Regardless of entrée, the main thing is that the connection with Ann turned out to be a great one. We share values around creativity and caring for the community, as well as a passion for good writing, and in this case, good cookies. Given the national stage on which The Christmas Cookie Club is “showing” this fall—network talk shows, big time films, blogs and magazines galore—I’m sure Ann and her literary manager could have handed the opportunity to make these cookies to some big time industrial bakery that would have paid a lot of money for the opportunity. But in the spirit of the Cookie Club, our long-standing relationship and Ann’s commitment to quality and local production, we’ve worked together to do a set of cookies that match the spirit of all that I’ve talked about above. I’m sure there are less costly cookies that could have been stuck into a “Christmas Cookie Club” box, but I doubt that they’d actually have had the spirit, soul and flavor of the ones that Amy, Frank and everyone from the Bakehouse has put into these. I hope you enjoy eating them as much as we’ve enjoyed working with Ann, reading, baking, testing, tasting, and talking about them.

Before I move on I should state really clearly that not only is this a good story but the actual cookies are really, really good! They’ve been winning raves from all the staff, many of whom have been diligently eating all the test bakes! Thin little ginger crisps and pecan butter balls are made from recipes out of the book, plus one of my long time favorites, the mint chocolate shortbread from the Bakehouse. That trio of taste treats is packed into a book-like box designed by our graphics crew. It’s really a great package—especially if you pair it up with a copy of Ann’s book—and would clearly make a great gift for anyone who likes to read and eat cookies which is probably a pretty high percentage of people out in the Zingerman’s universe. Stay tuned for the Wendy Finerman-produced (Forrest Gump and The Devil Wears Prada among other famous films) movie, which is likely to start filming next fall! Ann’s been pushing hard to have the filming done here in Ann Arbor so hopefully that will work out. In the mean time come on by and taste a cookie and celebrate some nice local success and the start of a sweet holiday season!

Why are the flavors more intense?
For starters, gelato has less air than ice cream. Conventional ice creams can contain as much as 50 percent of their volume as air. Zingerman’s gelato has only 10 to 20—that means that a little bit of gelato goes a lot farther than a big scoop of ice cream. Gelato also a softer texture than ice cream. Instead of scooping rock hard ice cream, you’ll find our gelato melts almost immediately in your mouth, leaving lots of flavor and a wonderful finish.

How does Zingerman’s Creamery Gelato differ from all other gelato you can get around here?
1) Better Ingredients. High quality whole milk and cream from Guernsey dairy, organic natural Demerara brown sugar and the finest flavorings possible.

2) Italian equipment. We’ve brought over special equipment from Bologna, Italy that’s designed to blend in a minimum of air during the carefully timed freezing process. This special machinery allows us to produce an authentic Italian gelato in Ann Arbor. Many so called gelati in this country are made using ice cream machines and are inadvertently incorporating air equivalents to ice cream and are therefore producing a hybrid of gelato and ice cream.

3) Freshly made. Because we’re working in small batches right here in the Ann Arbor area, Zingerman’s Creamery gelato will always be far fresher than pre-packed product shipped half way across the country. We deliver to the Deli and the Bakeshop from our Manchester base at least three times a week. And with gelato, freshness really does make a difference.

4) Tons of taste tests. We research and test each flavor in blind taste tests to determine which makes the most intensely flavorful recipe.

How can I tell a good gelato when I taste one?
Trust your taste buds. Taste a little of it. If it doesn’t scream out the flavor, it’s not a good gelato. It may be a OK ice cream or something similar, but it’s not good gelato. We joke that when we do a tasting, we give samples to ten people, if three people tell us the flavor is too strong, we double the flavoring and know we’re close. We want big, intense,
exciting flavors.

This October, I’m going to speak at the annual Southern Foodways Alliance symposium in Oxford, Mississippi, about the state of Southern food and why it seems to be so special. I’m not sure yet what I’m going to say, but one of the things that’s starting to dawn on me is that it’s not just that Southern food is really good; it’s that Southerners are way more poetic and emotional about their eating than many other people in the country are. It’s a part of Southern culture, and Southerners are proud of their culture and willing to talk about it in ways that folks from other parts of the country seem to skim over. Which brings me to a small, but sweetly delicious footnote of Southern eating—sorghum syrup.

