Ploughman's Lunch Gift Box

We ship thousands of loaves every year to bread lovers nationwide.

Our artisan bread is baked down the road from us at Zingerman’s Bakehouse. We ship bread using two business day service – nothing slower. Our bread doesn’t have any preservatives, so we use expedited shipping to help ensure it arrives in great condition.

The bread will last on the counter for a few days in its Zingerman’s bread bag.

It does not need to be refrigerated – in fact, we recommend you avoid the fridge! Refrigeration will wreak havoc on the texture.

If you want to keep the bread for more than a few days your best bet is to freeze it.

Double bag the loaf—or part of it—in plastic and freeze for up to three months.

All of our full-flavored breads are completely baked all the way so reheating is not necessary. 

You can eat the bread right out of the bag (ripping pieces or cutting slices – no judgment here). If it seems a little hard or dry, that’s because the thick, crisp crust is meant to protect the bread. Just like the rind on a natural cheese, real bread has very real crust to protect the inside of the loaf from drying out.

We only suggest that the bread will give you the “just out of the oven” experience… if you reheat it in the oven.

For a warm crackly crust and a soft, chewy crumb, we suggest putting your loaf (whole, half, or part) in a 350 degree oven for approximately 15-20 minutes. If you’re pulling bread out of the freezer, let it defrost for about 30 minutes before throwing it in the oven.

What’s the shelf life on cheese?

• Hard, aged cheeses stay good for a long time. Many days for sure. Sometimes weeks. Bigger hunks of cheese last longer. If it looks and smelled as expected, it’s likely still great.

• What if it’s got a little mold on it? A little mold is no problem. It’s a good sign, it means the cheese is alive. Scrape it off with a knife. But if there’s a lot of mold and it’s turning dark and funky it’s time to say goodbye.

• Soft cheeses and cheese spreads (like pimento and liptauer) are best eaten within a week or two of receiving them.

How do we ship artisan cheese year-round across the country?

In warmer months (early April to mid September), we ship cheese with two business day service plus warm weather care. We employ an ice pack and insulation defensive strategy to protect against warm delivery trucks and warm warehouses and ensure your shipment arrives in great shape.

The rest of the year (late September to the end of March), the shipping method will either be flat rate service (1-4 business days) for our durable hard, aged cheeses or two business day service for our more perishable soft cheeses and cheese spreads.

Hard cheeses have been carefully selected to withstand a longer transit time. Don’t worry if it arrives a bit warm or a bit cold – cheese is durable.

How should the cheese be stored once it arrives?

• Store cheese in the fridge, ideally in the spot closest to 50 degrees. That will likely be the door of your refrigerator or in a drawer where the temperature is consistent but not too cold.

• We wrap hand-cut wedges of cheese in a cheese bag before shipment, and you can continue to keep the cheese in that cheese bag. The next best option would be parchment or wax paper.

• After you open the cheese for a nibble, any remainders can be put back into the bag and closed with a simple roll or fold. 

• Do not freeze your cheese! Cheese is a living thing. Freezing will stop the natural processes that keep cheese so tasty. 

How should the cheese be served?

Regardless of the kind of cheese, it’s best to take it out of the fridge about 20 to 30 minutes before serving it. Cheese tastes better at room temperature. It makes a world of difference: the aromas expand, becoming more complex; more of the fat spreads on your tongue, which makes the flavor more intense. When cheese is warm you’ll eat less of it and enjoy it more.

Short answer: they’re cured, so they’ll last a while!

Long answer: Curing is an ancient process that makes meat safe by keeping it inhospitable to the microbes that would otherwise cause rot. Most commonly, this is done by salting, smoking, and drying. When cured slowly and traditionally, these techniques not only make the meat safe to keep, they also make it extra delicious. Cured meats like salami, prosciutto, and ‘nduja will last for weeks or even months if stored correctly and unsliced. Slice salami as you eat it – keeping it whole will help prevent it from drying out.

What if it arrives warm?

We don’t necessarily ship cured meats with ice packs. Since it’s cured, it’s healthy and happy at warm temperatures. To prolong its life at home keep it refrigerated. But hours or even days at warmer temperatures won’t harm it a bit.

What’s up with mold on salami?

Downy white mold is as essential to salami flavor as blue mold is for blue cheese. Every good salami has mold on it at some point in its life. It’s a sign the salami is aging well; the mold protects the fat from going rancid. If you’re buying one without mold it was probably washed off at some point. It’s edible, but you can also wash it off with a bit of vinegar and water if you’d like. If a little mold returns in time it’s a good sign.

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 essentially 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 cheddar was aged in cloth, but we do know that English cheesemakers have been using cloth since at least the 1600s. When colonial cheesemakers 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 counteract the heat, Yankee cheesemakers started covering the cloth wrapping 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 government 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.

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 flavors, 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 companion 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.