Handmade artisan feta from the island of Lesbos

As you probably know by now, I’m a big fan of feta cheese. This new arrival is amazing! To be clear, I still, also, love the Mt. Vikos-brand, barrel-aged feta we get from Vassily Roussas in northern Greece that we stock regularly at the Deli. It’s made with a blend of goat and sheep’s milk. It’s a bit firmer than this one from Lesbos, not quite as creamy, maybe a slight bit less salt. But I learned a long time ago that any good cheese shop in Greece will offer up to half a dozen different feta cheeses. Greek cheese eaters are as aware of regional feta flavors as Frenchmen are of the flavors of local wines. Different milk, different plants in the pastures, different starter cultures. “Each serious cheesemaker has his own,” Vasili Roussas told me years ago.

This new arrival from Lesbos proves his point. Both cheeses are excellent, each has its own distinctive feta-flavor and character. Like every other traditional cheese, feta should change according to the style and soil of the region in which it was made. The feta from Lesbos has hints in the milk of armirikia, a rare herb that grows on the island. The cheese is exceptionally creamy in texture, complex in flavor with an almost-vanilla-like finish.

Lesbos is one of the easternmost Greek islands—it lies just west off the coast of Turkey, near Izmir and about halfway as the crow would fly from Athens to Istanbul. It’s been ruled by any number of royal families and governments—Byzantium, Genoa, the Turkish sultans to name a few. Lesbos became a part of the Republic of Greece back in 1912. It’s known as the home of the goddess Sappho, hence its use in the word Lesbian. Agra, the small village where the cheese is made, is located on the western end of the island. The shepherds work collectively and bring the milk to the Tastanis family to turn into cheese. It’s made only when the sheep are out in the pastures—roughly December through July (breeding takes place after that—the sheep, like most everyone in Greece, take August “off”). The Lesbos feta is a 100 percent sheep milk (hence also higher in cost since sheep yield by far the lowest of any milking animal). The Tastanis use sea salt from the traditional sources at Kalloni on the southern shore of the island, which adds to the quality of the cheese.

It’s great for Greek salad and wonderful in that watermelon salad I just wrote about a few weeks ago. It’s also excellent in the Egyptian Cucumber and Feta salad I wrote up back in July. The feta is a great pairing with some of the Greek wildflower honey. You can add it to pasta; bake it with beans; crumble some over just-cooked potatoes dressed with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Put it on burgers or crumble onto bean soups. Rachel Juhl, who helps get the cheese imported, shared her favorite feta tip: “My very non-Greek favorite way to eat it is to fry thick-cut Benton’s bacon in a pan, once you flip it add two farm fresh fried eggs and chopped Toscano kale to the grease in the pan (push bacon to the side) and put the feta on the kale. Once the bacon is done, serve all together, and BAM.”

A percentage of the proceeds from the Lesbos feta go to the Daphne Zepos Teaching Award—before she died in 2012, Daphne was a partner in the importing company Essex Cheese (along with Zingerman’s Mail Order’s own Mo Frechette and Neal’s Yard Dairy’s Jason Hinds). One of Daphne’s great passions was to spread the word about the barely-known cheeses of Greece. Feta was well known, but in the U.S. it has typically been about as inauthentic as the wild rice I wrote about last week. Most had nothing to do with the authentic article. This lovely pure sheep feta from Lesbos (along with the Mt. Vikos feta at the Deli) fills that bill of authenticity. I feel confident it would have made Daphne happy to know that we have it.

Buy it at the Cream Top Shop.

I’m pretty convinced that Zzang! bars have essentially remade the way everyone around Zingerman’s (and a lot of our regular customers) think about candy bars. In the same way that Bakehouse rye and Farm breads and Creamery cream cheese (just to name some that come to my mind) have altered the way we think about those foods, I think the same thing is happening with Zzang! bars. We pay more for to eat these more traditional, more full flavored foods, but we’ve just come to accept them as the “norm” (I know, we’re spoiled).

Anyways, with that in mind . . . I’m on the campaign to get ever more folks of all ages, around and beyond Ann Arbor, to make the mental move to better candy in the same way everyone around here has done in the last couple years with so many other foods. I want to help people understand the difference in flavor between fresh candy and candy that can sit on the shelf for weeks. I also want to really get across what a big taste difference it makes when you’re willing to invest in the kinds of ingredients Charlie uses in the Zzang! bars. Really, a big commercial candy maker would never consider using ingredients like these. The flavor is, like, fifty nine times better than the stuff everyone is used to buying elsewhere.

Starting with the former—freshness—it’s not really new news in the food world in general; most everyone who eats well has long ago figured out the import of freshness with produce, roasted coffee, olive oil and a host of other things we eat and drink. Freshness counts for candy, too!

Obviously, not everything is better in its fresh state. Some foods are made to last—we’ve got a pretty fantastic wheel of two year old Comte cheese in the Deli right now that’s delicious. We’ve got balsamics that probably date back to before Emma Goldman ever left Lithuania (1885) or before the Nueskes went to Wittenberg, Wisconsin from their native Germany along with their family recipes for bacon and ham (1882). And of course there are loads of wines before they get sold, and dry cured hams at the deli that are aged for two or three years. But those are foods that are supposed to be aged before they’re at their best.

Candy bars are a different story—they don’t get better as they get older. Charlie started saying it like six years ago. The flavors are simply livelier and more lustrous and just better when the candy is fresh from the manufactory. It’s not like the bars are going to be spoiled in six months, but they aren’t as goo. Over time the sugars break down; the flavors blur. Commercial bars avoid this problem by loading up on ingredients that keep them as is for, literally, years.

Then there are the better ingredients. You can’t make great candy out of mediocre raw materials. Better chocolate, better nuts, honey, sea salt, etc. Handmade cashew brittle, handmade nougats. Literally everything in each bar is better. And again, you really can taste the difference.

