Artisan Bread Club

When will the first installment ship?

Whenever you’d like! Want to plan ahead and cross off an item on your gifting to-do list? You can choose a preferred arrival date in the future when you checkout online or when you give us a call. Otherwise, the first installment will ship on our next available ship date.

When will the rest of the installments ship?

After the first installment, the remaining club shipments will arrive every four weeks. If you’d like to change the delivery for any reason – maybe the recipients are traveling or maybe you want the shipments to occur every other month – we can make it happen! Just reach out to us and we’ll be glad to help.

How easy is it to change the address for one or more shipments?

Super easy! You can call, email, text or chat and let us know about the update. As long as it hasn’t shipped, we can change the address with a few simple clicks.

When am I charged for the club?

You’ll be charged the full amount for the club before the first installment ships out.

Want to print a card to give before the first shipment arrives? We have just what you’re looking for:

Bacon club card – monthly

Bacon club card – quarterly

Bakery club card

Bread club card – artisan

Bread club card – classic

Bread club card – sweet

Cheese club card – monthly

Cheese club card – quarterly

Cheese pairing club card

Coffee cake club card

Coffee club card

Food explorer’s club card

Dinner club card

Jewish Deli club card

Meat & cheese club card

Michigan foods club card

Olive oil club card

Pastry club card

Reuben sandwich club card

Snack club card

The (mostly true) origin story of Zingerman’s

Paul Saginaw (Detroit) and Ari Weinzweig (Chicago) met while working at the same restaurant in the late 70s. They dreamed of opening a classic Jewish corner deli in their adopted home (Ann Arbor). When a century old 900 square foot building on a cobblestone street opened up it felt like fate. They opened the doors of Zingerman’s Delicatessen on March 15th, 1982. Think pressed tin ceiling and black and white tiled floor and you’ve got the picture. Five tables, some stools in the window and a menu with twenty five different sandwiches. It was a bohemian food lovers paradise, shopped and staffed by friends. It was—and remains—a bustling food oasis with an awesome mix of regulars, college students, tourists, high school students, parents, visitors, first timers, foodies, fans and adventurers. Please come visit.

We were in commerce before there was e-commerce

Historians speak of a time before the Internet made order of chaos. When cooking shows only aired on PBS. When the celebrity chef du jour was Paul Prudhomme. When no one—I mean no one—took a picture of their dinner. They called it “1992” and it was electric. 

It was the year we packed our first box. On a prep table in the basement of Zingerman’s Delicatessen. We haven’t slowed down since. Back then we took orders on carbonless paper in triplicate. We had a touch tone phone and a cassette answering machine we bought at Target for twenty bucks. There are probably adults reading this right now who have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s how long we’ve been shipping great food. 

The food is the thing

We swear the food we sell is the best tasting we can find. That’s 1,000% true. But there’s more to it. Like Alexander Hamilton we’re never satisfied. So we keep looking. We’re constantly comparing the food we sell to the new food we find. If we like the new stuff better, that’s what we want to sell. It means constantly tasting and tasting and tasting some more to make sure what was true yesterday is still true today. 

We don’t just pull food off a shelf and ship it

Take cheese. It’s a living food that keeps developing and deepening its flavors the longer it stays as a part of the wheel. That’s why we hand-cut your cheese to order directly from the wheel right before we ship it out the door. It’s more difficult than grabbing a pre-packaged wedge from a distributor. It takes lots of training. But the flavor is worth it. 

Zingerman’s Bakehouse—same story. They make all our breads and pastries by hand about a mile up the road. They don’t use any preservatives in their breads, they just let the crust be the natural protector of the crumb inside. We wrap it in paper by hand, pack it in boxes by hand, and, well, you get the idea. 

It’s all in Ann Arbor, Michigan

We started in this college town. And that’s where we’re staying. We don’t have locations around the country. We don’t have a call center in Iowa. Or India. We don’t fulfill with Amazon. We don’t outsource. We insource. 

