Breakfast in Bed Gift Box

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 enjoying soon, keep them at room temperature.

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.

If you want to save some treats for later, keep them in the freezer.

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. 

After the freezer, it is best to allow frozen pastries and coffee cakes to defrost slowly at room temperature in the packaging. That’s all you need to do–though with some pastries like scones, a little warm up in an oven will make them extra delicious. 

In Spain, drinking chocolate is as common as drinking coffee. Just like we have coffee shops, Spain has chocolaterías serving drinking chocolate and churros to dunk in it. Some of them are open 24 hours a day, just in case of 4 AM chocolate emergencies. When you find good Spanish drinking chocolate it’s a far cry from the Swiss Miss many of us grew up on. It’s thick—sometimes so thick that instead of sipping, it’s easier to eat it with a spoon like pudding. It’s not overly sweet—you should still be able to taste the bitter, roasted notes of chocolate.

A thousand years before it caught on in Spain, drinking chocolate was all the rage in Mexico.

Cacao was first cultivated in the Yucatan peninsula by the Mayans around 500 AD. The beans were roasted, coarsely ground, and mixed with water, ground chiles, and toasted cornmeal (a thickener) to make a drink. One ingredient they did not include was any sort of sweetener. Instead of the hot chocolate we drink now, imagine a bitter, spicy, somewhat chunky drink, served at room temperature. Sounds good, huh? (Actually, it kind of does.) And it was popular. The Aztec royal court drank an estimated 2,000 pitchers of the stuff every day. And according to The Chocolate Connoisseur by Chloe Doutre-Roussel, when Aztec sacrifice victims were too glum to join in the dancing rituals before their death the solution to cheer them up was to give them a gourd of chocolate.

When Europeans first arrived in Central America, most of them weren’t too impressed with chocolate. Columbus brought the first cacao beans back to Spain, but mostly as a novelty. No one really knew what to do with them. It wasn’t until the middle of the 16th century that some total genius thought of adding cane sugar and serving the drink hot. Then chocolate really took off. But even then, both sugar and cacao were incredibly expensive so it was only a drink for the uber rich. Spanish nobles built their version of man caves in their villas: chocolate rooms where men of leisure spent hours conversing and drinking chocolate.

For a few decades, chocolate was a purely Spanish phenomenon. Then, in 1615, Anne of Austria, the daughter of the King of Spain, married King Louis XIII of France. She brought chocolate to Paris. It was a hit. In their very French way, the aristocracy didn’t build separate rooms just for their chocolate—they preferred to drink it in bed.

That lasciviousness made chocolate controversial. One French cleric called chocolate the “damnable agent of necromancers and sorcerers.” But it didn’t take too long for the church to come around. In 1662, a cardinal in Rome decreed drinking chocolate would not violate the fast for Lent. Amen.

Chocolate was only for drinking – not eating – until the 1800s.

That’s also about the time that the first machines were invented for grinding cacao beans. Before the industrial revolution, all ground chocolate was made with a mortar and pestle—and a whole lot of elbow grease. The new machines helped to make chocolate a luxury of the masses, not just the aristocracy.

Those new machines had another result, too: for the first time people were able to make solid chocolate. In 1847, the very first “eating” chocolate was made in England. Within a couple of years solid chocolates like bonbons and chocolate bars were taking off across Europe, but in Spain the chocolatería culture was already established and, thankfully, drinking chocolate was there to stay.

For centuries, coarse, whole grain flours were the everyday norm for bread and porridge. White flours were a once-in-a-while treat for only the most special cakes or breads, reserved for the highest of holidays. As refined white flours became more readily available in the 20th century, Big Ag marketing departments promoted them by running a smear campaign against whole grains. Sure, the story went, the “nuts and twigs” diet of hippies was OK for healthy eaters, but not for anyone who wanted their foods to actually taste good.

Boy did they get it wrong. Thanks to a couple of granite mill stones that now reside in Ann Arbor inside Zingerman’s Bakehouse, the flavors, aromas, and textures of our baked goods have been getting a big boost. We’re now using freshly milled, whole grain flours in all of our brownies and cookies (as well as many of our breads). In the process, we’ve discovered a new stratosphere of flavor for these sweet treats.

Good germs

The biggest advantage our granite mill gives is the ability to keep the grain’s germ intact and present in the flour. The germ is a tiny part of a grain, packed with precious nutrients and oils. Those oils are super flavorful—but also volatile. They go rancid over time. Industrial flour producers often remove the germ so the flour will keep for longer. What they gain in shelf life, they destroy in flavor and texture. Whole grain flours have a deep, toasty, wheat-y flavor that amplifies the flavor of pastries baked with it. And because we mill our flour just minutes before we bake with it, the shorter shelf life is a moot point.

More oil, more tender

The oil present in the germ makes for a softer, more tender texture for our pastries. It’s something you notice in the cookies, especially. They’re moist, almost fluffy, practically melting in your mouth. I’ve eaten a lot of Zingerman’s Bakehouse cookies in my day, tasting them as recipes have been tweaked, and this is the most noticeable improvement in texture I’ve ever experienced.

Local grain economies

Being local and knowing the provenance of your ingredients is a cornerstone of the modern food scene. Farmer’s markets have flourished, and many of us once again address our butcher by their first name. So why are local flours so hard to find? Unlike a fresh turnip or egg, grains must be transformed before we can use them. They must be milled. A century ago, practically every river, stream, brook, and creek anywhere near a town had a grain mill. Local farmers took their crops there for grinding. But as agricultural industrialization has pushed for the efficiencies of centralization, local mills shuttered. With them, flour went from being a product of the community to a faceless commodity. By installing our own mill, we’re turning back the clock. We now buy many grains directly from local farmers in Michigan and nearby states. In doing so, we gain more control of the quality of pastries and breads we bake.

A tighter loop

Milling some of our own grains in house has highlighted another problem: it can be hard to find the grains you want, grown the way you want. We’ve forged relationships with local farmers willing to grow particular wheats and grains just for us. It’s a risk for both of us. We commit to buying all the crop, and the farmer does their best to grow the varieties we’re excited to bake with. Thanks to the close relationships we’re developing with local farms, we’re able to explore and experiment with different, sometimes tastier, grains. We’re not looking to reinvent the wheel (or cookie in this case), but if we can find a specific strain of wheat that can make a specific recipe just a little better, we want to do it.