· Great Lakes Cheshire from Zingerman's Creamery

· Old Style Pasta With Germ

· Bakehouse Babka

· Five Reasons Cubebs are Really Cool

Great Lakes Cheshire from Zingerman's Creamery: Making GLC with TLC
John Loomis, cheesemaker and managing partner at the Creamery, has been waiting patiently for years to start making this cheese again. In the last few months the first wheels of Great Lakes Cheshire (GLC for short) have started to come out of Creamery world headquarters (that's the 3000 square-foot space we've got out by the Bakehouse — come by for a tour any Sunday at 2:00pm) and are already generating positive energy.

While it generally takes years and years to "perfect" any artisan product, this cheese, even in its first four months, has a really good flavor balance and complexity that are getting better and better. And I know too that it's very, very likely (there are no 100 percent certainties when it comes to artisan foods) to get better still as John and the Creamery crew have time to work on all the little details that go into making a great cheese.

The original recipe for Cheshire dates back thousands of years to the time of the Romans, and it's been made straight through ever since. Up until the middle of the 20th century, Cheshire — not cheddar — was the most popular British cheese which is hard to believe looking at today's cheddar-centric cheese counters. While the two names are similar, the cheeses really are pretty different. Cheddar is much more closely textured, aged much longer, and creamier on the tongue; Cheshires are younger, tarter, more crumbly.

John is particularly jazzed about the Cheshire because it's a raw milk cheese. We've long been focused on the fuller flavors that tend to go with raw milk cheeses. Unlike all our other cheeses which are "fresh" (that is, aged only from one or two days to, at most, a month-and-a-half), the GLC is aged for over 60 days which is the magic mark set by the government for making cheese from milk the way it comes from the cow without having to heat treat it first.

On the table, the GLC is really a pretty classic eating cheese. It's got a texture and flavor that are clearly related to classic English farmhouse Cheshire, but with a bit of an Ann Arbor twist to it. Cheshire farmers have long taken its English cousin out into the fields with them wrapped in little more than a bit of white cloth; Welsh miners would have done the same to have something to eat underground. Ploughman's Lunch would be the proper British name I think. If you're packing one up, I think the Roadhouse bread (my favorite) would be a good pick, but the Brewhouse bread would be good too (well, really any bread from the Bakehouse would be good) along with some cured ham (Nancy Newsom's or Sam Edwards' country hams are high on my list right now)... maybe some Cornman Farms pickles and/or a bit of good chutney.

The GLC is also excellent on a toasted cheese sandwich, which in Britain would be called Welsh Rabbit or Rarebit. Basically it's a thickish, creamy cheese sauce made with mustard, beer, and a bit of cayenne or Worcestershire blended with some grated Cheshire, that's then served bubbly, hot and a bit lightly browned under the broiler over toast. I like the old style "buck rarebit" where you pop a poached egg or two on top of the whole thing (don't miss John Harnois' chickens' delicious eggs at the Creamery — you really can taste the difference). Or Rachael Ray's lead — she spoons it over burgers then tops it all with a couple slices of bacon. (If you're curious about the name, the theory is that the Welsh were so poor that they referred to cheese as "their rabbit" since they couldn't afford to have actual meat very often. The original name seems likely to have been rabbit, later somehow having morphed into 'rarebit.')

The GLC is also very good in a little known but very delicious regional British dish, a classic that's called "Staffordshire breakfast." I've written a whole lot about it in the soon-to-be-published Zingerman's Guide to Better Bacon. It's basically a big, griddle-cooked, soft oatcake — the oatcake here is like a thicker oaten crêpe (not the crisp, cracker-like kind we're used to getting) — rolled 'round slices (aka, 'rashers') of British (or Irish) back bacon and a freshly fried egg or two. I guess you could say that it's the British version of a breakfast burrito. It's eaten out of hand and is a great way to get your day going in a substantial way.

Or, of course, you can just grab a hunk of the Great Lakes Cheshire and eat it like it is and forget all this other fancy stuff. No matter which end of the serving spectrum you opt for, it's a pretty darned good cheese and it's a pretty cool piece of history to bring back 'round — raw milk and really good to eat.

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Old Style Pasta With Germ, from the Morelli Family
This is a new and noteworthy arrival from a small artisan producer near Pisa in the western part of Tuscany. The Antico Pastificio Morelli is in the very small town of San Romano (pop. of about 1500), which is half way between Livorno on the coast and Florence in the center of the region. They do all the things we like in a pasta — low temperature mixing, bronze die extrusion, very long, low-temperature drying of the pasta.