We are real live human beings

No chatbots. No phone trees. No auto-email. Actually, there’s one, but it’s the most fun auto-email you’ll ever get, promise. When you call, you talk to us. When your order is packed it is packed by us. When we make a mistake, that’s us too. (And we’ll do whatever it takes to make it right.)

Our guarantee is rather crazy 

You know how some companies put up a bunch of rules and hurdles to overcome before they’ll give you a refund or ship out a new product? That’s not us. No rules. No returns. If you experience a problem with our food, service, shipping—or even if you simply don’t like how it tastes—let us know. We believe you. We’ll do whatever it takes to make it right. And you never have to return anything. 

Our horn, tooted by others

OK it always feels weird to share these kinds of things but they’re also kind of awesome. So here goes.

The reuben is killer.

Barack Obama, POTUS #44

Zingerman’s sandwiches are an 11 on a scale of 1 to 5.

Oprah, Midwesterner

My favorite store in the cosmos.

Jim Harrison, Writer, poet, trencherman

Arguably the best mail order gourmet food specialist in the nation.

Larry Olmstead, Forbes

Now that’s a sandwich!

Michael Ivins, Flaming Lips bassist, now retired from rock and roll

I ordered brownies for my daughter and her husband in Denver.  A coyote got into the box and ate most of the brownies. Not a very nice birthday surprise, but you came to my rescue. We came up with a new (secure) address and you replaced the brownies free of charge. 

Dave in Holt, Michigan

Zingerman’s—I think everyone around the country should love them.

Alejandra Ramos, Today Show

One of the country’s iconic food markets.

Kate Krader, Bloomberg

When it comes to the best place in America to buy cheese—OK, let’s all agree there’s absolutely no contest. It’s Zingerman’s.

Wall Street Journal

Zingerman’s is a legend.

USA Today

Thank you for having a company that ships great food overnight when children forget their parents’ 39th wedding anniversary and are in a bind.

Leah in Fredericksburg, Virginia

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.

Most artisan breads are based on the same four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and a leavener. The first step to making great bread is to choose great versions of those ingredients.

Better Flour

Let’s start with flour. At Zingerman’s Bakehouse, the “house” flour is an organic AP flour that comes from a single mill in Colorado—most of it grown on a single farm. The bakers use more than 20,000 pounds of it each week. It’s included in baked goods from Farm Bread to Hummingbird Cake.

For many breads and pastries, the team at our Bakehouse also use locally grown, freshly milled whole grain flours. Many of those flours are milled in the bakery on the in-house stone mill, including the rye flour use in the Vollkornbrot and Roadhouse breads. The freshly milled flours are more variable and perishable, but used well they contribute exceptional depth of flavor.

Natural Leavening

Let’s talk about leavening, too. While some Zingerman’s breads, like Paesano and Sesame Semolina, are made with yeast, more than a dozen of breads are naturally leavened. Naturally leavened breads are made without the addition of commercial yeast, relying instead on the “wild” yeasts present in the sourdough starters the Bakehouse team has been feeding daily since 1992. Zingerman’s naturally leavened breads range from the tangiest Better than San Francisco Style Sourdough to sweeter loaves like Cinnamon Raisin and Chocolate Cherry.

Time

The most important ingredient is one you’ll never see listed on a label: time. At Zingerman’s, making
bread is a slow process. A loaf of Farm bread takes 18 hours. A loaf of Paesano bread takes a whopping 20 hours. All that time allows for incredible flavor development, the same way that a broth simmered all day has way more intense, complex flavor than one that’s only been cooking for a couple of hours.
Those flavorless artisan breads from other bakeries probably suffer from being made in just a few hours, not allowing enough time for flavor development. And incidentally, those bags of sliced white bread at the grocery? Thanks to industrial dough developers and oxidizers, they can go from raw flour to oven- ready dough in four minutes flat. No wonder they don’t taste like much!

Stone

The method of baking matters, too. Zingerman’s breads are baked in a stone hearth oven. The stone allows for more even distribution of heat, making for a crisper, more flavorful crust.

All the little steps add up. Zingerman’s breads are deeply aromatic, with complex flavors of grain. You really can taste the difference.

Photo credit: EE Berger