Welcome to the September installment of the Culinary Adventure Society! Since Ann Arbor is such a big football town, the fall brings extra excitement (and a lot of extra people) to our community to enjoy the bounty of the season and the great food available all around.
Enjoy the season and enjoy the spread!
Brad, Mail Order Food Finder and Scribe
In this installment
Moroccan Challah
Long Table Popcorn Pancake Mix
Super Green Cremosa
Cascatelli Pasta
Dutch Dark Chocolate Sprinkles
Rust Belt Saucisson
Classic Seed Crackers
Sweet Chile Sauce
Moroccan Challah
Every year for Rosh Hashanah the master bakers at Zingerman’s Bakehouse crank up the ovens and produce amazing loaves of challah for the New Year on the Jewish calendar. Here’s a piece from their own Bakehouse historian, Lee Vedder. You’ve received the Moroccan (braided) Challah, though she mentions two other styles they also make.
“A loaf rooted in age-old Jewish tradition and laden with symbolism, the challah we have come to know and love today is a braided soft bread enriched with eggs, oil, and honey that was first made by Ashkenazi Jews in 15th-century Central Europe. Challah started out as a plain bread that over the course of the 15th century became more enriched. It was not sweetened until the early 19th century, when sugar and other sweeteners, such as honey, became more available and more affordable all over Europe. Sephardic Jews from the Mediterranean and North Africa enriched challah even further by kneading in and garnishing the bread with a customary mix of flavorful spices and seeds. Then as now, challah was used to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath or Shabbat, holidays and important life events.
Challah baked for the Jewish Sabbath and holidays are made in various sizes and shapes, all of which have symbolic meaning. For Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and the first of the High Holidays, the celebratory challah takes the traditional shape of a round turban and is often studded with raisins. The spiral shape, where there is no beginning or end, symbolizes continuity and the circularity of life. The loaves are often sweetened with honey, signifying the wish for a sweet year, richness and good living, and a nod to the Biblical references to Israel as the “land of milk and honey.”
Here at the Bakehouse, we make our challah in the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition with organic wheat flour, fresh cage-free eggs, local Michigan honey from Gearig Apiaries Honey, yeast, and a little corn oil. The flavor is rich, but not too sweet. The texture is soft, but stands up to sandwiches, French toast, and bread pudding.
During the Jewish High Holidays, starting with Rosh Hashanah, we pull out the stops with two rather fancy celebratory challahs, also rooted in centuries-old Jewish tradition: our Ashkenazi turban-shaped challah studded with rum-soaked, red flame raisins, together with our more Sephardic-leaning five-strand Moroccan braid, flavored with sesame, poppy, and aromatic anise seeds and brushed with a honey syrup to give it a touch of extra sweetness.
At the Bakehouse, we often refer to the Jewish High Holidays as “Challah Daze!,” due to all the traditional challahs we make at this time.”
Long Table Popcorn Pancake Mix
Lindsey and Samual were doing a play together in the Chicago area when sparks began to fly. They got to talking about Bisquick (as actors often do) and whether it was a force for good or evil.
Samual said it was good because it made people eat pancakes, even if the stuff in Bisquick wasn’t. “Samual loves pancakes,” Lindsay told me in our video call. “He became obsessed with making healthy pancakes that tasted great. It started to be his thing, crafting different kinds of mixes with different kinds of grains and nuts and whatever else he could think of.”
Eventually it worked on Lindsey and they fell in love. But all that pancake work wasn’t just romantically aimed…a friend of theirs recommended turning it into a business.
“Folks in the theater world have a lot of downtime in their calendars and we can be quite creative entrepreneurs when we need to be!” Lindsey beamed.
They started selling it at the farmer’s market and eventually Samuel started to know the farmers and customers very well ideas started to take form, even if time wasn’t always ample.
“Once the pandemic happened, things shifted.” Lindsey explained. They took entrepreneurial classes and focused on the business side. They even went on Shark Tank (no one invested, which is probably for the better) and they went from $60,000 in sales to $1,000,000 in sales becasue of the exposure. “It’s been a big change.”
They’re still working in the theater while they try to catch this tiger by the tail.
Samual went with popcorn as the base of the mix because they produce these wonderfully light, airy, fluffy pancakes that are really tasty.
Though prodded and begged and promised not to tell anyone, Lindsey wouldn’t share the company secrets of how they actually process the popped corn, but it goes something like this:
Pop the corn, grind it into flour. “There’s a reason no one is doing this,” Lindsey said, “it’s really hard!”
10 lbs of popcorn flour fits into a 50lb bag and it looks funny all packed in there. (“We have our four-year old carry it around and it looks hilarious!” Lindsey said.)
Unlike other pancake mixes, there’s not a lot of gluten in there, so you can’t over mix it. That’s a worry in other mixes because you might break the gluten strands that hold it together. In short, it’s hard to mess up and easy to love!
