Michigan Weekender Gift Box

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.

All of our Zingerman’s Bakehouse pastries and coffee cakes are baked with full-flavored ingredients, but without preservatives. The good news is we’ve done the hard work of tasting and testing to ensure that they can be enjoyed for weeks to come.

If enjoying soon, keep them at room temperature.

Each baked good will have an “eat or freeze by” sticker that is about two weeks from when the package ships out. If enjoying the treats within a week or so of delivery, they can be kept at room temperature in the packaging they arrived in or in a plastic bag. Avoid the refrigerator, it can ruin the texture.

If enjoying later, keep them in the freezer.

For longer term storage, all of our baked goods freeze well for up to three months. They can be stored in the freezer in their original packaging or, if they’ve been opened, double wrapped in plastic bags. 

After the freezer, it is best to allow frozen pastries and coffee cakes to defrost slowly at room temperature in the packaging. That’s all–though with some pastries like scones, a little warm up in an oven will make them extra delicious. 

Zingerman’s Candy Manufactory has been crafting delicious confections for fifteen years with a focus on traditional American candy. Each sweet treat takes days to make, and has remarkably full flavor. Here are two factors that make Zingerman’s candy different than your average grocery store find.

Made by hand, not by machines

Instead of massive industrial cookers mechanically churning out literal tons, we still make our peanut brittle, nougat, and caramel by hand in big pots on a stove.

“Made by hand” might sound like a throwaway marketing line, but it actually does translate to taste. Making caramel in smaller batches means we can caramelize it more for richer, deeper flavors. Those huge commercial vats hold about 50 times more, so they can’t cook as long without burning the caramel on the bottom.

We also hand-pull our peanut brittle, carefully stretching and pulling the melted nut and sugar mixture before it cools. Most companies, even smaller ones, rely only on the little bubbles from baking soda for an airy, crisp texture. But hand-pulling puts bigger air pockets into the mix for an even flakier bite—and it never sticks in your teeth.

Especially flavorful ingredients

We use high quality ingredients for each candy component. Take the peanuts. Instead of the typical
small runner peanuts, we source big Virginia Jumbo peanuts for better crunch. Industrial makers will
buy roasted nuts to save time, but they quickly lose flavor and texture. By roasting in house, we get the
freshest flavor and we control the salt and roast levels. We grind our house-roasted nuts to make
our own nut butters instead of pulling a jar off the shelf with added sugar and other filler ingredients. And that’s just the nuts. We use just as much care in selecting our chocolate, our sugar—even our raspberry preserves!

Looking at the ingredient list on a mass-produced candy bar, you’ll notice something we don’t add: preservatives. It’s cheaper to add preservatives because companies can make more candy at one time and hold onto it for longer. Think about a regular candy bar in the grocery aisle. Do you have any idea when it was made or how long it’s been sitting there?

With ours, you do. It’s likely no more than a few weeks old when you receive it. You’ll want to eat it within a couple of months for best texture and flavor. You really can taste the difference.

For most of its history, cheese has been a local affair. Farmers would bring their milk to a village creamery that could convert that milk into cheese and other dairy products. Cheese has always been the long term storage solution for extra milk—especially before the era of refrigerators. The creameries would produce the same type of cheese and offer it at different ages like fresh, young, aged, extra aged—that sort of thing—but most of their sales came from the fresh varieties. Cottage cheese, cream cheese, hand-ladled rounds and bright white logs were all typical and popular fare.

Folks might come into town once or twice a week to grab what they needed and stop by the local creamery, bakery, brewery, and general store for weekly supplies. A slower time to be sure, but the world wasn’t in such a hurry then, either.

Things changed, of course.

Small, local producers were mostly overtaken by the convenience and variety of grocery stores and shopping centers. Seasonality disappeared. Better living and eating through science and all that jazz. You know: TV dinners and toaster pastries and plastic wrapped blocks of orange cheese. The neighborhood creamery disappeared from the culinary landscape.

Then, slowly the trend reversed. Folks were over the microwave—they wanted well made products that tasted great. The “who” and the “how” were important again and our Zingerman’s community of businesses evolved in the same fashion: local baking, coffee roasting, cheese making. Zingerman’s Creamery hit the scene in 2001 and made an instant splash with natural cream cheese. In a couple short years they were making a variety of fresh, hand-ladled cheeses from local cow and goat’s milk—just like the old days.

Zingerman’s Creamery receives fresh milk daily from local farms within about an hour’s drive.

The volume of milk changes depending on the time of year, so they’ve become adept at changing their own production schedule to match the influx—or dearth—of milk. The cheesemakers at Zingerman’s Creamery use the same time-tested techniques that gave old village cheese its signature, light texture and subtle flavors. There’s a bright, fresh, tangy character you can only find in young, handmade cheeses. Like milk, butter and the other dairy regulars in your fridge, fresh, local, hand-ladled cheeses can once again be a staple.

Reserve the heavier, richer, more intensely flavored cheeses for a special occasion. Make fresh cheese the daily experience it used to be.