On the Mail Order website or in the Deli’s freezer case
Blintzes have been part of Eastern European Jewish cooking for centuries. Closer to home, these blintzes have been a big hit at the Deli almost since the day we opened, and now we have them in very workable frozen form for folks to heat up at home and serve!
For those who don’t know them, blintzes are one of the core items of the kind of Eastern European Jewish cooking. These handmade crepes are wrapped around a sweet cheese filling, and we’ve long proudly held our version up against other, often better-known blintzes made elsewhere.
The base of the filling is Zingerman’s Farm Cheese—and then, to add marvelous to mouth-watering, we shifted the sweetening in the recipe from a standard commercial honey to a very special Italian chestnut honey. Add a little vanilla, a snippet of sea salt, and there you have it!
Chestnut honey is slightly smoky and almost, at times, more bitter than sweet—deep, dark, and mysterious, with a hint of burnt sugar. It’s complicated and wonderfully out of sync with what most imagine honey to be. The late, great New York City pastry chef Gina DePalma used to say that chestnut was her favorite: “Dark and spicy, with touches of smoke and leather, chestnut honey is complex, mysterious, and nuanced.” It adds both a beautiful sweetness and a simultaneous bit of bitterness to the flavor of the blintzes’ filling.
To eat, fry them up in a hot skillet with a little butter until they turn a lovely golden brown and the filling inside is soft. All you need on the side are some good preserves or sour cream. Whether for brunch, lunch, dinner, or secret snacking, you really can’t go wrong with these.