Super Green Cremosa
I first heard the name Doug Zell around the millennium, when the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses was about to grow from a handful to a double handful of businesses. It was before there was a Zingerman’s Coffee Company, and we (Zingerman’s) were in talks with Doug and his Chicago-based coffee roasting company “Intelligensia” to roast our coffees. Ultimately, Zingerman’s Coffee Company became a thing, but I doubt it hurt Doug too much—Intelligensia was known as one of the best roasters in the country. Ultimately Doug sold the company and moved to Austin, Texas where he parlayed his knowledge of coffee, love of wine, and passion for bikes into an all-in-one sort of progressive space called “The Meteor” where you can start your day with a latte and breakfast taco, get your precision bike serviced, and wrap it all up with a glass of wine and some snacks while you watch the sunset.
“That green creamy sauce is a thing in Austin, but not really anywhere else.” Doug explained when we talked. “The sauce makes the taco and since a breakfast taco is rather straight forward with its flavor, you need more personality, heft, and impact with your sauce if you want to stand out in the crowded Austin Breakfast Taco scene.”
“They’re not salsas, they’re more of a sauce.” Doug continued. “We started making this cremosa in our cafes for our breakfast tacos it was such a hit we eventually started to bottle it.” They entered the sauce in The Good Food Awards competition and won! So we’ve been selling it in the cafes and now we’re ready for more!”
Doug wrapped it up by with this: “we didn’t invent this style of sauce, it’s a very Austin-style sauce, but I love our take on it and the distinctness of its flavor makes it stand out in my mind and hopefully in your mouth!”
Cascatelli Pasta
For most of us, pasta is part of our normal dinner rotation. It’s an easy meal, it’s delicious, and it satisfies everyone at the table (especially when time is short and life is busy). And over the last twenty years finding good pasta has gotten easier and easier thanks to the number of small, artisan, American pasta makers on our shelves. Sfoglini is one of those pasta makers.
Sfoglini pasta was founded in Brooklyn, NY back in 2012. Chef Steve Gonzalez and Creative Director Scott Ketchum were running it then and they’re still running the operation today, though they moved their facility up the Hudson River to the small town of Coxsackie, NY in 2018…it’s less hectic making, drying, and shipping pasta outside the city than in. They extract all their shapes through bronze dies, which give the noodles a rougher texture that’s good for grabbing sauces. (More industrial producers use plastic, which gives pasta a smooth texture.) They dry their pasta at low temperatures for a longer than most because it leaves the noodles with more of a toothsome texture. They follow all the traditional methods…the only thing innovative is the shape of these noodles.
Cascatelli was developed in collaboration with Dan Pashman, a two-time James Beard Award winner and creator/host of the podcast Sporkful. In a four-part series called “Mission: ImPASTAble” the developed the noodle you see before you in order to serve three functions:
- Sauceability: How readily sauce adheres to the shape
- Forkability: How easy it is to get the shape on your fork and keep it there
- Toothsinkability: How satisfying it is to sink your teeth into it
I think they’ve hit the mark in all three areas, myself, but you be the judge! Here’s a recipe from Sporkful and Sfoglini to try at home:
INGREDIENTS
MAKES FOUR SERVINGS
16 oz. Sfoglini Cascatelli by Sporkful
4 oz. diced pancetta
Large pinch red pepper flakes
½ medium onion, diced
1 celery stalk, diced
1 carrot, peeled and diced
Kosher salt
Olive oil (if needed)
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1 lb. ground pork
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp. tomato paste
One 28-oz. can crushed tomatoes
½ cup frozen peas
Chopped fresh parsley, for serving
Grated Pecorino Romano, for serving
Cook the Cascatelli according to the package directions (check at 13 minutes & serve to your taste), reserving ½ cup of pasta water.
In a saucepan over medium heat, cook the pancetta until crisp and most of the fat has rendered out, 5-7 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, place the pancetta on a paper towel-lined plate.
Turn the heat to medium-low, and add the red pepper flakes, onion, celery, and carrot to the pan, seasoning with a little Kosher salt. Cook until the vegetables are softened, 8 minutes, adding olive oil to the pan if necessary. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute more.
Move the vegetables to the edges of the pan. Season the ground pork with salt and pepper and add to the pan, turning the heat up slightly. Using a wooden spoon, break the ground pork up into smaller pieces and cook until it’s browned and cooked all the way through, about 10 minutes.
Add the tomato paste, stirring until the pork is evenly coated. Cook for 2 minutes, then add the crushed tomatoes and the cooked pancetta. Bring to a simmer, then turn the heat to low and simmer for 15-20 minutes to allow the sauce to thicken. About five minutes before you finish cooking the sauce, add the frozen peas. (If you’d like to thin out the sauce a bit, add some reserved pasta water.) Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Stir the Cascatelli into the ragu until it’s coated evenly. Top with chopped fresh parsley and Pecorino Romano, and serve.
