to three months. You can store them in the freezer in their original packaging or, if they’ve been opened, double wrapped in plastic bags. 

Half a pound of artisan cheese

The cheddar from Cabot Creamery is aged just under a year. It’s a great snacking cheese, with a creamy texture and hearty, savory flavors. The half pound block is wrapped with a wax coating which makes it more durable. The cheese can stay in the fridge unopened for a couple months. Once you’ve started snacking, plan to eat it within a few weeks.

Salami from Red Bear Provisions

Made with humanely sourced meat and traditionally cured. To prolong its life at home, keep it refrigerated. But hours or even days at warmer temperatures won’t harm it a bit. Like with most traditional foods, if you serve salami at room temperature you’ll get a lot more flavor than if it’s eaten cold, just out of the refrigerator.

Zingerman’s peanut brittle

Sharp, crackly texture with a finishing savor of roasted Jumbo Runner peanuts. Stash it at room temperature and it can be enjoyed for a few months (although it rarely lasts that long in reality!).

The classic American walnut sour cream coffee cake has been our top selling mail order baked good for three decades, almost since the day we turned on the phones at Zingerman’s Mail Order (long before the internet). What makes this cake so great?

The recipe

Zingerman’s coffee cake is made without icing. This makes it looks like an oddball compared to most coffee cakes out there. Nothing against icing, but too many times icing is a ruse. It’s an atmospheric distraction. It diverts your attention from the sub par ingredients that make up the land mass below. Plus, for many folks, me included, it’s too sweet.

Our coffee cake has just a hint of sweetness. It’s richly flavored with creamy sour cream, spiced Korintje cinnamon from Indonesia, and toasted walnuts. After you eat a slice it lingers in your memory.

The packaging

We pack the coffee cake in one of our illustrated cartoon boxes or in one of our wooden crates made by Wisconsin’s last cheese crate manufacturer. The packaging is fantastic for two reasons: it keeps the coffee cake from getting too jostled or smashed on the journey, and it makes for great gift presentation. Bonus points to those clever folks who re-purpose the boxes and crates for pet beds and other fun uses.

The pan

You can’t make the coffee cake without a bundt-style pan. It’s the pan with the hole in the middle which conducts heat to the interior of the cake. The batter for a sour cream coffee cake is very dense. If the hole wasn’t there the middle would stay raw and collapse into a soggy puddle.

The pan was not a part of American baking until the second half of the twentieth century. H. David Dahlquist, founder of Nordic Ware in Minnesota, created it on the request of Rose Joshua and Fannie Schanfield, two members of Minneapolis’s Hadassah Jewish women’s group. They were nostalgic for dense European cakes like kugelhopf and bundkuchen. They showed Dahlquist a European pan with a hole in the middle and he recreated it to sell with his other baking equipment.

Within a decade it was the top selling pan in America. Three decades later, it was our top selling cake.

1. Butter tastes better

You can’t tell just from looking at a cookie or a piece of cake whether it’s been baked with butter or shortening. The bottom line on baked goods’ flavor is that butter tastes better. It’s also about ten times more costly, so many bakeries make the choice to use less expensive shortenings or margarine. You can taste and smell the difference—pull apart a Bakehouse cinnamon roll and stick it right up to your nose. The sweet, rich scent of butter is right up front, followed by the soft smell of the cinnamon. Shortening, on the other hand, has no aroma to speak of. Good pastry should smell good.

2. Better butter

Zingerman’s Bakehouse doesn’t just use any butter. Many of our baked goods start with sweet butter from Grassland. It tastes better, has less water, and more flavor. There’s no way around it—the better the butter the better the baked goods.

3. Belgian chocolate

There’s chocolate. And then there’s Belgian chocolate. Our chocolate chunk cookies are loaded with big bites of great chocolate, including Callebaut Belgian chocolate. Higher in cocoa content, Callebaut is chocolatier, richer, more delicious than the inexpensive, mass-produced chocolates you’ll find in most baked goods.

4. Real maple syrup

Not Pearl Milling Company or Mrs. Butterworth’s—we use real 100% pure maple syrup from northern Michigan to sweeten our oatmeal raisin cookies. Sugar sweetens. But maple syrup adds depth, flavor and character to a cookie.

5. Country-style sour cream

I’m a sour cream addict from way back. And the sour cream we get is so thick we’ve had guests think that we’d given them a dish of butter by mistake. (Standard issue sour cream is thin and watery by comparison.) It adds enormous richness and flavor to our sour cream coffee cake.

6. Real vanilla

Real vanilla is a the first thing that big bakeries eliminate. You can use industrial, imitation vanilla for about a twentieth of the cost of the real thing. And, by proportion, you use so little vanilla in a batch of baked goods, it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that no one will notice. But… you can clearly taste the difference. Real vanilla is literally almost 150 times as complex in flavor as artificial vanillin. Take away anything else, but please, please don’t take away my vanilla—it adds incredible aroma and flavor to anything it’s used in.

7. Red Flame raisins

Thompson raisins—the ones in the little red boxes—are such a standard that many people have never had the chance to try anything else. But there are other raisins out there, and not surprisingly, some taste a lot better. Red Flames are plump, juicy, joyously flavorful. They’re the star in our Bakehouse’s oatmeal raisin cookies, pecan raisin bread, and cinnamon raisin bread.

8. Organic unbleached & unbromated flours

The better the flour, the better the baked goods. We use organic AP flour for practically all of our breads and baked goods.

9. Fresh eggs

The norm nowadays for commercial bakeries is to use frozen eggs that come in white plastic buckets. We stubbornly stick to old-fashioned eggs in the traditional oval-shaped white shell, the way they made ’em “back in the old days.”

10. Toasted pecans, almonds, and walnuts

Toasting takes time and time is money. But it also adds a lot of flavor to nuts. So we do it. Toasting brings depth to the walnuts in our sour cream coffee cake, the pecans in our pecan pie and pecan blondies, and everything else we make with nuts in it.

11. Indonesian cinnamon

Cinnamon is such a staple in baked goods that a simple switch from one cinnamon to another can make an enormous difference. We stick with Korintje cinnamon from Indonesia, which has a rich flavor with a tongue-tingling tickle to it.

12. Love

The crew at the Bakehouse is adamant that everything that enters and emerges from their ovens does so with the same personal seal of approval—the kind you’d get if you went over to your grandmother’s for a cold glass of milk and a brownie right out of the oven.