Day Three Hundred and Ninety Six :

For those of you dedicated Fromagical readers out there, you may or may not remember my last trip to Ann Arbor and to ZIngerman’s, the nation and world renowned market and group of food related businesses – a bakeshop, a creamery, a deli, a coffeeshop, and plenty more. The last time I visited, I only had the opportunity to go to the deli and coffeeshop –both of which blew me away in terms of the depth and breadth of opportunities for food products and produce, who knew you could find such a fabulous local business in Ann Arbor Michigan, well now I knew!

So this trip, I decided I needed to take an excursion to visit their creamery and their bakeshop, a little further away than the deli and the coffeeshop, but these two locales were where the magic happened – where the breads, pastries, cakes and pies were baked and in turn where their fantastic repertoire of cheeses, ice creams, and sorbets were produced. Walking into the bakeshop on a Saturday morning, you could tell they had been cooking up a storm all morning – I decided to procure their parmesan pepper bagel and their homemade irish soda bread for seasonal purposes to bring back with me. The bagel was the perfect mixture of cheesy, creamy, biting and spicy moments infused into the bagel milieu.

And gosh passing up good Irish Soda bread is just not right and this was spectacular!

Moving onto the creamery next door where they had a sparse selection of homemade cheeses sprinkled with a few other imported cheeses.  I knew what I was buying for, my grandmother's big birthday celebration happening tomorrow and knew I wanted to get a selection of three cheeses all made by Zingerman's to bring back for it.

The first cheese I got was Little Napoleon, a fabulously funky looking goat's milk disc that reveled in its true colors exposing all of the blue-ish grey-ish mold that accompanies the goat cheese aging process. Grassy yet funky, light yet full-bodied, -- a cheese full of fabulous contradictions. I like the fact that the cheesemaker let the mold sing and didn't pat it away to hide it from the consumer.

Next up was the Detroit Street Brick -- bloomy rind goat's milk cheese infused with green peppercorns -- cheesy paste that melts on your tongue with that spicy tang of the green peppercorns!

And lastly I got their Great Lakes Cheshire -- an aged cow's milk cheese which was Zingerman's first exploration into hard cheese and boy is it successful, aged for traditionally at least 8 months it is butterscotchy and tangy yet with an all around melt in your mouth quality for the perfect hard yet satisfying cheese!