Are you one of the tens of thousands of fans of the Bakehouse’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake? If you are, I’m excited to share some great news: Thanks to a quality-focused collaboration between the Bakehouse and the crew at Vermont Creamery, the Coffee Cake is now on the growing list of longtime best sellers that we have recently made markedly better with Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter.
What has long been great is now notably better. To be clear, it’s still the same great Sour Cream Coffee Cake—the recipe is really unchanged. All that’s different is the big upgrade in butter quality. As we say, “You really can taste the difference!” Bakehouse staffers have been oohing and aahing about it ever since we made the butter switch a couple of weeks ago. The aroma is markedly more buttery. The flavor is richer, rounder, and even more luscious than it already was. All the same great spices, walnuts, and sour cream are all still in place, but the cultured butter seems to weave them into the mix just a bit more effectively. The finish is longer, the cake creamier!
What is cultured butter? It’s the way all good butter would have been made 150 years ago. The cream is allowed to “ripen” before being churned into butter, which means that, as with yogurt, cheese, or sourdough bread, the natural cultures develop to make the flavor fuller and more complex. Whether it’s in the Coffee Cake, spread on a couple slices of toast, or melted atop a just-cooked steak, it really is terrific!
The Sour Cream Coffee Cake itself is, of course, not a new product. Nearly 40 years ago, Ellie Marks and others would go down to the basement of the Deli each morning and butter up a few Bundt pans to prepare for the day’s business. On weekdays, we made one cake; on busy weekends, two or three. Now we make many thousands. Despite the increase in volume, I will say with certainty that the quality is far better now than it was back then. Neither Ellie nor I was especially good at baking, but the Bakehouse pastry crew is skilled, trained, and far, far more focused on their craft than we were able to be back in the early days of the Deli. Their attention to detail and many years of experience come through in the impressive consistency of the Coffee Cake!
You may have experienced the great flavors of Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter over the last couple of years at the Roadhouse. It showed up first on the Roadhouse menu’s Bakehouse bread service. Almost right off the bat, it was a huge hit! Many regulars now buy one of the one-pound tubes to take home after dinner! From there, the cultured butter began to show up in other key menu items: the Buttermilk Biscuits, the Anson Mills organic grits, the mashed potatoes, on steaks and seafood, and, most recently, in the really remarkable Butterscotch Pudding. All were already excellent, and all have been made much better by our butter improvement. As of this month, we’ve done the same with Cultured Butter Croissants, scones, Patti Pockets, and pie crusts at the Bakehouse. Each item we’ve put this butter in is markedly better than before!
If, by chance, you haven’t had any of the Bakehouse’s Sour Cream Coffee Cake lately, the cultured butter could be a compelling reason to give it a try. This coffee cake is made with lots of it, which means that it a) tastes terrific and b) lasts a really long time (without the need for any multi-syllabic, lab-produced preservatives). Add in sour cream, Indonesian Korintje cinnamon, eggs, toasted walnuts, and real vanilla, and you’ve got a great-tasting cake. Perhaps best of all, pretty much everyone who tries it likes it. Old, young, connoisseur, food novice, locals, East Coast, West Coast, in the South, in South Dakota … almost everybody adores it.
Right now, we have these cakes in good supply at the Bakeshop, Deli, Roadshow, and Coffee Company. You can buy the cakes whole, by the slice, or both. Eat a slice in the car on the way home and save the whole cake for the rest of the family. Or ship a cake to a friend—right now, everyone can use a bit of extra connection.
P.S. If you want to try something new, I’ve discovered that lightly browning butter slices of the Sour Cream Coffee Cake in a frying pan is a positively fine way to enjoy it! Serve with your favorite jam on the side. Great for breakfast with a cup of the 2025 Holiday Blend from Zingerman’s Coffee Company, or with Zingerman’s gelato for dessert.
In 1982, Ari Weinzweig, along with his partner Paul Saginaw, founded Zingerman’s Delicatessen with a $20,000 bank loan, a Russian History degree from the University of Michigan, 4 years of experience washing dishes, cooking and managing in restaurant kitchens and chutzpah from his hometown of Chicago. They opened the doors with 2 employees and a small selection of specialty foods and exceptional sandwiches.
Today, Zingerman’s Delicatessen is a nationally renowned food icon and the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses has grown to 10 businesses with over 750 employees and over $55 million in annual revenue. Aside from the Delicatessen, these businesses include Zingerman’s Bakehouse, Coffee Company, Creamery, Roadhouse, Mail Order, ZingTrain, Candy Manufactory, Cornman Farms and a Korean restaurant that is scheduled to open in 2016. No two businesses in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses are alike but they all share the same Vision and Guiding Principles and deliver “The Zingerman’s Experience” with passion and commitment.
Besides being the Co-Founding Partner and being actively engaged in some aspect of the day-to-day operations and governance of nearly every business in the Zingerman’s Community, Ari Weinzweig is also a prolific writer. His most recent publications are the first 4 of his 6 book series Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading Series: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business (Part 1), Being a Better Leader (Part 2), Managing Ourselves (Part 3) and the newly-released Part 4, The Power of Beliefs in Business. Earlier books include the Zingerman’s Guides to Giving Great Service, Better Bacon, Good Eating, Good Olive Oil, Good Vinegar and Good Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Ari regularly travels across the country (and world) on behalf of ZingTrain, teaching organizations and businesses about Zingerman’s approach to business. He is a sought-after Keynote speaker, having delivered keynotes for Inc. 500, Microsoft Expo Spring Conference, Great Game of Business Gathering of Games, Positive Business Conference at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, American Society for Quality (ASQ), and the American Cheese Society. Most recently, Ari and Paul Saginaw were invited to address an audience of 50,000 for the University of Michigan 2015 Spring Commencement.
One of Zingerman’s Guiding Principles is being an active part of the community and in 1988, Zingerman’s was instrumental in the founding of Food Gatherers, a food rescue program that delivers over 5 million pounds of food each year to the hungry residents of Washtenaw county. Every year Zingerman’s donates 10% of its previous years profits to local community organizations and non-profits. Ari has served on the board of The Ark, the longest continuously operating folk music venue in America.
Over the decades, the Zingerman’s founding partners have consistently been the recipients of public recognition from a variety of diverse organizations. In April 1995, Ari and Paul were awarded the Jewish Federation of Washtenaw County’s first Humanitarian Award. In 2006, Ari was recognized as one of the “Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America” by the James Beard Foundation. In 2007, Ari and Paul were presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award from Bon Appetit magazine for their work in the food industry. Ari was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Cheese Society in 2014. And Ari’s book, Building a Great Business was on Inc. magazine’s list of Best Books for Business Leaders.
Notwithstanding the awards, being engaged on a daily basis in the work of 10 businesses and 21 partners, writing books on business and in-depth articles on food for the Zingerman’s newsletter, Ari finds time to be a voracious reader. He acquires and reads more books than he can find room for. Ari might soon find himself the owner of the largest collection of Anarchist books in Ann Arbor outside the Labadie collection at the University of Michigan library!
