Rustic Peasant Bread 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.

Excerpted from the new Zingerman’s Bakehouse Book

In order to open Zingerman’s Bakehouse, we had to be able to bake great Jewish Rye Bread for Zingerman’s Delicates­sen, which was our first (and at the beginning our only) customer. It’s not possible to have a superb Reuben sandwich without authentic Jewish rye bread. We wanted our Jewish rye to be an essential part of the sand­wich, not just a structural element that didn’t really add to the flavor. So right from the beginning, we used and further evolved the excellent recipe and techniques we learned from our first teacher, Michael London.

First, we use a sour starter, which is unusual these days.

It adds a little bit of leavening to the recipe, but mainly it provides depth and complexity of flavor. We created the starter in the fall of 1992, and we’ve been feeding it every day since to keep it healthy, with just the right amount of tang. This version of rye bread was the one made most often by the Polish Jewish bakers in New York and was called sour rye. It later became known as Jewish rye.

Second, we use “old” rye bread from the previous day’s bake.

We slice and soak it in water and then add it to the dough. It adds a layer of texture, flavor, moisture, and color to the bread. It’s also a tradition for Jewish bakers to take something from yesterday and put it in today’s recipes, representing the continuity and interconnectedness of life.

Third, there’s actually some rye in the recipe.

Many rye breads are made from white-wheat flour with a touch of rye added. We use lots of medium rye (rye flour that has some of its bran) in our sour starter.

Finally, we create a real crackly crust.

We brush each loaf with water before it goes into the oven and then again when it comes out. The contrast of the cool water on the hot loaf causes the crust to crack in a distinctive way that is characteristic of Jewish rye.

Why use preservatives in the first place?

The use of preservatives isn’t inherently a bad thing. The USDA’s shorthand definition of a preservative is any substance that slows or stops the deterioration of food. Our ability to preserve food like fruit and meats with sugar and salt has helped humans survive travel, famine, and long winters like we get in Michigan.

But it’s worth asking why we want to preserve a food, especially if the goal is more about convenience than quality. In breads and baked goods, for example, it’s not uncommon to see an antimicrobial like calcium propionate, which inhibits the growth of mold, or EDTA (Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid – say that five times fast!), which keeps elements in foods like zinc or copper from being available to microbes that need them to function.

So, do we want to add calcium propionate and EDTA to a loaf of bread so that it will last an extra week on the grocery shelf and the grocer has an easier time handling the product? Well, perhaps we do if we’re the grocer. But in this case, it’s harder to see the benefit for the bread eater. A loaf of bread that’s been sitting on the grocery shelf for a week is never going to taste as wonderful as one that’s freshly baked, no matter how many preservatives have kept it from molding. The reason to add preservatives to baked goods is not to make them taste better. It’s to make them more convenient for the baker and merchant to handle while waiting for someone to buy them.

At Zingerman’s, we don’t add any preservatives to our breads or pastries.

This means they have a relatively short shelf life, usually somewhere between a few days and a couple of weeks. When we ship them we include a recommendation on how soon they should be eaten. You can also freeze them for a long time. But beware the refrigerator!

Why the fridge makes your baked goods go stale fast:

As a loaf of bread stales, its texture gets drier. This isn’t related to any moisture it may be losing. It’s because the chemical structure of the starches in the bread change. They become more crystalline with each passing day. This happens especially quickly at temperatures just above freezing. In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee references a study that showed that a loaf of bread stored in the fridge at 46° F got as stale in one day as another loaf of bread stored at 86° F did in six days. In other words, the fridge stales baked goods!

We recommend against storing our breads and pastries in the fridge. To prevent staleness, it’s best to freeze any bread or pastry you want to keep longer than a few days. Freezing stops the crystallization process.

To revive a bread or pastry that has started to stale a bit, heat it up in the oven or toaster. Heating decrystallizes the starches, magically returning the baked good to the moist, delicious texture it had when it first came out of the oven. To aid you in performing this magic trick, all of our breads come with heating instructions. They’re available on our website for handy reference, too.