“The search for great bread,” my friend the food writer Paula Wolfert once wrote, “. . . has been my passion. Whenever I travel I constantly ask people: ‘Where can I find the best bread around here?’ ‘Who is the best baker?’ And nearly always, as soon as I ask, the eyes of my respondent will light up. He or she will utter a name and an address. And then I am off upon the hunt.”
I’m not much different. My own search started 35 years ago when Paul Saginaw and I opened Zingerman’s Delicatessen in a slightly out of the way, oddly angled, two-story, turn-of-the-19th-century orange-brick building at the corner of Detroit and Kingsley Streets in Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown neighborhood. My hunt took a great leap forward when, in the fall of 1992, we joined with our friend Frank Carollo to open our own bakery. Today, if Paula Wolfert were to come to town, inquiring about the best bakers, I’m pretty sure that almost every local food lover would send her to 3711 Plaza Drive, to Zingerman’s Bakehouse.
