Country Multigrain Bread

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.

First things first. What’s a grain?

The foods we call grains are the seeds of certain members of the grass family. Wheat, barley, oats, rye, rice, corn, sorghum, and millet are all grains.

Each grain has three main components:

(A) The endosperm: the starchy part that would feed a baby plant if the seed were planted and grown; it makes up about 70-75% of the volume of the grain.

(B) The germ: the part of the seed that would grow into a new plant.

(C) The bran: an outer coating to protect the grain.

Next, let’s talk about milling.

While some grains like brown rice are eaten whole, most are milled. Milling crushes the grain into a meal or flour. It also breaks apart the germ, endosperm, and bran, allowing us to choose which parts to include in that flour. For white flour—which is to say, the majority of flour sold today—that means keeping only the starchy endosperm and discarding the fibrous bran and the oily, quick-to-spoil germ. A flour made only of endosperm keeps for a long time and makes good breads and pastries. But it lacks the flavor and nutrients that are in the bran and germ.

This separation is nothing new; people have been removing the bran and germ to make white flour for millennia. Prior to the industrial revolution, the sifting required to separate the bran and endosperm was a laborious process. That’s why white flour was a rarity used only on special occasions. Advances in milling technology during the 19th century made white flour accessible to the masses. Through many rounds of grinding and sifting and refining, modern roller mills produce white flour. In the milling industry, this white flour is often called 75% extraction. In other words, it includes 75% of the original wheat berry—the endosperm—but none of the other 25% that was the bran and germ. White all purpose (AP) flour and white bread flour are both 75% extraction flours.

Since the endosperm lacks much of the nutrition of the grain, white flours are often enriched: they have certain nutrients like vitamins added back in to make up for what was lost when the bran and germ were discarded. In other words, enriched flour undergoes additional processing to make up for what was removed by the earlier processing.

What about whole grain flours, like whole wheat?

Much like how modern brown sugar is made by taking white sugar and mixing molasses in, most whole wheat flour is made by taking white flour and mixing the bran and germ back in. Whole wheat flour must contain endosperm, bran, and germ in the same proportions as the original wheat berry did. Since whole wheat flour has 100% of the original components, this is called 100% extraction. Put another way, that 100% is the “whole” in whole grain. That’s true for all grains: whole wheat, whole rye, you name it. It’s also true for white whole wheat flour—that’s just a regular whole wheat flour made from a paler colored variety of wheat. If you were to mix back in some, but not all, of the bran and germ, you’d get what’s called a “high extraction” flour—a flour that falls between 75% and 100% extraction.

Legally, for a bread to be labeled as “whole wheat,” 100% of the flour used to make it must be whole wheat flour. However, it can still include other ingredients, like sugar or eggs or any of the non-pronounceable ingredients found in many supermarket loaves.

There’s another way to make whole grain flours.

You could just never sift anything out in the first place. It’s much less common. This is what we do at Zingerman’s Bakehouse on our two in-house stone mills. We use our whole grain flours in many of our baked goods, like our olive oil cake made with freshly milled whole grain durum wheat and our vollkornbrot bread made with freshly milled whole grain rye. In other baked goods, we use a mix of whole grain flours and AP or high extraction flours. Our banana breads are made with 60% freshly milled whole grain soft white wheat and 40% AP flour. Our country miche bread is made with a mix of freshly milled whole grain rye and spelt along with high extraction Michigan wheat flour.

One challenge to using whole grain and high extraction flours is that the oils from the germ and bran can make them go rancid more quickly. Since we bake with the flours right away the rancidity and short shelf life isn’t a problem. We never remove any part of the grain, so all the vitamins are already there without any enriching. And just like how freshly ground coffee has a ton of aroma and flavor but months-old ground coffee has lost much of its character, our freshly milled grains give an enormous boost to the flavor of our breads and pastries. You really can taste the difference.

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 used 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 our 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

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.

At Zingerman’s Bakehouse, we use the terms “sourdough” and “naturally leavened” interchangeably for our naturally fermented breads. I personally prefer to say naturally leavened because sourdough implies that the bread will taste sour, and that is not always the case.

What does naturally leavened mean?

As artisan bakers, we are very happy to tell you that many of the breads we bake are naturally fermented. These breads don’t use any commercial yeast—the sourdough starters are kept alive and fed daily in preparation for addition to the final mix. They start with the fewest ingredients, but thanks to the fermentation time (anywhere from 14 to 18 hours, depending on the type of bread) they have the most complex flavors.

Fermentation is an ancient food preservation technique that humans have been using intentionally for literally thousands of years. It extends the life of food and can make it taste better. It’s a natural process through which microorganisms like yeast and bacteria convert carbohydrates—like starch and sugar—into alcohol or acids that give food a distinctive flavor, ranging from tart to savory. The fermentation process promotes the growth of good bacteria, known as probiotics, and their by-products, such as organic acids, keep the bad microorganisms out, which can otherwise make us sick.

Fermentation can occur naturally, no human hands needed, and we can harness it ourselves in an attempt to control the outcome, giving us the level of sour or the spectrum of flavors and textures we prefer. Fermented foods are everywhere, from soy sauce to yogurt to beer to pickles.

How does naturally leavened bread taste?

Naturally leavened bread can come in the full range of sweet to very sour depending on how the fermentation process is handled and what kind of ingredients are used. For example, the Italian Christmas bread panettone is traditionally naturally leavened and it is definitely sweet and milky in flavor, not sour. Our Better than San Francisco Sourdough is the tangiest of all of our naturally leavened breads. Our Cinnamon Raisin and Chocolate Cherry are certainly sweet with a slight background note of tanginess and they are also both naturally leavened. Whether sweet or tangy, or somewhere in between, we as bakers strive for fully fermented breads to give you the best experience in terms of flavors, textures, and aromas as well as nutrition.

So if you’re looking for breads made from natural starters, with no commercial yeast, and long fermentation times…

… we bake more than a dozen different choices. All have lots of flavor and texture variations whether you want to call them sourdough or naturally leavened. Need a few names to start your personal research? Farm, Pecan Raisin, Cinnamon Raisin, Country Miche, Chocolate Cherry, 8 Grain 3 Seed, and Vollkornbrot are all naturally leavened breads.