Forget the pineapple. These hams start with heritage Duroc pork raised outdoors on pasture on a single farm in northern Indiana. They’re cured and smoked by the meat mavens at Smoking Goose. The result? They’re showstoppers without the extra garnishes.

It all begins at Gunthorp Farm in LaGrange, Indiana.

Greg Gunthorp is a fourth-generation pig farmer. Growing up, his family ran a mixed farm: they raised crops like wheat and soy, but also animals like pigs and chickens. As a kid, Greg’s favorite thing to do on the farm was to go out with his grandfather and feed the pigs. He grew up knowing he wanted to raise his own pigs. But he quickly learned that the economics were not in his favor. In 1998, the market price for his pasture-raised pigs was five cents a pound—lower than the price during the depression. But Greg wasn’t willing to give up. So he made the decision to switch from selling pigs to selling pork.

That may not sound that revolutionary. But being able to sell pork meant that Greg needed to build his own abattoir (also known as a slaughterhouse). Thanks to regulations that work to keep us from living in another Upton Sinclair jungle, you can’t just open your own abattoir the same way you can just set up your own butchery, bakery, or candle stick-makery. The immense amount of red tape and paperwork involved in establishing and running an abattoir have essentially squeezed everyone out of the industry except the very biggest players. I asked Greg once how many pig and poultry farmers there are in the US that run their own abattoirs. He didn’t have to pause to think before he answered simply, “Three.”

Greg raises heritage breed Duroc pigs. Greg will tell you they’re not the easiest to raise—compared to today’s conventional pigs, it’s much tougher to get enough piglets from a sow in a year. But he likes them anyway because he loves the deep, rich flavor of the pork. The pigs spend their whole lives out on pasture, in the woods and fields of Greg’s farm. They root around for nuts, roots, and greenery. They’re never given hormones, subtherapeutic antibiotics, or any other growth promotants.

A hundred years ago, this all would have sounded pretty typical to any pig farmer in this country. But today, the vast majority of pigs raised in the US are raised indoors in confinement, standing above giant lagoons of their own waste. It’s more efficient that way, which is to say it costs less. Lower costs means higher profits for the giant companies that own most of the pigs in the US. But they save that money at the expense of animal and worker welfare—and flavor.

Not so with Greg’s pigs. They spend their lives doing what they please on the farm. When their time has come, they don’t have miles to travel on a crowded truck to get to the abattoir—instead, they stay on the same property where they’ve spent their whole life. It all adds up to make supremely flavorful pork.

Enter Smoking Goose.

Working in Indianapolis, Smoking Goose cures and smokes a slew of excellent meats, from familiar offerings like city hams to more adventurous choices like jowl bacon. They’re conscientious about all of their meat, and work only with farmers who meet their standards for ethics and sustainability—farmers, in short, like Greg.

This Easter, we’ve partnered with Greg and Smoking Goose to offer an exclusive pecan smoked ham, made only for Zingerman’s. The Duroc hams come from Greg’s farm. The team at Smoking Goose cures them with pepper, coriander, mustard seed, honey, bay leaf and a strawberry-rhubarb cider from New Day Meadery in Indianapolis. Then they smoke the hams over pecan wood.

This is an Easter ham par excellence.

The meat is sweet with a smooth smokiness. It’s complex enough to wow the most discerning palate at the table, yet approachable enough for the pickiest eaters to love it, too. The flavor is a knockout. It will linger with you long after you put down your fork.

The hams are fully cooked, ready to eat. Though it’s not strictly necessary, I’d recommend heating it up in the oven before serving. It’ll add a couple of hours to the prep time, but it’ll also make a stunning, steaming centerpiece on your holiday table.

Heating instructions

1. Store your ham in the freezer until two days before you want to eat it, then put it in the fridge. On the day you want to serve it, remove it and let sit uncovered at room temperature for about 1 hour.
2. Preheat oven to 325°F
3. Remove ham from packaging and place in a shallow roasting pan on a roasting rack.
4. Cover the bottom of the pan with water. (You could also mix it up and use stock, wine, cider, or soda.)
5. Cover the pan and ham tightly with aluminum foil and bake for approximately 12 minutes per pound, until the internal temperature of the ham reaches 150°F. (Remember that the ham is fully cooked already. Heating it to this internal temperature helps ensure that it’s warm throughout.)
6. Optional: If you wish to apply a glaze (not included or required), remove the ham from the oven with about 30 minutes left in your cooking time. Baste with your favorite glaze and return to the oven uncovered. Basting can be repeated several times during the last 30 minutes of heating.
7. Remove from the ham from the oven and cover. Allow it to rest for 15 minutes before slicing. There’s no bone, so you can slice all the way through.