My thoughts about sorghum syrup starts with a black and white photo of Mrs. Burnett Brooks in Foxfire, the amazing book of Appalachian folkways published in the 1970s. She’s probably in her 70s, though mountain folk who’ve worked hard physically their whole lives can often appear older than they really are by modern urban standards. Broad, slightly rounded shoulders. Strong looking arms. Both fists clutching a sorghum skimmer that she holds diagonally across her chest the way a medieval knight might hold some sort of long handled axe. The skimmer itself is a flat, perforated plate as big as her head, and nailed to a long wooden pole. Mrs. Brooks is all dressed up in a white button-down shirt and a white apron, wearing the very serious look of someone who’s been asked to pose for a photo in a time and place that people didn’t pose for photos taken with cell phones every fifteen minutes. In truth, she looks rather dark and dour but for whatever reason I’m sure that underneath that posed-for-the-Foxfire-photo appearance she was actually a very sweet woman, rich with a history, lore and lots of good cooking and eating in her past and present. That’s, to me, the setting in which to assess sorghum syrup.

The sorghum is ready each autumn when the seeds at the top of its stalks turn red. The stalks are stripped of the leaves (which are used for silage), the seeds are saved for next year’s plantings, and the stalks go through a mill to make the juice. The liquid comes out green, which explains the intriguing greenish cast that you can still sense in the otherwise finished dark brown syrup. It takes about four hours of boiling to get the juice cooked down to the right consistency. In the early stages, a natural scum forms on the top, which is skimmed (as per Mrs. Brooks’ skimmer above) and tossed on the ground. (Foxfire reports that, “Usually the dogs get to the skimmings before they are covered and really enjoy this treat.” Southerners do seem to love stories about dogs almost as much as food. Read one of my favorite books, Hunter’s Horn by Harriet Arnow, for more on dogs, sorghum and the upper South.)

Down South, they generally refer to the syrup as “sorghum molasses,” or just shorten it down to “molasses.” The latter had me confused for a long time because I didn’t realize that folks were referring to a wholly different product than the sugar cane molasses that I was familiar with. Compared to the latter, sorghum syrup is a bit lighter and brighter with a lovingly sourish hook to it that you might not even notice if I didn’t mention it. It’s primarily a crop of the upper South; Kentucky and Tennessee make the most. Production was much higher a hundred fifty years ago when locals relied on sorghum molasses for their every day eating. Back then, sugar was very costly, so other than honey, sorghum molasses was what you had to work with. In the hills, folks seem to have used it for most everything, including a considerable amount of moonshine.

I guess in part the name sorghum seems a bit off-putting. It’s hardly glamorous. And compared to the light golden majesty of maple syrup up here in the upper Midwest, sorghum syrup is dark and rather mysterious looking, kind of uninviting actually to the uninitiated. But underneath that surface level stuff, sorghum syrup is sweet and rich and something you might want to seriously consider getting into your regular eating routines.

Probably the most popular way to just eat sorghum syrup is to put it on biscuits. Former Governor of Georgia Zell Miller, who grew up on sorghum, says in Joe Dabney’s superb book, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread and Scuppernong Wine that you start by putting a good bit of butter on a warm plate, then pour on the syrup, then mix with a fork till the mixture looks a lot like cake batter. Then you drizzle the mixture over pancakes or biscuits, or corn bread. In Memphis, they taught me to just pour the sorghum straight onto the biscuits. Either is good, so try both of them out for yourself. It’s excellent over ice cream, on French toast, pancakes or really just about anything else you’d use maple syrup for. Or just have a spoonful or two and think of Mrs. Brooks when you do!

Shawn’s chocolate is written up in the current issue of Zingerman’s News but I wanted to get it in here too because I’ve learned more about it since I wrote the newsletter piece, and also because the more I learn and the more I taste, the more I like it. Anyways you can get the full story in the newsletter (or I can email you the essay if you like!) but here’s the gist of it:

Here’s the gist of what’s getting me going:

1. The flavor

This chocolate tastes really amazingly good. I keep going back and tasting and retasting, sort of expecting to be underwhelmed at some point. But I’ll tell you, I actually like the chocolate more now than I did three months ago when I first tried it. The flavors are long, big, wide, complex, and compelling without being in the least being overly extreme in any one direction. In fact, I’ll just say that this chocolate fills the bill in terms of our definition of “full flavor”—it’s extremely complex, it’s very, very well balanced and it’s got a really great finish that stays with you with ever more appeal for a long, long time, even if you only eat a single square. It’s just really, really good.

