Zingerman's Bakehouse Hardcover – Illustrated, October 3, 2017

I lived in Ann Arbor for 6 years (up until 2011), so I spent quite a bit of time at the various Zingerman spots. There are a lot of desserts I've loved from Zingerman's, but the Hot Cocoa Cake is definitely my favorite. I've been dying to find out whether the recipe for Zingerman's Bakehouse's amazing Hot Cocoa Cake would be included in this cookbook and it is! More importantly, the recipe is easy to follow and produces a cake that tastes just like I remember. Warm and chocolatey, with fantastic chocolate chunks (use chunks, don't use chips) interspersed throughout the tender cake, it makes for a great treat with coffee, an easy crowd-pleasing chocolate cake (and it travels well), and also makes for the best breakfast slice ever.Likewise, the included recipe for challah and the very precise instructions for shaping it is worth the cost of this cookbook. The Bakehouse makes some of the best challah I've ever had, and I was able to reproduce it at home. Their recipe calls for a lot more egg (yolks) than most other challah recipes do, which along with the touch of oil helps make it so tender and golden in color.Since Amazon hasn't included the Table of Contents or Index in their preview, I'm attaching them to this review. It's true that the cookbook doesn't have that many recipes overall, but the expertise of the bakers and uniqueness of some of the recipes (like the Hungarian savory fried dough and the Transylvanian cinnamon swirl bread) more than makes up for it. Happily, this cookbook includes plenty of color photos (which the previous Zingerman's cookbook did not), while still managing to pack in a ton of information about the Bakehouse itself, how each recipe came into being, and ways you can tweak the recipe it make it your own.If you really enjoying baking desserts or breads, if you like learning more about the history of a place or a company, if you like hunting down recipes for unusual items, or if you are interested in what striving for perfection while running a thriving bakery looks like - Zingerman's Bakehouse is definitely a cookbook you should add to your library. If you aren't so interested in any of those things, but you're willing to buy a cookbook that will have the best recipe, one that's easy to follow and certain to succeed, for a few items you do want to make - Zingerman's Bakehouse is also worth adding to your cookbook library.

I bought this book a few months ago and it sat by my couch. I would thumb through it, reading the stories, glancing at the recipes. Well, lo and behold, last week I found myself with a NEED to make a cake for a birthday and no car. I picked up the book and found a recipe that appeared easy enough and away I baked!Well, I should say that I THOUGHT it was easy, but there were parts of making a buttercream from scratch that had me floundering in my kitchen. I had to get my egg yolk/sugar mixture up to 180 degrees in a double boiler and, for some reason, that took a VERY long time! I persisted...and followed the directions to a T. I baked a masterpiece. Yummy and not overly sweet. This was the encouragement I needed.Two days later I ran out of bread and was in the middle of making my son breakfast. I decided to try the drop biscuits. To be honest, I had attempted to make other biscuits in the past, but they were pretty...solid and not too edible. Well, I made the biscuits and they were AMAZING!With those initial recipes down, I decided to try the cheddar ale soup. Zingerman's Cheddar Ale Soup is one of my favorites at the bakehouse. I am vegetarian and many soups from restaurants contain a beef or chicken base. As this is one of the few ones that does not, I was able to try it and fell in love. Cripes! It's BEER and CHEESE! What is NOT to love. I made the soup, the biscuits, and the ginger-up cookies for dinner last night. The soup was just as amazing as it was at the bakehouse! The biscuits were perfect, again. The cookies were also amazing - with little pockets of crystallized ginger that take them over the top.With so many recipes online, it is rare for me to find a book that I am so fond of. This is a keeper for me and I am committed to baking my way through it.

The recipes in here are excellent. As others have noted, the bread recipes are rather involved and take time and patience. If you have both, you'll be very happy with the results. I've been baking bread for 50 years and their Paesano bread was, possibly, the best loaf I've ever baked. (That's the round loaf in the pictures.) The "dinklebrot" (spelt) bread was delicious (rectangular loaf with seeds) and a wonderful basis for a meal of cheese, soup and bread. I think my challah recipe is better than theirs (mine has more butter!) but theirs isn't bad at all. The Black Magic brownies are wonderful. The pie crust recipe wasn't as good as Julia Child's, but, really, most things aren't.As a long-time customer of Z's, I enjoy reading the essays between recipes where they discuss their history, their corporate culture, and their philosophy. They politely refuse to enter the fight about gluten-free baking (nothing here is g-f, that I recall) or arguments about health.I do agree with other reviewers that the organization is a bit... arbitrary. Or maybe "quirky" is a better word. It would have been a lot more accessible a book if they'd put all the bread recipes together, all the cakes together, etc. It may be that they found that they wouldn't have chapters of equal length if they did, but it still would have been preferable.Other than that -- I'm delighted to have my hands on these recipes, and I'm doing the "Julia and Julie" thing of working my way through every recipe. I haven't been disappointed yet.