The Thanksgiving turkey most of us are used to is very different than the turkey that would have been on our table a hundred years ago. They look different: today’s commercial turkeys are all white with a broad, distended breast; traditional turkeys range from white to tan to bronze to black and have a longer, leaner body. They act differently: most turkeys today have been bred to live in close confinement with little movement; traditional turkeys trot, strut, run, roost, and fly (Les Nessman was right). They taste different, too: grocery store turkeys are pumped full of brine so they’re not completely bland; traditional birds have a bigger, more robust flavor.

Luckily, there are still a few opportunities out there to taste the turkeys that our grandparents grew up with.

That’s thanks to the hard work of farmers like Frank Reese and Bill Niman. Frank, the godfather of the heritage breed turkey world, raises them on his 180-acre farm in Lindsborg, Kansas. He’s a fourth-generation turkey farmer, an impressive length of time to do anything, let alone raise turkeys. But more impressive than his own family history is that of his turkeys: he can trace back nearly a hundred generations, all the way to 1917 for his Standard Bronze turkeys. Along with the Bronzes, he raises a handful of other heritage breeds that were popular fifty years ago but have all but disappeared today: Narragansett, Black, White Holland, Bourbon Red. Thanks to Frank’s work, more and more farmers—including Bill Niman, a pioneer in the world of humanely raised beef and pork at his former company, Niman Ranch—are beginning to raise heritage breed turkeys, too.

Today, one breed of turkey dominates more than 99% of Thanksgiving tables: the Broad Breasted White. It’s a fitting name. The breast is so large that the turkey has trouble standing, let alone walking. Forget flying. They can’t mate naturally so they have to be artificially inseminated. The birds suffer severe disfigurement: their claws, wings, beaks, and snoods—the fleshy part that hangs from the top of a turkey’s head—are clipped to keep them from fighting (or at least to keep them from doing much damage to each other when they do fight, an inevitability since they’re kept in tight, crowded spaces). White feathers are favored because darker feathers can leave small dark spots on the meat when the bird is plucked. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing except that white-feathered turkeys are less disease resistant so they’re fed antibiotics their entire lives. They’re not given any hormones, but that’s only because those hormones were banned due to health concerns—not for the turkeys, but for the people eating them.

If all of this is starting to make you depressed, you’re not alone. I was too. Until I met Frank’s birds.

Heritage breed turkeys, like the ones that Frank and Bill raise, are a totally different animal.

Heritage turkeys must be able to do three things:

1. Mate naturally. Frank spends February and March helping to set the Valentine’s Day mood for his turkeys. He separates each breed into its own barn, turns on the heat lamps for the only time all year, and lets nature take its course. Apparently, turkey hens don’t require chocolate or roses.

2. Live outdoors, moving around normally and enduring whatever weather comes along. Frank and Bill keep their turkeys in barns at night for protection from coyotes, but every morning the turkeys are let out to spend their days strutting around the yard, flying over fences, chasing rabbits that come too close, and, at least when I visited Frank’s farm, pecking inquisitively at unfamiliar humans. They eat bugs and wild grasses and any rodents they catch (turkeys are omnivores) as well as a bit of supplemental corn and soy, but they’re never fed any antibiotics. To allow them to get along out in the elements, Frank and Bill never clip their turkeys’ claws, beaks, wings, or snoods.

3. Grow slowly. Frank and Bill’s birds take six months to grow to their full size, a natural growth rate for turkeys. By contrast, Broad Breasted White turkeys take half that long to reach full size, which is great news for the team in accounting but not so good for the bird’s welfare—or its flavor.

The difference in flavor between industry birds and heritage birds is like the difference between Wonderbread and a loaf of French Mountain Bread.

Active lifestyle, varied diet, and a longer lifespan all add up to more flavorful meat. Heritage turkeys taste richer, more like turkey, if that makes sense. The breast, while less plump, has flavor that’s a far cry from the bland meat we’re used to. Frank’s turkeys have won taste competition after competition across the country, including ones held by the New York Times and America’s Test Kitchen. In our kitchen here at Zingerman’s, Bill’s turkeys from his new company, BN Ranch, were a big winner in our own turkey taste test. This year we have three-hundred whole, frozen turkeys that will ship just in time for Thanksgiving. They make for a stunning, delicious, honorable centerpiece to your meal.

