They’re Back!  Our Mozzarella classes are being offered almost every Saturday, from September through May.  They are being held in the dairy, from 12 – 2pm. Class registration is $45, and class size is limited to 14 people; pre-registration is required.  Cheese heads John and Aubrey are teaching the course, which includes an in-depth cheese chemistry lesson and how to make fresh mozzarella made from Calder dairy milk, and mozzarella made from finished Belgioso curd.  You will craft and hand-stretch your very own mozzarella balls as well as Buratta and Mozzarella & Myrtle.  The temperature in the dairy, is usually between 65 and 75 degrees depending on the time of year, so please dress appropriately for warmth and wetness.

Please contact us at (734) 929-0500 if you are interested in signing up.  We’ve had a ton of requests for classes over the summer so we are expecting them to fill up quickly.

The Detroit Street Brick

If you’ve never visited the Deli before, located at 422 Detroit St., you might be wondering how this cheese got it’s name.  Shaped like the bricks lining the streets of Kerrytown, the Detroit St. Brick is a dense aged goat’s milk cheese studded with cracked green peppercorns.  It has a thin white rind, with an intense soft creaminess when young, and slightly more crumbly texture when a bit older.  The Brick is most excellent crumbled on a salad or melted on a burger.  The slightly spicy, fresh flavor of the green peppercorns is well suited when paired with a glass of your favorite Sauvignon Blanc.

This month, the Detroit Street Brick is on special at the Creamery and our Farmer’s Markets.  It is priced at $22.99 a pound.  Come on by the dairy or market for a taste!

Farmer’s Markets

It has been a great season at the markets so far this year.  We are coming up on our final Westside Market of the year and to celebrate, the Sharon Hollow will be on special, 2 for $10.  Catch Mike in the parking lot of the Roadhouse tomorrow afternoon, from 3-7pm for some fresh cheese and local produce and crafts.

The Kerrytown Market is going strong on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  We are looking to be down there through October and some of Novemeber.  We haven’t quite figured out our end date yet, but will keep you posted.

Eastern Market in downtown Detroit is our newest market.  We’re there on Saturdays, from 7am until we run out of cheese, usually around 3pm, in Shed 3.  If you’ve never been to Eastern Market before, it’s definitely worth the trip.  3 giant sheds filled with vendors make up the heart of the market district.  Vendors spill out into parking lots as people flood the streets in search of local produce, meats, coffee, salsa, breads, and countless other goodies.  It feels like one big event, one giant party thrown every Saturday morning.  We hope to see you there!

Jackie and Keith at the Eastern Market

In honor of the Creamery’s recent eighth birthday, this post celebrates the happy little story of how the cheese shop we love came to be.  It’s a Zingerman’s classic.  And it begins with cream cheese, as all good stories should.

It was right around the year 2000, and the sandwiches of Zingerman’s Deli were in top form.  They had benefited immensely from the (then 8-year-old) Bakehouse’s old-fashioned, long-baking, good-and-simple-ingredient laden bread recipes.  The Deli staff no longer had to drive daily to Detroit in search of a halfway-suitable loaf!  Out of this quest for great food, the Bakehouse had been born, and the Creamery started much the same way.  Because now that they had a great bagel, the next logical step for any self-respecting Jewish deli was to top it with smoked salmon and good cream cheese.  But most all of the cream cheese offerings of the time were preservative-laden, gummy bricks – and none of it was local.

And so: through the search for a truly traditional, hand-made fresh cheese, the Creamery was created.  John Loomis, former local cheesemaker and then-cheesemonger at the Deli’s cheese counter, became the head of the new adventure, and the Creamery was started on a farm in Manchester.  We later moved right next door to the Bakehouse, and since the very start we’ve always used super-fresh Michigan milk, and gentle pasteurization to preserve its flavors.  Besides starter and rennet, we add cream and salt to the milk… and that’s about it.  No vegetable gums, nothing that will make it indefinitely, unnaturally shelf-stable.  The result is a cream cheese of the sort that has rarely been tasted since the early 1900s.  An award winner at the 2006 American Cheese Society competition, this is a cheese so rich, smooth, and slightly sweet it takes the bagel and lox combo to a different level.

Since initiating the return of really awesome cream cheese to the culinary world, the Creamery has branched out to making the wide variety of fresh and aged goat and cow’s milk cheeses you know today.  We’ve even added a hard aged cheese, the Great Lakes Cheshire, to our repertoire.  But our reverence to the simple fresh cheese that started it all has not diminished.  Our Real Cream Cheese has remained one of our most popular cheeses throughout the years, as scrumptious today as ever before.

This is the story of Zingerman’s Creamery.  And all the people lived happily ever after, eating cheeses.  The end.

Coming in October, we will be mixing harissa from Tunisia in with our real Cream Cheese for a spicy and creamy treat.  And for a limited time we will be giving away a special Cream Cheese & Harissa T-shirt with the purchase of a 1/2 pound or more.