2. The raw material

Every one that makes good chocolate says they “buy the best beans” but of course there are huge variations in quality—saying it and doing it are two very different things. But because it’s pretty much impossible to make a great chocolate like this from mediocre cacao, I feel pretty confident saying that this guy’s actually doing just what he says. Unlike most small chocolatiers, he’s actually going straight to the agricultural source and buying cacao beans from the growers. Shawn has spent significant time in South and Central America in order to meet every single one of the farmers from whom he’s getting cacao in order to get to know them and what they do. “Because of that,” he explained, “I’m able to literally evaluate the beans before we get them delivered. I direct the exact fermentation and drying specifications of my beans and this is the greatest influence of taste that there is.” The fermentation piece of this is huge—every really great chocolate maker talks about it at length, but few consumers yet understand how much difference it makes. It’s a credit to Shawn’s work with teaching fermentation techniques to the growers that the chocolate is as good as it is.

3. The chocolate making

Shawn is nothing if not fanatical about the attention to detail in each piece of the production, a trait which probably makes his wife crazy sometimes J, but from which the rest of get to benefit. All that little itty bitty detail stuff is what takes something from pretty good to the really amazing level of greatness that I that these bars are at (which I still attribute somewhat warily because they’re so relatively new) (or the Zzang bars from the Bakehouse—see below for more on those).
“There are only a few places to effect taste,” Shawn said on the phone last fall. “The farmers have the first three—growing, fermentation and drying. Then we have the rest—roasting, conching and the finishing. That’s where we try to not mess up what the farmers have created.” To focus his chocolate on the pure flavor of the cacao, Shawn decided not to use any of the lecithin or vanilla that are commonly used in most commercial chocolates. He does add a bit of cocoa butter, which, quite remarkably he makes himself in Missouri. The latter is almost unheard of in a production this small. Only a handful of chocolate producers—all much bigger than Askinosie—do it. I’m glad he is—it makes a small but very significant difference in the flavor and quality of the chocolate.

4. Connection

So much of what we do here in the ZCoB is about connection—hooking up the people who make the food, with the people who sell it, and then on to the customers (and us!) who actually eat it. It’s what I’ve come to call Six Degrees of Connection (I don’t like the negativity of “Six Degrees of Separation” though the alliteration of the latter is clearly better.) Our original connection with Shawn came, as many of you already know, through Jack Stack who runs Springfield Remanufacturing and co-wrote Great Game of Business (with Bo Burlingham) . . . maybe today I’ll call him the Babe Ruth of Open Book Finance—it’s not a place I’ve ever before learned about a really good new food, but, hey, connections are connections and good karmic stuff comes back to you many times over so it’s great that a hook up we’ve had for so many years in the finance and world went on to lead us to one of the best new chocolates I’ve had in ages.
Shawn takes that connection thing seriously too. Unprompted by me he said, “Part of what I want to do is to connect the people who eat the chocolate with the people who grow the beans.” He’s doing it. Like I said, the guy’s been to visit every single one of the farmers he buys from in Ecuador and in Mexico. Not only did he buy their beans though—he also later brought them finished chocolate to taste. Many had never had finished conched chocolate of any sort; and certainly hardly any (if any) had ever had finished chocolate made from their own beans. He also went down to meet them and thank them for all the work they were doing. He said that they uniformly were shocked to see him and that no chocolate maker—no one—had ever before come down to thank them for what they were doing.

