How long will the pastries last?
All of our Zingerman’s Bakehouse pastries and coffee cakes are baked with full-flavored ingredients, but without preservatives. The good news is we’ve done the hard work of tasting and testing to ensure that they can be enjoyed for weeks to come.
If enjoying soon, keep them at room temperature.
Each baked good will have an “eat or freeze by” sticker that is about two weeks from when the package ships out. If enjoying the treats within a week or so of delivery, they can be kept at room temperature in the packaging they arrived in or in a plastic bag. Avoid the refrigerator, it can ruin the texture.
If enjoying later, keep them in the freezer.
For longer term storage, all of our baked goods freeze well for up to three months. They can be stored in the freezer in their original packaging or, if they’ve been opened, double wrapped in plastic bags.
After the freezer, it is best to allow frozen pastries and coffee cakes to defrost slowly at room temperature in the packaging. That’s all–though with some pastries like scones, a little warm up in an oven will make them extra delicious.
Two things that make Zingerman’s Candy taste so good
Zingerman’s Candy Manufactory has been crafting delicious confections for fifteen years with a focus on traditional American candy. Each sweet treat takes days to make, and has remarkably full flavor. Here are two factors that make Zingerman’s candy different than your average grocery store find.
Made by hand, not by machines
Instead of massive industrial cookers mechanically churning out literal tons, we still make our peanut brittle, nougat, and caramel by hand in big pots on a stove.
“Made by hand” might sound like a throwaway marketing line, but it actually does translate to taste. Making caramel in smaller batches means we can caramelize it more for richer, deeper flavors. Those huge commercial vats hold about 50 times more, so they can’t cook as long without burning the caramel on the bottom.
We also hand-pull our peanut brittle, carefully stretching and pulling the melted nut and sugar mixture before it cools. Most companies, even smaller ones, rely only on the little bubbles from baking soda for an airy, crisp texture. But hand-pulling puts bigger air pockets into the mix for an even flakier bite—and it never sticks in your teeth.
Especially flavorful ingredients
We use high quality ingredients for each candy component. Take the peanuts. Instead of the typical small runner peanuts, we source big Virginia Jumbo peanuts for better crunch. Industrial makers will buy roasted nuts to save time, but they quickly lose flavor and texture. By roasting in house, we get the freshest flavor and we control the salt and roast levels. We grind our house-roasted nuts to make our own nut butters instead of pulling a jar off the shelf with added sugar and other filler ingredients. And that’s just the nuts. We use just as much care in selecting our chocolate, our sugar—even our raspberry preserves!
Looking at the ingredient list on a mass-produced candy bar, you’ll notice something we don’t add: preservatives. It’s cheaper to add preservatives because companies can make more candy at one time and hold onto it for longer. Think about a regular candy bar in the grocery aisle. Do you have any idea when it was made or how long it’s been sitting there?
With ours, you do. It’s likely no more than a few weeks old when you receive it. You’ll want to eat it within a couple of months for best texture and flavor. You really can taste the difference.