Palmier Cookies Gift Box

1. Butter tastes better

You can’t tell just from looking at a cookie or a piece of cake whether it’s been baked with butter or shortening. The bottom line on baked goods’ flavor is that butter tastes better. It’s also about ten times more costly, so many bakeries make the choice to use less expensive shortenings or margarine. You can taste and smell the difference—pull apart a Bakehouse cinnamon roll and stick it right up to your nose. The sweet, rich scent of butter is right up front, followed by the soft smell of the cinnamon. Shortening, on the other hand, has no aroma to speak of. Good pastry should smell good.

2. Better butter

Zingerman’s Bakehouse doesn’t just use any butter. Many of our baked goods start with sweet butter from Grassland. It tastes better, has less water, and more flavor. There’s no way around it—the better the butter the better the baked goods.

3. Belgian chocolate

There’s chocolate. And then there’s Belgian chocolate. Our chocolate chunk cookies are loaded with big bites of great chocolate, including Callebaut Belgian chocolate. Higher in cocoa content, Callebaut is chocolatier, richer, more delicious than the inexpensive, mass-produced chocolates you’ll find in most baked goods.

4. Real maple syrup

Not Pearl Milling Company or Mrs. Butterworth’s—we use real 100% pure maple syrup from northern Michigan to sweeten our oatmeal raisin cookies. Sugar sweetens. But maple syrup adds depth, flavor and character to a cookie.

5. Country-style sour cream

I’m a sour cream addict from way back. And the sour cream we get is so thick we’ve had guests think that we’d given them a dish of butter by mistake. (Standard issue sour cream is thin and watery by comparison.) It adds enormous richness and flavor to our sour cream coffee cake.

6. Real vanilla

Real vanilla is the first thing that big bakeries eliminate. You can use industrial, imitation vanilla for about a twentieth of the cost of the real thing. And, by proportion, you use so little vanilla in a batch of baked goods, it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that no one will notice. But… you can clearly taste the difference. Real vanilla is literally almost 150 times as complex in flavor as artificial vanillin. Take away anything else, but please, please don’t take away my vanilla—it adds incredible aroma and flavor to anything it’s used in.

7. Red Flame raisins

Thompson raisins—the ones in the little red boxes—are such a standard that many people have never had the chance to try anything else. But there are other raisins out there, and not surprisingly, some taste a lot better. Red Flames are plump, juicy, joyously flavorful. They’re the star in our Bakehouse’s oatmeal raisin cookies, pecan raisin bread, and cinnamon raisin bread.

8. Organic unbleached & unbromated flours

The better the flour, the better the baked goods. We use organic AP flour for practically all of our breads and baked goods.

9. Fresh eggs

The norm nowadays for commercial bakeries is to use frozen eggs that come in white plastic buckets. We stubbornly stick to old-fashioned eggs in the traditional oval-shaped white shell, the way they made ’em “back in the old days.”

10. Toasted pecans, almonds, and walnuts

Toasting takes time and time is money. But it also adds a lot of flavor to nuts. So we do it. Toasting brings depth to the walnuts in our sour cream coffee cake, the pecans in our pecan pie and pecan blondies, and everything else we make with nuts in it.

11. Indonesian cinnamon

Cinnamon is such a staple in baked goods that a simple switch from one cinnamon to another can make an enormous difference. We stick with Korintje cinnamon from Indonesia, which has a rich flavor with a tongue-tingling tickle to it.

12. Love

The crew at the Bakehouse is adamant that everything that enters and emerges from their ovens does so with the same personal seal of approval—the kind you’d get if you went over to your grandmother’s for a cold glass of milk and a brownie right out of 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.