“Get them while you can.” Treats that come but once a year.
Stollen, Christmas sausage, buche de noel and other treats come but once a year
The first inquiry about stollen, the fruited German Christmas bread, came in September at Rocket Baby Bakery in Wauwatosa. Every year, people ask Michael Glorioso of Glorioso’s Italian Market on Brady Street, “Will you have the Christmas sausage again this year?” “Yes,” he says, “we have it every year!” Understandably, there’s an eagerness for Christmastime treats like these. “Get them while you can,” your brain tells you. Christmas treats are about more than hunger, of course. “Food is one of those things that still brings families together,” said Jon Gabe, the vice president of sales and marketing at Usinger’s. “People talk about, ’Remember when we had this, or that?’ ” Christmas food memories seem to fall mainly into two categories: meats and sweets. Here are some seasonal treats that shoppers can find around Milwaukee:
MEATS
The Christmas sausage at Glorioso’s, 1011 E. Brady St., is made every day the entire month of December. It gets its Christmas colors from fresh diced tomato and chopped green onion. Sweet Marsala wine, the Wisconsin Italian-style cheese called Auribella and spices add to the distinctive flavor of the pork shoulder links.
That is, it’s made through Dec. 31 if the sausage-makers are still standing after the holiday, Michael Glorioso joked. How so? “We’re still handmade; we make one link at a time,” he said.
“We’re going to sell about 6,000 pounds of sausage this month, a couple hundred pounds a day,” he said. With four links to a pound, that’s 24,000 links made by hand, by a team of four.
Glorioso’s doesn’t ship its fresh sausages, so it’s something customers have to visit the store to get.
Although, Glorioso noted, the Christmas sausage ($6.99 a pound) does freeze well. For the customers who can’t make it to the store in December, the meat department makes one last batch and puts it in the freezer case. First come, first served.
Items like spiedini and porchetta are sold year-round but are popular at the holidays; customers might order their porchetta customized, made spicy or with fresh basil, for instance. Canned scungilli, or conch, is another item in demand now; Glorioso expects 90% of the store’s scungilli sales to come over the holidays, when shoppers buy conch as is or in Glorioso’s scungilli salad.
More Old (and New) World flavors
Usinger’ssells several kinds of summer sausages only at the holidays, Jon Gabe said.
A couple of nontraditional flavors are sold in holiday gift boxes (various prices for boxes, from $26.99): summer sausage with jalapeño and summer sausage with roasted garlic (summer made with raw garlic is sold year-round). The third is more of an Old World-style summer sausage, made with a coarser grind and heavier smoke.
Only a limited number of those special summers are sold at Usinger’s shop at 1030 N. Old World Third St., so consider yourself lucky if you happen to find them there.
Another holiday-only item is a petite pit ham, at 2 1⁄2 pounds rather than the usual 6 or so, sized for smaller households. But Usinger’s also sees sales of year-round items boom at the holidays — Old World favorites like ring blood sausage or kishka, traditions people will indulge in more at the holidays than for everyday. Even bacon becomes a bigger seller, as families are home for breakfast at the holidays.
Another is saucisschen, the coiled and skewered breakfast-like sausage that years ago was made only at Christmas and Easter.
“They’re so much better Christmas morning when the whole family is there,” Gabe observed. “If family is not there to enjoy it with you, it’s just another day. That’s what makes those things special and why people enjoy them so much.”
All about the Polish
Although Polish sausage is available year-round at the new-this-year Milwaukee Sausage Co., 1200 Milwaukee Ave. in South Milwaukee, owner Mark Maciejewski initially wanted to sell it only at Christmas and Easter, the times of year when his family made sausage at home.
“It was all about family and togetherness,” he said — everyone having a good time, retelling family stories of events that happened before he was born, arguing about the sausage (“The links are too long; nobody wants links that long.” “The links are too short.” “Who cares how long the links are?”).
So in December, Milwaukee Sausage is all about the Polish. The shop is taking orders for the handmade sausage ($5.99 a pound) in person, by phone at (414) 301-5792 or by message on Facebook until Dec. 15. Pickup will be Dec. 21 to Dec. 24.
The Polish at Milwaukee Sausage is a coarse grind of pork with pronounced garlic flavor. “It’s made the same way that my grandparents made it” while raising their families in South Milwaukee, Maciejewski said.
