Customizable 6 Bread Gift Crate

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.

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.

Twenty years ago we started gift boxing our as-of-yet-not-quite-famous sour cream coffeecake in traditional cheese crates made by Dufeck Manufacturing in Denmark, Wisconsin. What I didn’t know then was they were—and are—the last surviving cheese crate maker in the United States.

There used to be crate makers all over the country.

“When we started a hundred years ago, there were cheese makers on every corner and they all needed crates,” explained Paul Dufeck, the fourth generation of Dufecks to make the cheese crates. “Back then you could find a crate maker every thirty miles or so and they’d make crates for everyone,” Paul continued. “The crates were used for aging twenty-two pound rounds of cheddar cheese. The cheese would form into wheels in the crates and they makers would flip them, age them, and ship them when they were ready, all in the same crate.”

Aging in wooden crates may seem odd, but wood is great at protecting cheese. It allows the cheese to breathe, so its flavors can better develop. “There’s something special about the flavor of a cheese aged in wooden crate,” Paul continued. “There are still a few cheesemakers in Wisconsin that age cheddar in our crates—and one in North Carolina—but the practice is pretty rare nowadays.”

It takes at least six different people to make a Dufeck crate.

Three folks operate the veneer lathe which is like a large pencil sharpener, but instead of whittling a pencil to a point, it sheers off thin sheets of wood from large logs that are soft and malleable enough to be formed into different shapes. This veneer makes the sides of our round and oval crates. The fourth person makes the tops and bottoms of the crates from planed pieces of wood that fit together with tongue and groove (no glue or adhesives). Another person nails the crates together. Finally the tops of the crates are sanded by the last person who also screen-prints our logo on top. Once the crate is finished, it’s moved upstairs to dry for a couple days and then they’re shipped directly to us. We buy a few truckloads a year of different sized crates, any one of which we’re happy to use to store cats and sour cream coffeecake.

Dufeck’s crates are one of the things people love about our gifts—but that’s not all they’re good for.

We get pictures all the time of people repurposing them—as button boxes, as cat condominiums, as yarn crates. I used to think we were a little strange for repurposing a cheese crate to hold a coffeecake but then I realized everyone does—it turns out Dufeck has been doing the same thing for half a century.

In the middle of the 20th century the small cheesemakers closed or consolidated into larger companies and the larger cheesemaking factories started making huge blocks of cheese and shipping them to factories that would cut and cryovac the blocks and ship them in cardboard, not wood.

“You either diversified or you died,” Paul explained, “and that’s what we did. We make pallets and crates for large equipment and we recycle all our scrap into mulch and sawdust that we also sell, but we’re the only ones left that still make cheese crates.”