5. Sustainability

While I’m starting to feel like the word itself is quickly becoming an “over-used resource,” I don’t have a better one to offer right now so let me just say that pretty much everything about this chocolate is set up to be sustainable. Shawn is paying over Fair Trade prices for the cacao, which I think, is great. As so many of our other like-minded producers have done, he’s committed to those prices as long as the quality of the beans is good. At an equal level of amazingness, Shawn went back later to actually review Askinosie’s early financial performance and deliver the first set of bonus checks to the growers—you can imagine the shock (in a good way) from them over that one. The packaging is all environmentally sound. He’s open book finance all the way back to the growers and has gone back down to Mexico and Ecuador to give the farmer’s their first bonus checks. And he’s doing some really great work with kids in need in his hometown of Springfield to teach them about chocolate as well.
So with that as background, here’s the details on the actual chocolate. There are four bars and I really think that they’re all amazingly good.
First up is the one from Mexico—it’s a 75 percent dark chocolate made with cacao from the area of Soconusco in southern Mexico. While today it’s just a tiny town on the country’s Pacific Coast, six or seven centuries ago Soconusco was to cacao what Bordeaux is today to grapes; in fact, the Aztecs took over the region simply because the cacao beans that came from there were so darned good. The area long ago fell off the radar of most everyone in the food world, but now, thanks to Shawn’s work, we all get to taste the fruit of the labor of Soconusco’s farmers—this is the first time this cacao has been used to make chocolate outside of Mexico in over 100 years! And it’s darned good stuff. (Through Shawn’s educational efforts the Soconusco growers have begun to ferment their cacao, something that wasn’t done in the old days but is one of the keys to making great chocolate from any cacao today.)
The more I eat this chocolate the more I like it. It’s got a very wide flavor that spreads out across your mouth side to side—not to sound stupid, but it’s just pretty darned delicious. Lots of really good, long lingering low notes accompanied by mellow but meaningful liveliness, very long finish with sort of dry red wine textures in the mouth maybe? It’s definitely not too sweet at all, which I like a lot. Little bits of flavor keep coming out long after you finish eating it. I like the not overly finessed feel it has in the mouth. I like the finish too—low and centered and very pleasant, lingering nicely long after you’ve finished eating it.
The second bar is the one made with nacional cacao (the variety of beans also known as Arriba) from Ecuador. The cacao it’s made from comes from the tiny, centuries-old village of San Jose Del Tambo, which lies in the foothills of the Andes Mountains. It’s got a cacao content of 70 percent, so it’s slightly less dark than the Mexican bar. As Shawn aid at the tasting session when he was here a few weeks ago, “it’s a completely different in taste from the Soconusco bar. It’s 70% cacao but in one of those nobody ever believes it but it’s true anyways, sometimes (like this time) lower percentages of cacao might taste “stronger” than others that have more simply because the beans are different. This is a good example of that because although it has less cacao in it, it really does taste darker than the Mexican bar above. It’s got a really big flavor, a big creamy mouthfeel, not too sweet in the least. Lots of delicious, dark low notes, really long finish.
The third and fourth bars are simply the two chocolates above, but each with the addition of cacao nibs from their respective home regions. I really like both of them, in part because the addition of the nibs makes the flavor slightly darker and deeper and less sweet, and because I really like the textural contrast you get from their crunch.

PS: Zzang!

Shawn came into town on a Sunday evening before going to the Zingerman’s Experience Seminar the next day, and went by the Deli to get some food. Among the many things he bought to take back to his hotel room he bought a Zzang bar, figuring he’d have a bite or two at the most for dessert (given that he eats a lot of chocolate it’s not like he needs more). He ended up eating the whole thing that night, and announced in the ZingTrain seminar the next day that the Zzang was the best candy bar he’d ever had. High praise from a very picky chocolate person with very good taste.

PPS: Don’t miss the newly arrived Chalk-late boxes for Valentine’s. When you see one at the Deli you’ll get the name. Very good gift . . . very good.

What I know about this search is that it usually takes a really long time – a year isn’t excessive at all for us. Two years is often more like it. It’s nice to think (as I often do) that all this stuff should be worked out before one ever opens for business or starts selling a product. But of course, it just doesn’t work that way in real life. Because in real life, you don’t get to spend a year researching mints before you open a restaurant. When you put together your priority list, things like construction, staff training, wines, steaks and fish suppliers are all likely to come before mints. Then with lots of inquiries and tastings and web searches and samples getting sent, coolers breaking, staff turnover, snow storms, and a thousand other things I’ve already blocked out, it takes a year if you’re lucky.

We used to buy our mints from some very good producers who have good products, but for whatever reason they just didn’t quite hit it for me. They were good on their own, but not so good in the context of what I think needs to come after a meal.