A Tangy tonic for what ails ya!

For centuries grandmothers have been prescribing vinegar as a panacea for ailments ranging from hiccups to dandruff to tummy aches to arthritis. The link between vinegar and medicine is so established that the Italian word balsamico actually comes from the same origin as the word balsam in English: a resinous liquid with medicinal benefits. Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that when Dana St. Pierre suffered from bad allergies as a teenager, his German grandma suggested he try mixing apple cider vinegar with a bit of fresh horseradish and honey. The tonic tasted terrible—but it was effective. So effective, in fact, that he kept drinking it for years.

Over time, he tried adding in other ingredients to make it more palatable. When he lived in Phoenix he started added lemons and oranges from his backyard to the mix. But this story really begins in 2010, after Dana had moved back to his hometown of Pittsfield in western Massachusetts. That fall he made three 5-gallon jugs of hard cider. One of them went a little too hard and turned into vinegar. Dana took that vinegar and played around with a dozen recipes. After subjecting his friends to plenty of pungent taste tests, he settled on a mix of honey, horseradish, orange, lemon, onion, ginger, habanero, garlic, and turmeric. Fire Cider Vinegar was born, and it wasn’t just good for use as medicine. It earned itself a spot in the pantry.

These days, the recipe starts with unfiltered, raw, certified organic apple cider vinegar. Dana and his team of five take that vinegar and add in the citrus, roots, and spices. Everything mixes and mingles together at ambient temperature for six weeks. Then the seasonings are filtered out and a bit of honey is mixed in. The result is a cloudy, amber vinegar that packs a serious, complex punch.

All of the ingredients in the mix are organic except for the honey. To get a honey to be certified organic, you have to be able to prove that all of the fields within the area a bee might visit for nectar are certified organic. A bee will fly up to about four miles from its hive, so that means the hive would need to be in a circle of certified organic fields that’s at least eight miles in diameter. That’s pretty uncommon in the US (or anywhere, for that matter), so to make Fire Cider Vinegar they use a local Massachusetts raw wildflower honey.

The flavor of the vinegar starts a bit sweet from the honey, then moves to a vinegary, citrusy tartness, then gets warm from the ginger, and then hot from the habanero. It tingles across the tongue and the roof of the mouth, and then tickles down the throat. The flavor lingers for a long, long time—and just when it starts to fade you realize you want to taste it again.

Five ways to rev up your cooking with Fire Cider Vinegar:

1. Whisk up a punchy vinaigrette with a peppery olive oil to dress spicy greens like arugula
2. Stir a bit into lemonade or iced tea for an afternoon pick-me-up with a kick
3. After sautéing Brussels sprouts or broccoli in a bit of bacon fat, use a splash of Fire Cider Vinegar to deglaze the pan
4. Mix some into a cool, refreshing gazpacho for just a hint of heat
5. Muddle half a jigger of Fire Cider Vinegar into a cocktail like a spicy Manhattan or a perked up Hot Toddy

Fire Cider Vinegar is available from Zingerman’s Mail Order!

Enjoy! 

A brief history of really good coucous

In the mountains and valleys that stretch across North Africa, there’s no guarantee of a good harvest from year to year. That’s nothing new for the Berbers. They’ve been farming olives, wheat, vegetables, and fruits there since before Carthage was founded in 814 BCE. (The name “Berber” actually comes from the Roman name for the people: barbarians. In their own language, Berbers call themselves Amazigh, or Free People.) In a good year a Berber tribe would grow plenty of food to sustain themselves. But even in a good year, the farmers learned to look ahead to the future. What if the next year there’s a drought and the harvest is limited? And what if that happens two years in a row? Or what if, after a year or two of bad harvests, a hungry neighboring tribe invades and pillages their food supplies? Those were all common scenarios for the semi-nomadic Berbers.

The solution was to make the harvest transportable.

Like most people looking to preserve food before the days of refrigeration, the Berbers used what they had on hand: salt, oil, sun. In Tunisia, smack dab in the middle of Berber land, sun drying has always been the most important method of preservation. Drying not only preserves, but it also makes the food weigh less. Should the tribe decide to pack up and move, they could take it with them. The Berbers sun dried everything: tomatoes, stone fruits, peppers. And to preserve wheat, they would sun dry couscous.

The basics of making traditional couscous are pretty simple. You take semolina flour and mix it with a bit of salt and water, rub it together to form tiny balls of dough, and then dry ’em out. Today, though, most couscous is made with big, industrialized machines. The whole process can be completed in a couple of hours from start to finish, including just seven minutes for mixers to form the balls and then a whopping eighteen minutes to dry them in huge rotating ovens.