Last winter I met the Morellis at the Alimentaria show in Barcelona. We bypassed the flavored pastas that are their big-sellersand they walked me over to the side of their booth where they had these bags of pasta that was a bit darker in color. This is their true passion. In Italian it's simply called pasta germe di grano — pasta made with wheat that has its natural germ still intact. Sr. Morelli explained to me that this is much the way pasta was made a century or so ago before milling techniques were "perfected" enough to whiten the grain as we've come to expect it today. Many of you have experienced the fuller flavor that the germ brings to the food — in the germ-restored wheat flour we use in the French Mountain Bread, or the germ-still-in Irish oatmeal, Carolina Gold Rice, Anson Mills grits and cornmeal, or Marino family polenta from the Piedmont. To me this is what whole wheat pasta should taste like. I should say, in honesty, that I've never been a big fan of whole wheat pasta, but I do love this stuff.

You can serve it with most anything but I tend to stick with saucing options that allow the fuller — though certainly not at all strong — flavor of the pasta to be the star. Dressed with just good oil and good cheese it's great. I did it the other night with just a bit of sautéed squash, a good bit of good olive oil, a lot of black pepper and some sea salt.

There are three varieties of this germe di grano pasta on hand right now. My favorite is the paccheri — wide, flattened tubes that are about two inches long and an inch and a half across. The shape hails originally from near Naples. They tend to "collapse" down when you cook them, kind of capturing some of the sauce. The straccetti are flat wide noodles that I like with a simple butter and grated Tuscan sheep cheese (pecorino Toscano), or with a meat ragu. The Morellis also make a "double dose" of germ, which is, of course, darker and more intensely flavored. The ricciolina are nice for hearty cooler weather dishes. I do it with bits of potato or with sautéed Swiss chard and some soft cheese (Italian Taleggio or American Teléme would be good). Try 'em all! Great gift for a food lover who's "had everything."

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Bakehouse Babka: Lots of Dark Chocolate and a Splash of Cinnamon in a Traditional Jewish Sweet Bread
There's so much to like about Bakehouse babka. It's rich, it's got lots of butter, it's laced with dark chocolate, it's got an interesting history and it tastes really good! Babka has actually been on sort of a leave of absence for a while (we have so many great things at the Bakehouse it's hard to make all of them all the time). I'm particularly excited to be bringing this one back, mostly just because it's really good and because babka is absolutely one of the tastiest traditional ways that Jewish bakers have found to put chocolate into old-time Eastern European preparations.

Babka is a sweet loaf akin to a light textured coffee cake. It starts with a rich, slow-rise dough made with lots of butter, real vanilla, fresh egg yolks, sugar, sea salt and mashed potato (helps keep the dough moist). The dough is rolled around dark chocolate and cinnamon sugar. More traditional old time versions were probably focused on sweetening with honey or sugar, and then a variety of the sorts of dried or candied fruits that go into Kulich or any other sweet bread. Chocolate likely came much later.

If you're eating alone, try warming a single slice in the oven for a few minutes, then enjoy it with a cup of strong coffee. I know that inexpensive babka abounds in the food shops of New York but I've tried about twenty different brands, and, although it's just my opinion, none of them came close to the flavor of the one the Bakehouse has put together. And if you don't believe me, you can take it from Susana Trilling, author of the excellent cookbook, Seasons of the Heart, and creator and cooking teacher extraordinaire of the Oaxacan cooking school of the same name. She grew up on the East Coast and used to run restaurants in NYC and wrote me to say that "... bar none, Zingerman's Bakehouse makes the BEST Babka I have ever eaten!! It was incredible."

PS: try it warmed with a little scoop of vanilla gelato from the Creamery!

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Five Reasons Cubebs are Really Cool
A) It's a Cool Thing to Be Searching So Long and Then to Find Something
As you know, I love the obscure, and I'm particularly fascinated with foods that were once very popular but then seem to have disappeared. Cubebs certainly fit the bill. During the Middle Ages, cubebs and long pepper sold for a pretty penny in Europe. They were used in sweets, sauces and savories. Sauce Sarcenese (meaning "Arab") was made with almond milk and cubebs and some other spices as well. Candied cubeb — a nougat-like confection — was quite popular too. But by the time I got active in cooking in the last quarter of the 20th century, it's safe to say that cubebs were next to nowhere to be found.