Funny thing is that I could have been on to these all along because the Fralinger’s folks work with Tony Cox, our Dallas-based Mail Order advisor. One day, I was particularly frustrated with this whole mint thing and I emailed to Tony asking if maybe he knew of a mint that we might use. Turns out, not only did he know one, they were one of his clients. My mistake for not asking Tony earlier on.

And lucky we are because these are really good mints. Their formal name is Fralinger’s Creamy Mint Sticks. The Fralinger famly has been in the mint business in Atlantic City, NJ since the 1880′s. Joseph Fralinger, “a former glassblower and fish merchant,” (I’m sure you all know a lot of people who were former glass blowers and fish merchants) started a retail candy shop on the Boardwalk. Today it’s a fifth-generation, family-owned business, and the mints are made to the same recipe as they have been for many decades. They’re still double-wrapped in wax paper marked with the old green and white Fralinger’s logo. They have a long, delicate mintiness that fills the mouth slowly but doesn’t hit you over the head, and a really nice, sort of creamy, almost buttery texture, with a long clean, never cloying, finish.

These may be just little mints, but they are worth trying – a small, subtle but very enjoyable bit of flavor to enjoy when you’ve just finished up a good meal, or just when you want a nice flavor that will linger on your tongue for a while.

Fralinger’s Creamy Mint Sticks are available on the counter at the Roadhouse for 25 cents each. You can also buy a one-pound boxful for $7.99.

In doing homework on doughnuts, I came across this quote from the Simpsons: “Doughnuts. Is there anything they can’t do?”

At first I paid little attention to it. But the more I talk to folks about doughnuts, the more I’m starting to think that the Simpsons were really on to something. People *@#* love doughnuts!!! Honestly I don’t think I’ve ever seen more people’s eyes get so wide over a single food than when I’ve told them over the last month or two that we’re making doughnuts at the Roadhouse. I mean caviar and smoked salmon and all that great stuff gets people thinking, but the response to doughnuts seems to be sort of intensely visceral, an almost instinctive, intuitive, uncontrollable response. Like they don’t even have to think about it- I say “doughnuts,” and they just start smiling.

Doughnuts are an American tradition that dates back to the arrival of the Dutch. It seems that the original idea of the American doughnut may actually be tied to a New Year’s Eve tradition in the Netherlands. The “oliebol” (the name means, literally, “oil ball”) is a yeasted batter with raisins that’s fried in hot oil and could be light and fluffy or denser with powdered sugar. One Dutchman I talked to said with a broad smile, “We eat piles of them for New Year’s Eve in Holland.” The American name? Of course no one really knows but it could well be that early recipes suggested that the cook make up little “nuts” of dough to fry.

Here in the States, doughnuts were a home-cooked food up until the early years of the 20th century. Large-scale commercial production probably started in the 1920′s, at which time they were most popular for taking to movie theaters. At about that time, to satisfy the growing demand for doughnuts, one inventive Russian Jewish immigrant named Adolph Levitt created the first doughnut machine. By 1934, the same year that the World’s Fair in Chicago declared the doughnut “the food hit of the Century of Progress,” Levitt was pulling down twenty-five million dollars annually on sales of his doughnut machines to bakeries. His daughter Sally Levitt Steinberg put together The Donut Book to tell his story and that of doughnuts in general. (The book is highly recommended-great visuals as well as being really informative.)

Here in 2006, the big thing with doughnuts in our world is that we’re making them from scratch at the Roadhouse and that they’re really good.

Last year the doughnuts were written up in the Ann Arbor Observer about the new All-American brunch at the Roadhouse. “… The real showstoppers are the house-made doughnuts, adapted by Roadhouse chef Alex Young from a traditional Dutch-American recipe. World’s apart from the standard sugar-flour-grease bombs of chain fame, Roadhouse doughnuts are full flavored, with hints of molasses, lemon zest and nutmeg in a rich buttermilk batter, deep fried but not greasy, and dusted with a dark brown muscovado sugar. Everyone at our table (which included some hard-to-impress New Yorkers) was utterly bowled over.”

And now they’ve made the national news in Saveur. Stop by the Roadshow some morning and ask for a taste – there’s not much these doughnuts can’t do.