With all that focus on Polish sausage at the shop, only a few of the shop’s other fresh sausages will be available fresh the week before Christmas, like its breakfast and Hungarian sausage; the others will be available frozen. And some Polish will be available fresh, too, for those who forgot to order or just need an extra pound.
SWEETS
Jim Niemann of Niemann’s Candies & Ice Cream at 7475 Harwood Ave. in Wauwatosa, makes candy canes the way his father and grandfather made them: with pure cane sugar and water, cooked over an open fire, worked on the same marble slab and hand-pulled into shape.
This laborious bit of candy making is done only in weeks leading up to Christmas. Niemann, helped by a son, makes about 20 batches in five flavors: peppermint, in the classic white with red stripe; spearmint, with a green stripe; lemon, with a yellow stripe; cinnamon, red with a white stripe; and molasses, which turns a golden light brown when it’s pulled on a taffy hook.
Most of the canes are 6 inches ($3); each batch will yield about 250 of those. The shop also makes 10- to 12-inch canes ($7.50) and, by special order only, large and extra-large canes ($15 and $25 for a 3-foot or larger cane).
But even the 6-inch cane will last, Niemann said. “It takes awhile to consume,” he said. “It doesn’t melt quickly like the corn syrup candies.”
A byproduct of making the candy canes, hard candy pillows, also is sold, and Niemann’s has three dozen or more other varieties of candies that it sells, from chocolate Santas to year-round cream-centered chocolates and bestselling almond butter toffee.
Baked sweets, plain and fancy
At Amaranth Bakery & Cafe, 3329 W. Lisbon Ave., baker and co-owner Stephanie Shipley’s stollen and steamed Christmas pudding are the two most popular holiday items.
“They sort of go together in my mind,” she said. “They remind me of things my grandmother made. They both use a lot of fruit.”
At Amaranth, stollen — bread that’s folded to represent the swaddled baby Jesus — is made with dried instead of candied fruits; the cranberries, cherries and currants are soaked in brandy for 24 hours before being mixed into the yeasted dough with almonds and a log of almond paste at the center.
It’s also made with a heritage whole grain called Red Turkey and honey to sweeten the dough, for what Shipley calls a rustic-y loaf. It’s coated in snowwhite powdered sugar.
“People come back year after year and say, ‘I want to get one to share with my family,’ ” Shipley said.
She usually bakes extras on Fridays and Saturdays, but it’s best if customers order their stollen at least 48 hours in advance by phone at (414) 934-0587 or email Stollen are sold in roughly 1-pound ($19.75) and 2-pound ($30.95) loaves.
Plan ahead; Amaranth will be open until Dec. 22, closed on Christmas Eve. The loaf does stay fresh for several days, thanks to the large quantity of fruit; it’s also made with cheese (some stollen are traditionally made with quark or cottage
cheese).
Gingerbread pudding and ‘families’
Steamed puddings ($33.75), which Shipley also has been making as an alternate dessert for Thanksgiving, are an old-fashioned dessert with roots in England that both Shipley and her husband, David Boucher, grew up eating.
Shipley’s are gingerbread-like, made with fresh cranberries, dried currants and almonds; they’re steamed three hours in forms before they’re unmolded. “It’s like the moistest cake you could ever have,” she said, adding that the steamed puddings keep well.
And speaking of gingerbread, Shipley began making gingerbread families last Christmas — men, women and children. “Very gender-stereotypical,” Shipley said, with the gingerbread women in dresses. Last year, the artist Muneer Bahaudeen, whose studio is across the street, decorated the cookies (75 cents to $1.50 apiece).
Shipley also makes Finnish pulla, a braided bread flavored with cardamom, for holidays from Thanksgiving to Easter.
More stollen, yule logs and ’mallows
At Rocket Baby Bakery, 6822 W. North Ave. in Wauwatosa, stollen is one of the bakery’s Christmas traditions; bûche de noël, or yule log, is another.
Head baker Rachel Swengel makes the German Christmas breads from a recipe that owner Geoff Trenholme received from a master baker from Germany. Trenholme said it was one of his favorite things to make in pastry school, and it made sense to offer it at Rocket Baby, considering the area’s German heritage.
The stollen contains “as much fruit as it will hold,” Swengel said: candied lemon, orange peels and raisins soaked in rum, along with almonds.
