Past Newsletters
Vol 1 No 12

In Pursuit of Chocolate

We take Great Pleasure in introducing you to …Zingerman’s Magic Brownies

Zingerman’s bakes thousands of BIG scrumptious Magic Brownies every week… the size of a wallet, says USA Today. They've got a thin crust and a rich, thick and fudgy interior you can sink your teeth into. And they are loaded with chocolate, scented with real vanilla, studded with toasted walnuts and mixed with fresh farm eggs. In fact, Zingerman’s, a little deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has some of the best food you can find anywhere in the USA. Zagat rates Zingerman’s as the Best Deli in America.[Zagat delivers unbiased reviews for more than 20,000 restaurants — all based on the opinions of customers.]

Seven Reasons Why Zingerman’s Brownies Taste Like Magic!

1. Butter Tastes Better You can't tell just from looking at a brownie 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 more and more commercial bakeries have shifted towards less expensive shortenings or margarine. You can taste and smell the difference… butter richens the flavor without any chemical aftertaste and smells sweet and soft. Shortening, on the other hand, has no aroma to speak of, and absolutely no flavor. Good pastry should smell good, and butter flatters its flavor.

2. Better Butter Zingerman’s Bakehouse doesn't use just any butter. Many of their baked goods start with sweet butter from Grassland. It tastes better: it’s made with less water and more flavor. There's no way around it… the better the butter the better the baked goods.

3. 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 vanillia, which is made from wood pulp. 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.

4. Unbleached and Unbromated Flours The better the flour, the better the baked goods. Zingerman’s uses stone-ground flour from the local millers, the Daily Grind in Ann Arbor, as well as from the highly respected King Arthur Mills in upstate New York.

5. Fresh Eggs The norm nowadays for commercial bakeries is to use frozen eggs that come in white plastic buckets. Zingerman’s stubbornly sticks to old-fashioned eggs in the traditional oval-shaped white shell, the way they made 'em "back in the old days." They hand-crack over 12,000 per week… delivered fresh from Jim Bilbie's Egg Farm just outside of Ann Arbor.

6. Toasted Walnuts Toasting takes time and time is money. But it also adds a lot of flavor to nuts. So you can count on Zingerman’s to do it.

7. Love The crew at Zingerman’s 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.

About In Pursuit of Chocolate

Each month, we feature one exceptional, world class, Chocolatier. You will discover handmade confections from around the world, reminiscent of age old traditions and presented with savoir faire! Some of the artists we will be featuring in the next few months include…

• Vosges Truffles… amazing exotics like estate-vanilla, absinthe, and woolloomooloo with macadamia nuts
• Hand-crafted solid bars from three of the world's best chocolatiers: El Rey from Venezuela, and Valrhona and Michel Cluizel from France
• And many other fine artists, such as Gaston Prestiege Belgian Chocolates, award-winning Richard H. Donnelly Fine Chocolates, Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker, Michael Recchuiti Chocolates.

Magic Bownies

A few weeks ago, a mature and rather stately woman visited the Zingerman’s Deli and saw their Magic Brownies on display. She looked at the sign, looked at Jude behind the counter, and said, "Magic" Brownies. Do they have marijuana in them?"

Assuring her that they certainly did not… Jude explained the name. We use a VERY OLD and SECRET recipe, which states that when the ingredients are true to the letter and properly blended, bewitching brownies will materialize.

Zingerman’s guest looked sort of blank and then said, Well, if they don’t have any marijuana, why would I want to buy any?"

Yet one more reason to love living in the beautiful college town of Ann Arbor MI, says Mo Frencette, from Zingerman’s.