There are still a few producers out there making couscous the traditional, slow way that the Berbers would have made it. The best couscous I know of is made by Majid Mahjoub, himself a descendant of the Berbers, and his company Les Moulins Mahjoub. Mahjoub couscous is m’hamsa (hand-made, in Arabic). Using the Razzag variety of wheat that they grow organically on their own farm, they roll every little ball of couscous by hand, the way it’s been done for millennia. For that reason, this couscous is a little bigger than most, and you may notice that it looks a tad less uniform. That’s a good thing. After the couscous has been shaped, it dries in the sun. That drying doesn’t take minutes or hours—it takes days. All told, a batch of Mahjoub couscous takes about ten days from start to finish.

All that time drying in the sun has a huge impact on flavor.

It’s like the difference between bread that’s allowed to slowly rise and proof for most of a day versus the stuff that’s baked as quickly as possible. The longer drying time allows the couscous to develop deeper, richer flavor. In essence, couscous that’s produced as quickly as possible tastes like flour, while couscous that is made more slowly tastes like bread. The exact same thing happens with the flavor of traditional pastas that are allowed to dry slowly rather than being baked as quickly as possible. Mahjoub couscous is wheaty, toasty, nutty, earthy, with a chewy, firm, toothsome texture. This is no boring grain to be relegated to the corner of the plate and smothered in spices and sauces.

I still remember the first time I tasted Mahjoub couscous. It was a little more than six years ago. The first bite stopped me in my tracks. I had no idea that couscous could be so delicious. But once I got over the surprise, I went back for more, and more, and more. I still always keep a jar or two in my pantry and cook it at least a couple times a month.

Cooking couscous is as easy as boiling water.

Seriously. You bring a pot of water to boil, add the couscous, bring it back to a boil, take the pan off the heat, put a lid on it, and let it sit. After ten minutes, you fluff the couscous with a fork and it’s ready to eat. Majid visits us in Ann Arbor from time to time and he’s cooked up some some outstanding couscous dishes for us. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Couscous with tomato sauce and a perfect egg
  This is one of the simplest ways I know of to serve couscous, and conveniently, it’s also one of the most delicious. After cooking the couscous—roughly ⅓ cup per person as a side dish, or a bit more as a main dish—stir in a bit of good extra virgin olive oil to keep it from sticking. Dish it onto plates and then on top of the couscous spoon a healthy dollop of your favorite tomato sauce, warmed on the stove. Then top that with an egg. I’m partial to a poached egg with the yolk still soft and oozy, but you could use a fried egg, a diced hard-boiled egg, whatever kind of egg fits your fancy. Sprinkle with salt and a grind of fresh pepper, and serve immediately.
• Couscous salad
  To serve four to six people, use 1 1/2 cups of couscous. Once it’s cooked through, stir in a couple tablespoons of good extra virgin olive oil, then let it cool. While it cools, dice a bunch of vegetables: an onion, two tomatoes, a sweet pepper, a cucumber, a little fresh mint, and a preserved lemon. When the couscous has reached room temperature stir in all the vegetables along with a few capers and a splash of white wine vinegar. Once it’s all mixed up, refrigerate it for half an hour or so to chill it and let the flavors meld. Just before serving taste and add salt if needed.
• Sweet couscous
  Majid uses three parts milk to one part couscous. Bring the milk to a boil, and add the couscous. Let it simmer for five minutes, then remove it from the heat and let it cool a bit. That’s it—it’s ready to serve. Majid likes to add a bit of jam to it, but he also recommends you could add a little sugar to sweeten it up a bit more. Since hearing about the recipe, I’ve made it with a little maple syrup and cinnamon and that turned out pretty delicious. Majid likes to eat sweet couscous for breakfast. In the summer he likes to make it the night before and keep it in the fridge overnight, then serve it cold, like a couscous version of rice pudding.

Did we mention that Sun Dried Couscous from Les Moulins Mahjoub is part of our annual Summer Sale? Hurry, sale ends 7/31!

See you soon! 

Summer sale goodie!

A friend and I went to the grocery one evening in search of ice cream and hot fudge. The ice cream part was easy; we picked a good one right away. The chocolate sauce was another story. We spent a lot of time reading all of the ingredient lists looking for the one with the fewest (and most pronounceable) ingredients. The one we finally settled on was okay, but nothing to write home about.

