That’s our mission statement here at the Bakehouse. The bolded words come directly from the founding bakers who were making the bread here in the 90s. Those are the words they felt made Zingerman’s Bakehouse what it is and what they wanted it to be. Today, this mission is shared with staff during training and posted on our walls in the bakery to remind us why we’re here. It’s a reminder that our work here is not a final destination that we will reach one day, but rather a constant journey to be something better than we are right now.

But what does this mission statement look like in action? How do we show we are passionately committed in our daily work? Where do we demonstrate our relentless pursuit? What is the best bakery we can imagine?

One way that we actively live our mission statement here at Zingerman’s Bakehouse is with something we call “tastings.” Simply put, tastings are where the makers and bakers of our food critically sample that food regularly. It’s different than eating a Cinnamon Raisin Bagel for breakfast, snacking on a Ham and Cheese Croissant at lunch or enjoying a slice of Hummingbird Cake for dessert. It’s more than occasionally bringing a loaf of bread home for sandwiches. Tastings are something that our bakers, cooks and decorators are trained to do as a part of their work. It includes nearly all of the food we make here at the Bakehouse. Each day scores are recorded, tracked and then talked about at our staff huddles. We know this relentless practice is one of the reasons our great food keeps getting greater.

Because tastings are such an important part of our work at the Bakehouse, we have a recipe for them. We grade our food in three different areas; visual appearance, texture and flavor. For us every item has a specific way we want it to look, a texture we desire and a taste profile we strive for. These standards are agreed upon and documented. We train the staff on these standards and then taste and score our food against those standards. So while it’s certainly a fun dream job to eat samples in a bakery, this is some serious business!

The visual score pertains to how the food looks on the outside. It includes everything about the food’s appearance like color, shape, size, and volume. Is the Boston Cream Pie’s chocolate glaze smooth and shiny? Is the color of the True North bread crust dark enough? Since we are an artisanal bakery and use our hands to make our food, some variation in appearance is expected.

The score for texture comes from the inside of the food. Are the holes inside the Rustic Italian bread the right size? Is the Creamy Tomato soup just the right thickness? Is the cross section of a butter croissant showing an open honeycomb structure? These are the types of details that we’re looking for when we grade the texture of our food. This is similar to the visual score because again it is partially coming for visually inspecting the food, this time on the inside instead of the outside. Also contributing to the texture score is the way the food feels in your mouth. Is the Buttermilk Cake the right density when you bite into it? Does the Sourdough bread have a crisp, crackly crust with a moist interior? Is the sugar on the Palmiers caramelized or are there granules of sugar noticeable in your mouth? Are all of the vegetables in the Chicken Noodle soup chopped to a consistent size to avoid some being mushy while others remain crunchy?

Flavor is our final tasting criteria. After all, we are known to say “You really CAN taste the difference!” Does the food taste like it is supposed to? This is different than does the food taste “good” or does today’s taster like it. Regardless of your personal preferences, it means having a clearly defined flavor profile for each kind of food that we make and comparing what we taste that do to that desired goal. We have dozens of staff all with different taste, so we need to have an agreed upon standard we can all work with.

Tastings are graded are on a scale of 1-10. A score of 9 means the item is ideal. A score of 7-8 means the food is good, but not quite hitting the desired mark. Any score below a 7 is something that we won’t sell. This food just doesn’t live up to the Zingerman’s name. On the rare occasion that all of the stars are in alignment and the baking gods have smiled down upon us, we get an item that is the absolute best that we can imagine it to be. This is a 10! For each item tasted, it gets a score of 1-10 for it’s visual, texture and taste. That item’s final tasting score is the average of those three scores. Our Bakehouse wide goal is to have our tasting scores average no lower than 8.8.

So what exactly gets tasted at the Bakehouse? The quick and simple answer is everything. Between Monday and Sunday, nearly every item that we make and sell gets formally tasted at the Bakehouse. With over 25 varieties of bread, 75 kinds of different pastries offered each season, at least 10 different kinds of cake and 10 seasonal selections of soup, we do a lot of formal tasting. Sounds like a tough job? Or would you like to fill out an application?!

