Day Three Hundred and Nine : Zingerman's

For any foodie visiting Ann Arbor, Zingerman's is a must visit! Zingerman's is a spectacular community of food related businesses -- a delicatessen, a creamery, a bakeshop, a coffee company and shop, a candy manfactory, catering, and their roadhouse (restaurant). Each of their businesses is customer service driven and strives to have the best and the most hand crafted produce and the most knowledgeable staff and really be a culinary mecca in Ann Arbor. Boy do they succeed! I visited the delicatessen and the coffee shop and each had such warm friendly feel to them -- completely different from their equivalents here in NYC. As much as I wish that there was such an establishment here, I think it would loose the same sort of small-town, homemade, local feel which really makes it as special as it is.

I love the fact that they have their own creamery right in Ann Arbor and boy do they make some delish cheeses. They source their milk from two local dairies and make seventeen different cheeses and gelato. Their repetoire spans the gamut from harder aged cheeses down to bloomy rind goat's milk cheeses and cream cheeses and mozzarellas. Each cheese I tasted surely had its own particular Ann Arbor spin on it and really tasted lovingly handmade. Of course I had to bring some home, I could have easily brought home half of the products in the delicatessen but I decided that I would be back and each time, I could bring home one little treat!

I purchased their Bridgewater which is a mold ripened cow's milk cheese delicately infused with telicherry black pepper. Somewhat firm and paste-y with that lovely piquant oomph of the pepper and a nice clean citrus-y finish. An unusual sort of flavor profile for a cow's milk cheese, this was light and fanciful in a way that I tend to expect goat's cheeses to be!

If you can't visit Zingerman's, you can most certainly order from them online at http://www.zingermanscreamery.com/, but if you are ever in Ann Arbor, please go check it out, it is a quirky wonderful jewel!