Pecan Praline Banana Bread

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. 

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.

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 Aunt Jemima 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 from down the road at Guernsey Dairy is the best sour cream I’ve ever eaten. 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.