So how are these tasting scores contributing to the making the food better? Over the years, we have improved our recipes or techniques many times based on the data we collect from the tasting scores. Recent food improvements made in the bakery as a result of relentless tasting and the passionate pursuit of improvement include updating the Sesame Semolina bread recipe to 100% semolina flour, exclusively hand rolling our French Baguettes and Farm bread, adding to the richness of our cinnamon roll dough, and tweaking the ratios of our Funky Chunky cookie, Hot Cocoa Coffeecake and New Deli Coffeecake recipes for better texture. Some of these changes were relatively small; others were quite involved and resulted in significant changes to the way we work. They all had one thing in common though. We made them because we believed the food could be better. It was all selling quite well and our customers weren’t complaining about their quality. We’re just confident there’s room for improvement in everything we do. So we go to work to take those recipes from really good to greatness.

Wanna taste with us? Stop in to our Bakeshop and ask for a sample of anything. Before you pop that sample into your mouth, take a moment to look at it and smell it. After you put it into your mouth, pause to feel and taste it. Enjoy. Feel free to share your input and tasting score with us! We always love feedback!

-by Nina Plasencia, Zingeman’s Bakehouse baker

–Browse our job listings
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We’ve learned over years of researching here at the Bakehouse that pinpointing the origins of a recipe or food movement can sometimes prove to be quite tricky. Often there are similar versions of a food in different regions developing at the same time. It’s not surprising that the Hummingbird cake is of Jamaican decent with its flavor profile of banana and pineapple. What is surprising is HOW the recipe got here.

In Jamaica, this cake was commonly referred to as the Doctor Bird cake. Doctor Bird is a nickname for Jamaica’s national bird, the Red-billed Streamertail, a variety of hummingbird. Jamaican’s dubbed the bird the doctor bird because of the similarities between a hummingbird probing flowers with its beak and a doctor prodding a patient during an examination. Hummingbird cake is believed to have gained the Doctor Bird name in Jamaica because it is sweet enough to attract said bird.

In 1968, Air Jamaica was established and began offering flights from Miami and New York to Kingston and Montego Bay. The icon on the tail of these planes was none other than Jamaica’s national bird, a hummingbird. Jamaica’s tourist board put together some promotional kits to send to the U.S. to increase interest in travel to the country. The kits included recipes of some local cuisine; among which was the Doctor Bird cake. That is how the Doctor Bird cake initially landed in the United States.

The Doctor Bird cake quickly gained popularity in the South. There are numerous references to the cake in county fair reports and baking competitions throughout the 1970’s, although not always under the same name. Variations of the name include the Doctor Byrd cake after a familiar regional name dating back to early Virginia and then finally the more generalized name of Hummingbird. The first printed recipe of the cake appeared in Southern Living magazine in February 1978. The Hummingbird Cake has since become the most requested recipe in Southern Living’s history.

While there are a few staple similarities among recipes (like finishing it with cream cheese frosting, a batter made with oil rather than butter, and more fruit than flour in the mix!), today there exist many versions of the Hummingbird cake with everything from lime in the cream cheese frosting to an unfrosted Bundt cake to a decadent cake topped with pecan praline. Here at Zingerman’s Bakehouse, we like our Hummingbird cake with some coconut in the batter, a hefty dose of ripened bananas and pineapple, a handful of toasted pecans, a generous amount of cream cheese frosting and a tasty and beautiful finish of toasted coconut.

Since joining the cake line up at the Bakehouse in 2003, Hummingbird has become quite a fan favorite, earning a spot in the year-round line up. Find out for yourself. Stop by and ask for a taste.

by Nina Plasencia, baker

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-Learn to bake our hummingbird cake in our Zingerman’s Classics class
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At Zingerman’s Bakehouse, we are very serious about our bread. We take special care in the selection of ingredients, the way we mix our dough, and the processes we use in handling, proofing and baking our bread. We are especially particular about the way we eat our bread. With that in mind, I consulted the experts as to which Bakehouse bread is their favorite when making French toast. Clearly by experts I mean the staff of the Bakehouse, who make, bake, sell and basically live this bread every day.