Dutch Dark Chocolate Sprinkles
In The Netherlands, Dutch children enjoy a breakfast of toast, butter and chocolate sprinkles. This isn’t one or my more romantic “food finding” stories, but it’s common to most of us, I think:
I was visiting cheesemakers in the Netherlands (Brabander Goat Gouda, for one) and our headquarters was a hotel in Amsterdam. It wasn’t a cute boutique hotel, really, just your standard European biggish city hotel. We’d meet in the dining area after breakfast to start our travels, and it was there in their cafeteria that I first tried the sprinkles. I thought it a lark the first time, but the next morning I had it again, and again, and by the end of the week I was hooked. I stocked up at the airport on the way back home and began plotting how to bring it to our shelves officially…which is happening at the end of September! Consider this a sneak peak of what I’m sure will be one of your favorite foods, too.
The chocolate sprinkles are made with very decent chocolate, not the waxy/grainy/overly sweet kind we see on sundae bars here in the states. You can use them on ice cream/gelato of course, but I recommend you go the toast route like the Dutch. I like to sprinkle mine over peanut-buttered toast. It’s amazing.
Rust Belt Saucisson
The domestic artisan food world has been growing for decades, now. Across the country in every corner of these fifty states, small time producers are making a name for themselves with great tasting foods made by hand, following traditional methods of production.
What’s most exciting (at least to a midwestern boy like myself) is these celebrated producers aren’t any where near “the coasts” or major metropolitan markets: they’re right here in the heartland. Folks like Smoking Goose in Indianapolis are making fantastic artisanal cured meats in the very places where the meats are raised.
Fresh meat makes for delicious cured meats. Add the fact that these producers are only working with small farms that follow humane, often sustainable practices of husbandry and the flavor potential grows even more.
This Rust Belt Saucisson from Smoking Goose in Indianapolis is a perfect example of great tasting salami from our own backyard. Founded in 2011 by Chris Eley, the folks at Smoking Goose at the vanguard of speciality food, encouraging the artisanal food producers and sellers around the Indianapolis area for better than a decade. Made from 100% Duroc pork from Gunthorp Farms in Indiana (we sell their pork chops and bacon, too), it’s mixed with a bit of garlic, clove, nutmeg, cinnamon and white pepper before being cold smoked over applewood and hickory before being cured. It’s a no-nonsense, straightforward, delicious salami that everyone will enjoy. Take it with you hiking or to the next bonfire.
Classic Seed Crackers
These are no butter, conventional cracker, these Swedish-style crackers are more than a vehicle for other flavors, these are bountiful, crunchy, satisifying snack that you could devour in one sitting if you’re not careful! These crisp crunchers are so stuffed with organic ingredients that I’m this close to calling them ‘healthy’ for ya! But I won’t go that far.
Made with: sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, flax seeds, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds and just enough coconut oil and cornmeal to hold it all together, these crackers crunch so loudly you’ll alert the whole house that you’re indulging in them, so maybe find a soundproof room or podcast studio in which to enjoy them. Also with the salami. That would be great.
Sweet Chile Sauce
Tara Stowe has been working for Zingerman’s for more than ten years by now. She started with us at Zingerman’s Mail Order, but has spent the last few years working part-time at Zingerman’s Candy Company where she handles a lot of the packaging of those precious confections.
But her true passions are found in the garden and in the kitchen where she turns the fruits of her labors into the jams and sauces that she remembers making with her grandmother and mother, and now her own daughter.
Many of the recipes Tara uses come from turn of the century cookbooks she’s collected over the years. We’re not talking Betty Crocker, here, we’re talking ingredients and techniques that Laura Ingells Wilder would have recognized.
That’s not to say that Tara assuages modern conveniences and safety measures when creating her chutney…on the contrary. She made each and every jar in a USDA certified professional kitchen and it’s passed muster. Still, it’s a lot of work for one woman to handle. She’s been harvesting peppers and celery and tomatoes and all sorts of delicious vegetables from her garden all summer long and she’s used many of them as ingredients in this Sweet Chile Sauce.
“A sauce like this is very midwestern,” Tara said when we chatted. “It’s just something all grandmothers seemed to have in their pantry.” She continued. “I like that it changes a little each year, depending on what’s going on in your garden at the time, but to me it’s a very fall flavor.
“This version is made with tomatoes, onion, vinegar, sweet peppers, brown sugar, celery, salt, dry mustard, cinnamon and spices. I used some dried spicebush berry this time because it gives it a little allspice/pepper kick that I like.”
Use it on everything from eggs to burgers and grilled meats. I especially like it on burgers this time of year.