B) They're Cool Because of Their Story
No one really knows why black pepper hit the tipping point and stayed so prominent for so many centuries while its once-popular cousins — cubebs and long pepper — were relegated to total obscurity. Best I've read was that black pepper kept better which is logical. Both cubebs and peppercorns are in the Piperaceae family and both are berries that are dried in the sun. Cubebs are a bit bigger, not really as wrinkled, and have little tails attached to them which makes them fun to play with, very distinctive looking, and earned them an alternate name of "comet's tails." In 1640 the King of Portugal banned cubebs in order to promote black pepper, which the Portuguese, with their bases in Macao and Goa, had a better line on. Java, by contrast, was Dutch ruled, and there cubebs, cloves and long pepper were the prominent spices.

Cubebs turn out to be an important ingredient in perfumes, particularly patchouli. They were, and still are, used in various cures but since I'm not a doctor and this isn't a journal on holistic medicine, I'm going to leave that alone. Cubebs were also used to spice up chewing gum. To this day they're used a lot in spirits, too, most notably Bombay Sapphire Gin. Drop a couple cubebs in the bottom of your next Bombay martini.

C) It's a Cool Thing to Support Sustainability
I haven't yet been to Bali to visit Big Tree Farms in person, but sooner or later I'm going to get there. I already like pretty much everything about it — the people, the product they send us, the entire approach to food, the environment, the packaging and tradition. Ben and Blair Ripple got Big Tree going in the spring of 2000. The idea then, and now, was to create a positive, sustainable setting in a part of the world that's long been known for its beauty but not so much for its economic health.

Like pretty much every meaningful piece of work I've been around, this one was no flash in the pan. "Having a vegetable farm was and is our first dream. The constant challenges of watching the sky and praying for no rain or pleading with the clouds to unleash their downpour, coaxing carrots to grow big and strong with compost, love and weeding, growing produce that is vibrant, delicious and organic will always be at our core," Ben told me. "But, we soon realized that supporting ourselves through planting carrots here in Bali was never going to work. Out of that realization came some bold new ideas." The bold new ideas were to find the traditional products of Bali that could be grown sustainably and then brought to the rest of the world. It started with the sea salt — something everyone who cooked on the island crowed about but which was still about as secret as could be to the rest of world. After that came long pepper (we've got these as well, and I'm a big fan), then honeys, palm sugars and now, of course, cubebs.

D) It's Cool Because They're So Darned Old
Cubebs have a very long history. They came to China during the Tang (unrelated to the name of the 1970's drink powder) Dynasty (7th-10th centuries) but were used there almost exclusively for medicine. From there they went to India where they got the name Chinese Cubebs. They've been well known in Europe since at least Greek times. They were extensively used across North Africa — the Latin cubeb comes from the Arabic quibbes — for medicine as well as for making meals more interesting. They're written up in 1001 Nights as a remedy, either to fight infertility or as an aphrodisiac. In Europe people thought cubebs would fight demons of all sorts. Oh yeah, cubebs are high on the list of hoodoo cures and potions. Hoodoo is a traditional African American folk magic. It's way out of my expertise, but I know do know it's also called 'conjure,' that Zora Neale Hurston writes about it, and that it uses lots of potions and herbs, including cubebs, which the hoodoo call "love berries" because... well, you can figure it out on your own.

E) It's a Cool Thing Because the Flavor Is So Unique
As with so many marvelous spices, it's kind of hard to describe what a cubeb tastes like. Having learned now that it's in Bombay Sapphire gin, I can almost imagine it in there without even tasting. Imagine a cross between black pepper, allspice and juniper berries. Their flavor is inversely proportional to the smallness of their size because they have a lot of oil — 8 to 10 percent per 'beb.

Cubebs go very well with the sweetness of dried fruit. I like dipping pieces of dried dates into ground cubeb. Pretty much any meat would probably be marvelous rubbed with ground cubeb, or with them crushed in a meat based soup, sauce or marinade. Lamb for sure would be great, maybe long cooked in a stew with peppers, olive oil and some honey. You could see where cubebs could be this really interesting little bridge between the sweet and the savory. In sweets, I can imagine them making a positive difference in panforte, lebkuchen, pfeffernusse and other spiced sweets of medieval origin. Cubebs are used a lot in Indonesian curries. They're one of those things that you throw into a complex culinary setting that adds character and that no one can ever pick out. Paula Wolfert, who's studied the food and cooking of the Mediterranean for decades, told me about a Moroccan tagine of beef, garlic, dried apricots, dates, preserved lemons, all slowly cooked with a bunch of cubebs for at least a couple of hours.

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