With all that in mind, the truth is that I think we’re all sort of spoiled around here—living near the Candy Manufactory is like having a really good local bakery, while most of the rest of the world is still making do with Wonder Bread. That’s starting to change as the Zzang bars make their way into so many other stores around the country.

While I’m on the subject, let me just say out loud that there’s no question that these bars—like our bread or Neal’s Yard Dairy cheeses or whatever else—cost more. If you use good stuff and make ‘em by hand it’s safe to say that they’re gonna have a higher price than all that commercial candy that everyone’s been accustomed to for so long now. But hey, there was candy before there were big factories. And now, thanks to Charlie (and Sara and Freddy and Amy and Frank everyone else involved) there’s candy after big factories. Those of us in Ann Arbor and folks near a Zzang! retailer (or, really, anyone with an internet connection since they’re available Zingerman’s Mail Order) no longer have to settle.

Meet the Bacons! 

Join us for a Bacon Celebration like no other at Zingerman’s Camp Bacon on Saturday, June 19. We’re bringing together bacon lovers under one big tent at our Southside location for a day full of flavors, history and fun as we explore the best bacons we can find and learn the stories behind them.

• We’ll have Herb Eckhouse from La Quercia in IA, Allan Benton from Benton’s in TN and Nick Spencer from Spencer’s Jolly Posh British & Irish Foods in Chicago to discuss their work curing pork and Megan Dorsch from Nueske’s in WI will also join in the fun.
• James Beard award winning cookbook author Molly Stevens will provide a cooking demo
• Ari will lead a comparative tasting of great bacons (and maybe some not-so-great ones so you really CAN taste the difference)
• Jan Longone from the UM’s Longone Culinary Archive will speak on Bacon history

Plus, games, prizes, bacon poetry reading and more!

Registration for the day is $150 and includes breakfast, lunch, a Camp Bacon t-shirt and a signed hardcover copy of Ari’s Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon.

Online registration at www.zingermanscampbacon.com or call 888.636.8162 to sign up!

Greetings and welcome to spring!

Before I even get into the actual five foods, I wanted to wish a happy anniversary to everyone here. Hard to believe but sure enough, 28 years in the books! The anniversary wishes really do go out to everyone here because, while I guess it’s sort of not really deniable that Paul and I are the people who started the whole thing 28 years ago last week, the exceptionally obvious reality is that none of it would exist without all the other thousands of people—that would clearly include you—that have worked over all the two point eight decades. As we all know, ideas are great but it’s making them into a reality that’s the key. And as we also all know incredibly well in the food business the way that we do it here, it REALLY doesn’t matter much how great someone’s idea of the food was. Unlike books, cds, software, shoes and appliances handmade food really has no guarantee that what was good on one day will be anywhere near that good the next. Sometimes that’s because of nature, sometimes human error, sometimes some of both. . . but the point is just that if we’ve served a lot of good food over the years it’s to the credit of the many thousands of people who made it happen.

So, Happy Anniversary, and here’s to many more years to come. And as per the 2020 vision, I look forward to taking our already good food and service to radically higher levels over the next decade.

Getting back to food of the moment . . . (not that they’re particularly monumental or meaningful from an anniversarial standpoint but . . . ) here’s five foods to fit into your eating this week!

Happy everything!

ari

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As is becoming the norm, I’m way overdue to get these out. Thanks for your patience and support (both personally and professionally), thanks for reading, thanks for doing all the amazing things that you do everyday to make all this that is the ZCoB go as great as it goes. It’s just my own sense of things but I feel like the energy around our parts is really, actually probably higher that it’s ever been. And that while—as is pretty much always the case—some parts of “us” are having better times and others are working through more challenging ones—the energy, the positive attitude, the spirit of generosity, the level of cooperation and the quality of the food and drink are better than ever. Which is pretty cool thing to be able to say 28 years down the road.

There’s a lot of great stuff going—Roadhouse beef, baguettes, new Wowza candy bars, new packaging at Mail Order (Mo’s working on some really great, cloth from old bread baking, not inexpensive, but I think lovely carry-bags to sell—ask him about them if you’re interested in getting in on the project!) … plus pot pies at the Deli, new coffee brewing methods, ZingTrain’s debut of the new, half day, Service Express training sessions, etc., etc.

In terms of compliments and how much good food, good service, good energy appeal to all ends of the world’s spectrum, I’ll tell you that on the same day I heard rave reviews about the entire ZCoB first from half a dozen highly experienced, business focused upper level executives from the Giant Eagle supermarket chain (based in Pennsylvania) and from the guys from Band of Heathens, here from Austin for the Folk Festival. Let me just say that these two groups are not likely to be seen hanging out together too often and probably have fairly different tastes in many things in life. But there they were – the execs stylish black overcoats in the am, the heathens in black jeans and leather jackets later that same evening—telling me how much they loved the whole experience. Pretty cool I’d say.

Seriously, thanks for doing all you do. It’s pretty darned amazing to be a part of it!

Ari

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In terms of food, as usual there are about 900 great things that I feel like I should write about… .Comte, Manchester from the Creamery, Christmas Cookie Club cookies (and books, signed by Ann Pearlman), Boston Brown Bread, 2 Kilo Caraway ryes, Maras red pepper from Turkey, Crunk Fish (when it’s on special at the Roadhouse), Rwanda coffee, Masia Altet olive oil, Txakoli vinegar (more on this one next week), stollen, wild berry preserves from Serbia, El Rustico chocolate bars and peppermint bark from Askinosie… like I said, I have a lot of stuff on my mind. But since they aren’t going to all fit in below, here are five things to get you going.

More info to come soon.

See you soon!

Ari

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