And the dough itself is rich.
“It’s got an enormous amount of butter,” Swengel said, a proportion of flour to butter that’s verging on equal. And in the center of the large loaves is a log of marzipan. (Mini-loaves for one, which are new this year, don’t contain marzipan.)
Holes are poked into the baked breads, which are then dunked in rum and melted butter and rolled in cinnamon sugar before they’re given a final dusting of powdered sugar.
The large stollen, for about eight people, is $20; the mini-stollen is $3.
“It’s so much better to me than a fruitcake,” Trenholme said. While much of what Rocket Baby bakes is French in origin, “We’re American; we get to pick and choose from all these traditions.”
Swengel is baking two special savory breads in December, as well. One is a sourdough packed with hazelnuts and figs ($8), made from wheat and rye that’s stone-milled in Wisconsin; it’s a bread that would be ideal with a cheese plate. It’s available Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and the three days before Christmas.
The other is a version of a Sicilian sesame bread ($6) that’s made with semolina flour and entirely coated in sesame seeds that toast while the bread is baking. It’s available Fridays and Saturdays at the bakery, plus the three days before Christmas.
Along the lines of French pastries, pastry chef Ali Fisher is making bûche de noël ($38), chocolate cake rolled with vanilla buttercream that’s covered in chocolate buttercream to resemble a log. It comes with mushrooms she makes of meringue to decorate the cake platter at home.
Fisher also is making what she calls Santa’s Chocolate Mousse ($30), a modern version of a bûche de noël. Crushed hazelnuts are folded into chocolate mousse, with candied hazelnuts supplying texture. The log-shaped mousse sits on vanilla cake and is glazed in white chocolate that’s colored brilliant Rudolph-nose red.
And hazelnut flavors the buttercream of a layered 8-inch gingerbread cake ($36), too, garnished with candied hazelnuts.
Rocket Baby will sell its marshmallows again this year, but they’ll look entirely different: They’re swirled with red and tasting of peppermint. Customers can buy one (75 cents) to add to hot chocolate or mocha or just to nibble, or six-packs to take home ($6).
The Yule log and gingerbread cake also will be sold by the slice in December. All items can be ordered for Dec. 23 or 24 pickup at the store, by phone at (414) 502-7323 or online at rocketbabybakery.com.
Seasonal macarons
Le Reve Patisserie & Cafe, 7610 Harwood Ave. in Wauwatosa, does its own version of a Yule log every year.
Co-owner and chef Andrew Schneider said the patisserie began selling its bûche de noël four years ago, creating a different flavor combination every year. This year, the log is cheesecake mousse with pistachio crémeux, vanilla bavarois, morello cherry cream and pistachio cake, glazed in white and topped with snowflake confections.
A large bûche ($45) serves eight or so; a small version ($7) is sized for an individual. The Yule logs are available in the pastry case or can be ordered until Dec. 19 in person or by phone, (414) 7783333.
The macarons that are a year-round presence in the Le Reve pastry case include a couple of holiday flavors that change yearly, as well; this year, one is peppermint, and the other, gingerbread ganache. (Packages vary; a gift box with five or six macarons is $10 to $12.)
Le Reve also sells tins of its own hot chocolate mix in wintertime, a combination of hand-grated Valrhona and Cacao Barry chocolates. The patisserie this year has branched out to add chocolate mint and milk chocolate hazelnut versions (small tins, $7.50; large tins, $14).
Italian cookies and breads
Beyond French sweets, Italian sweets begin appearing on store shelves before Christmas. At Glorioso’s, there are imported breads such as varieties of pandoro, the golden sweet enriched with eggs, and pannetone, the sweet loaf typically studded with raisins and candied orange; sizes and prices vary (from $1.99 to $25). Glorioso’s also carries panforte, which Michael Glorioso describes as “fruitcake on steroids; it’s so intense.”
And then there are Italian cookies like pignole, the Sicilian macaroon made with pine nuts, and the fig-filled cookies called cuccidate. Italian cookies also are available at Italian bakeries including Peter Sciortino, 1101 E. Brady St., and Scordato, 5011 W. Howard Ave. (the cookies typically are around $11 a pound).
And after all that, with annual treats secured, the next thing needed might be a long winter’s nap.