Vegetarian In Sympathy Gift

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. 

How should the cheese be stored?

Hard cheeses have been carefully selected to withstand a longer transit time. Don’t worry if it arrives a bit warm or a bit cold – cheese is durable. Hard, aged cheeses stay good for a long time. Many days for sure. Sometimes weeks. Bigger hunks of cheese last longer. If it looks and smelled as expected, it’s likely still great.

Soft cheeses and cheese spreads (like pimento and liptauer) are best eaten within a week or two of receiving them.

We wrap hand-cut wedges of cheese in a cheese bag before shipment, and you can continue to keep the cheese in that cheese bag. The next best option would be parchment or wax paper. After you open the cheese for a nibble, any remainders can be put back into the bag and closed with a simple roll or fold. 

Store cheese in the fridge, ideally in the spot closest to 50 degrees. That will likely be the door of your refrigerator or in a drawer where the temperature is consistent but not too cold. Do not freeze your cheese! Cheese is a living thing. Freezing will stop the natural processes that keep cheese so tasty.

What if it’s got a little mold on it? A little mold is no problem. It’s a good sign, it means the cheese is alive. Scrape it off with a knife. But if there’s a lot of mold and it’s turning dark and funky it’s time to say goodbye.

What’s the best way to serve cheese?

Regardless of the kind of cheese, it’s best to take it out of the fridge about 20 to 30 minutes before serving it. Cheese tastes better at room temperature. It makes a world of difference: the aromas expand, becoming more complex; more of the fat spreads on your tongue, which makes the flavor more intense. When cheese is warm you’ll eat less of it and enjoy it more.

Twenty years ago we started gift boxing our as-of-yet-not-quite-famous sour cream coffeecake in traditional cheese crates made by Dufeck Manufacturing in Denmark, Wisconsin. What I didn’t know then was they were—and are—the last surviving cheese crate maker in the United States.

There used to be crate makers all over the country.

“When we started a hundred years ago, there were cheese makers on every corner and they all needed crates,” explained Paul Dufeck, the fourth generation of Dufecks to make the cheese crates. “Back then you could find a crate maker every thirty miles or so and they’d make crates for everyone,” Paul continued. “The crates were used for aging twenty-two pound rounds of cheddar cheese. The cheese would form into wheels in the crates and they makers would flip them, age them, and ship them when they were ready, all in the same crate.”

Aging in wooden crates may seem odd, but wood is great at protecting cheese. It allows the cheese to breathe, so its flavors can better develop. “There’s something special about the flavor of a cheese aged in wooden crate,” Paul continued. “There are still a few cheesemakers in Wisconsin that age cheddar in our crates—and one in North Carolina—but the practice is pretty rare nowadays.”

It takes at least six different people to make a Dufeck crate.

Three folks operate the veneer lathe which is like a large pencil sharpener, but instead of whittling a pencil to a point, it sheers off thin sheets of wood from large logs that are soft and malleable enough to be formed into different shapes. This veneer makes the sides of our round and oval crates. The fourth person makes the tops and bottoms of the crates from planed pieces of wood that fit together with tongue and groove (no glue or adhesives). Another person nails the crates together. Finally the tops of the crates are sanded by the last person who also screen-prints our logo on top. Once the crate is finished, it’s moved upstairs to dry for a couple days and then they’re shipped directly to us. We buy a few truckloads a year of different sized crates, any one of which we’re happy to use to store cats and sour cream coffeecake.

Dufeck’s crates are one of the things people love about our gifts—but that’s not all they’re good for.

We get pictures all the time of people repurposing them—as button boxes, as cat condominiums, as yarn crates. I used to think we were a little strange for repurposing a cheese crate to hold a coffeecake but then I realized everyone does—it turns out Dufeck has been doing the same thing for half a century.

In the middle of the 20th century the small cheesemakers closed or consolidated into larger companies and the larger cheesemaking factories started making huge blocks of cheese and shipping them to factories that would cut and cryovac the blocks and ship them in cardboard, not wood.

“You either diversified or you died,” Paul explained, “and that’s what we did. We make pallets and crates for large equipment and we recycle all our scrap into mulch and sawdust that we also sell, but we’re the only ones left that still make cheese crates.”