After polling the Bakehouse staff, there were some clear winners in terms of favorite loaves of bread to make this classic American breakfast item. With 66% of staff selecting a variety of this bread as their favorite breakfast sweet loaf, Challah comes out on top. Our plain version of Challah was the top pick, with our special bake variety called Kálac (cinnamon swirl egg bread) coming in a close second. Although now on vacation, Chocolate Challah rounds out the top three. (“on vacation” means we’re not making it right now). Next on the list of top picks is our Rustic Italian bread. Bread with even more flavor that made the list included Cinnamon Raisin, Pecan Raisin, Cranberry Pecan, Farm, Country Wheat and Challah Turbans with rum raisins.

Challah is a bread of Jewish descent. All of our challah loaves are chock full of fresh eggs, local honey and corn oil; not your typical bread ingredients. Extra egg brushed on the outside of the bread helps deliver that crisp, mahogany crust. Staff cited the soft texture, the egg base of the bread itself and Challah’s absorbent nature as their top reasons for making it the perfect choice for French toast. Sales Specialist at the Bakehouse, Ally, recommends slicing your Challah thick, stuffing it with a bit of your favorite jam, and coating it in both a custard batter as well as a dry mix of almond meal and flour before frying.

Somodi Kálac is a lesser-known gem in the Bakehouse’s bread line up. Had any other sample in Ann Arbor been polled, it’s doubtful this bread would have made an appearance; however, 25% of Bakehouse staff rallied behind this bread for their go-to choice for French toast. Somodi Kálac is a Hungarian bread traditionally enjoyed at Easter. The Bakehouse added it to our menu after learning to make it in a remote village in Transylvania in 2012. It takes our Challah dough and swirls cinnamon and sugar throughout it. Bread baker, Damon, says “Somodi Kolac already tastes like French toast so when you make it into French toast, it’s just that much better.” “It should be illegal. It’s THAT good!” adds Mandie, pastry baker at the Bakehouse.

Fiona, longtime Bakehouse accountant, loves using Challah Turbans when making this special breakfast meal. Like the previous favorites, Turbans start with a base of Challah bread. This time add rum soaked raisins to the mix for your eating pleasure. You can find Turbans at the Bakehouse each September. Fiona recommends buying a few loaves to freeze and use throughout the year.

Rustic Italian was cited as a favorite due to the contrast in texture that it provides. If more of a crisp crust is the goal while keeping that super soft interior, Rustic Italian is perfect. Add a touch of sour flavor to that texture and you have French toast made with our Farm bread, which is the top pick of Bakehouse founder, Frank. The culmination of texture and flavor makes this loaf impeccable, Frank thinks.

Other top soft bread at the Bakehouse that the staff uses include Brioche, Country Wheat and Bakehouse White. Patrick, Service Specialist, prefers cutting his bread into a French toast stick shape to the more common slice. For added stability, he recommends the Brioche Pullman loaf.

For those of us that are a little more adventurous and less traditional, try one of these Bakehouse specialty bread. Cinnamon Raisin, Pecan Raisin, and Cranberry Pecan are much more dense bread than those typically used. French toast made with these will be full of flavor and more on the chewier side. Paul, Bakehouse veteran of 9 years, lets his Pecan Raisin slice soak in the custard batter for 5 minutes on each side before frying. It takes patience, but Paul ensures it’s worth it.

When it comes down to it, there are many great choices of Zingerman’s Bakehouse bread when planning your French toast creation. It just depends on your taste, and we also say the only one that counts is yours. Try a few out and let us know what you think. Or share your favorite French toast recipe with us. We always love discovering new ways to enjoy Bakehouse bread.

-by Nina Plasencia, Zingeman’s Bakehouse baker

–Take our Challah making class or Somodi Kalác making class
–Browse all of our breads

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