When I asked Marc Cooper—who goes by Coop—what he was looking for when he created his hot fudge , he told me he wanted something all natural. There’s no legal definition of “all natural” but Coop’s personal definition is that there are no chemicals used in any part of production, and all of the ingredients are processed as gently as possible.

Let’s start with the chocolate.
Cocoa powder is simply ground up, roasted cacao beans with most of the fat (in the form of cocoa butter) removed. To get “natural” cocoa powder, that’s all there is to it. The flavor ends up being very bitter and pretty acidic, much like cocoa beans themselves. However, around 90% of all cocoa used today is alkalized (also sometimes called Dutch processed, because it was invented by a Dutch guy). Alkalized cocoa has been treated with chemicals to make the cocoa less acidic. It has a milder flavor and darker color. Alkalization also makes cocoa more soluble, so it’s easier to mix it into liquids, making it especially popular for use in ice cream and with dairy products.

Coop uses a natural, unalkalized cocoa powder to avoid that chemical processing. Each new harvest of cacao beans is a little different from the one before due to weather and processing conditions, so periodically he’ll test out new cocoas to make sure he’s got one that gives the rich, complex, chocolatey flavor he wants. He’s opted for a cacao from Ivory Coast which is processed into cocoa powder in Holland. When he tried making his hot fudge with cocoas from Central and South America a few months back, he found it created a more fruity flavor that didn’t have the richness he wanted.

Besides the chocolate, there are only four other ingredients.

The first two are cream and butter. It took Coop a while to find the dairy products he wanted. Most commercial dairies these days pack the cows in tightly and then either feed them antibiotics to prevent disease or ultra pasteurize the milk to kill off any pathogens. (Take a look the next time you’re picking up milk at the grocery; nearly all organic milk, which comes from cows that haven’t received preventative antibiotics, is ultra pasteurized.) Ultra pasteurization is different from regular pasteurization in that it heats up the milk much hotter for a shorter period of time. The process can make the milk shelf stable for months, but it changes the flavor and texture of milk. In particular, it can alter the whey proteins that give milk its creaminess, requiring the addition of congealing agents like guar gum or carrageenan to achieve the original texture. Coop uses cream and butter from a local Massachusetts dairy that pasteurizes more gently. There are no congealing agents, nothing added, nothing removed.

The last two ingredients are white cane sugar and brown cane sugar (which is actually just white sugar with some molasses mixed back in). Coop prefers to use cane sugar rather than beet sugar since all beet sugar in the US is GMO. He’s also careful to only use sugar that is processed in the US because a lot of the cane sugar processed in other countries is treated with charred cow bones (which help to take out the natural tan color of sugar to make it snowy white; American-processed cane sugar uses charcoal instead). Most chocolate sauces contain corn syrup (either instead of or in addition to sugar) which helps to keep them from recrystallizing and becoming grainy; Coop uses the molasses in the brown sugar to achieve this effect.

Coop is a poster child for small batch production.

A while back, one of those TV shows about how things are made gave Coop a call. They were interested in featuring his hot fudge production in an episode. “They like to see a lot of production lines and machinery,” Coop told me. “When I told them all I have is two vats that each produce about four gallons of hot fudge at a time, they decided not to come and film us.” Coop and his three employees produce three or four double batches of fudge per day, four days a week—that adds up to about 1,200 jars weekly. On the side of each jar you’ll find the hand-written initials of the person who made that particular batch.
Coop’s hot fudge business was actually an off-shoot of the ice cream shop he opened a few decades ago. “I wanted to be able to keep my staff busy in the off-season,” Coop told me, so he started playing around with a hot fudge recipe. His plan worked, and the hot fudge became so popular that about five years ago the fudge production split off from the ice cream shop to become its own business.

And how does it taste?

Coop’s hot fudge is thick, luscious, intensely chocolatey. It’s insanely good heated up—microwave the whole jar or a smaller bowlful for a minute or less and you’re good to go. And then what to drizzle it on? “Our hot fudge will make any ice cream better,” Coop told me proudly. Then he added, perhaps a bit apologetically, “even Zingerman’s gelato.”

There are a lot of products we sell that I’d say you could eat on a spoon out of the jar. This one tops that list; I never put the spoon in the sink without licking it first. I’ve drizzled it over coffeecake and strawberries. It’s killer slathered on toast. Or chocolate covered pancakes?!

Coop’s Hot Fudge is part of our big Summer Sale at Zingerman’s Deli and Zingerman’s Mail Order through July 31. Try this chocolate wonder today!