Make Cheese, Not War

OK so I've been on a bit of a hiatus recently due to Midterms followed by a Spring Break trip. This has unfortunately resulted in gross neglect with regards to writing and posting articles here. This doesn't mean that I've forgotten about the site, bla bla bla etc. A few new developments, though. I will soon be writing a weekly column on food and sustainability - mostly with regards to the St. Louis metro area - for a new publication called What's Up Magazine. What's Up is a print and online publication that supports the areas homeless through advocacy and activism. I will be posting my articles and links to them as they appear on the magazine's website and will be also continue to contribute to this website.

While I have sat on an article on an "new" pizza joint The Good Pie (photos and interview pending), I wanted to briefly bring attention to something rather awesome that I have been meaning to post:



Clearly Merryl Winstein is a well known cult figure in St. Louis but I thought it prudent to highlight her as an example of urban (or in this case suburban) agriculture. Ms. Winstein sells her milk and eggs to a small number of local customers and is willing to share her expertise and knowledge with individuals who would like to raise their own goats and chickens. As Community Supported Agriculture takes root, in light of the current economic situation, we can expect an ever larger number of individuals to turn to some forms of self-subsistence agriculture in order to mitigate living expenses and to also augment salaries.

Ms. Winstein will be teaching a class on cheese-making this Sunday, March 22 at her home.

Further information can be found on her page at the Local Harvest: http://www.localharvest.org/farms/M10788

If I do find the time to attend, I'll post pictures and provide any other additional info!

Event: Wheels of Glory II

While this post is unrelated to food it is related to good causes and St. Louis so... why not!

Wednesday night (February 11) I plan on participating in Wheels of Glory II at the Atomic Cowboy on Manchester Rd. For those who don't know, this is an indoor virtual cycling race with bikes hooked up to projector screens in the bar. Cyclists (or wannabees) will line up for one-on-one races in order to win unannounced prizes. While it does cost $5 to race, I have no clue what the prizes could possibly be, and I'm definitely out of shape at the moment, it's not going to stop me from looking great in reflective spandex!

The event is being put on by the local group Will Cycle for Charity. Unfortunately there is no clear indication of what charity the proceeds will be donated to (or how much of the proceeds will be donated). For all I know the money can be going towards purchasing new bicycles for the members of Will Cycle for Charity (but hopefully not)!

Be there or be square. Registration starts at 7, races at 8.

St. Louis Style Pizza: Tradition, Religion, Ethos

This is not the first time that I've mentioned St. Louis Style Pizza (nor the last time that I will mention it). I came across a nice little video put on by the local PBS station here about our very own style of pie. It's not that extensive BUT it's a nice introduction for those who have never experienced the local delicacy! BEHOLD the power of processed Provel cheese!



More on Pizza in St. Louis this week!

Gyros makes the world go 'round

I love Gyros. I love sultry, salty, succulent meat turning on a spit. Shave it and wrap it in fluffy, delicious pita. I love it with tzatziki or spicy feta spread.  I love it with tomatoes, french fries, and onions.  But what I don't love is the fake unpalatable wrapped trash passed onto unwitting American consumers. This is not to say that sometimes it can't be tasty - I've definitely filled up on the American version at the Gyros House in St. Louis. Papa Cristo's in LA has also done it's job from time to time. But generally it needs to be noted that what Greek-American restaurateurs serve would never pass in Greece.

Before I launch into any tirades concerning fast food of the Eastern Mediterranean, it must be made clear that I will focus exclusively on the Greek version of gyros.  Many permutations exist throughout the Mediterranean world, primarily as Döner and as Schawarma.  The modern inculcation first appeared in the 19th century, in the Turkish city of Bursa and quickly spread to other parts of Turkey.  Greeks expelled from Turkey in the 1960's began opening up döner shops in their new country, and quickly popularized döner, which was rebranded as gyros (Greek for "turning").  With fast-food culture taking over the Western world, Greek expatriates living in the United States returned and established a fast-food tailored to Mediterranean tastes.

The American gyros can be looked at as a metaphor for Greek diaspora culture - or it can be further extrapolated as a prime example for any diaspora. Clearly Greek entrepreneurs meant well when they popularized gyros but they had to tailor it to not only American tastes but also to American preconceptions and stereotypes with regards to Greek culture. Certainly in the 1960s the stereotypes of a pastoral Greece, whose landscape was dominated by shepherds and their flocks of sheep and goats, wasn't too far-fetched. What stuck in the imaginations of Americans were images of Greece, which were filtered through the lens of the few prominent films which caught the attention of the general public - Never on a Sunday and Zorba the Greek, serve as two prime examples. I will not discuss these films in depth but they both establish and corroborate the stereotype of the macho mustachioed Greek man, drunk, poor, dancing, and happy.

In all of this developed this fascination with Lamb. According to the average American, Greeks eat lamb for every meal. While I love lamb, until relatively recently, the cuisine of Greece was purely seasonal. You could not buy strawberries in November. You could buy lamb frozen but that simply would not do. Lamb really is only served a couple of times a year - served primarily at Eastern when it is roasted whole on a spit, preceded by an intense soup made with the offal of said lamb.

These misconceptions are played up by Greek-American restauranteurs who, at this point are run by 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations who have been fully assimilated into American culture, and are perpetuated in the name of sales and expectations of the American clientele. Certainly most emphasize quality of ingredients but very few emphasize refinement of cooking. Often it is an older family member who cooks the traditional dishes and recipes, which are passed on to line cooks who are often not Greek. But essentially this is comfort food - from their home to yours and is not intended to be a refined cuisine.

Of course this article is not intended to belittle the hard work of Greek-American restaurateurs who have worked hard, chasing the American dream. The true testament to these entrepreneurs are the legions of Greek-Americans who have excelled in academia, medicine, law, business, etc. The only question that remains is - if this group of people can excel in so many high-profile fields, why can't they just serve a proper Greek gyro?

Recipe: Chestnut Gelato

Finally, it's chestnut season.  This means that it's also time to get creative with this simple and amazing nut.  Hot chestnuts are one of the great universal pleasures harkening the arrival of winter but unfortunately the once omnipresent roasting chestnut have fallen out of vogue.  For those of you who never have had a chestnut they are best when eaten warm, having been fresh roasted or boiled.  Peeling off the thick, brown skin reveals an off-white tender, nutty, sweet flesh that has a subtle and amazing flavor.  Chestnuts can be added to any number of dishes, such as ravioli filling, for example.  

Today, though, I decided to make chestnut gelato with the Missouri chestnuts my Mom brought home.  

The recipe is very simple, provided you have an ice-cream maker.  I suppose one could hand-churn the ice-cream but it's a tiring process - this would work as old-fashioned freezer-frozen ice cream as well.  This recipe is adapted from Gelato: Italian Ice Creams, Sorbetti and Granite by Pamela Sheldon Johns.

You will need:

2 cups whole milk

1/2 vanilla pod (I used Madagascar Vanilla from Penzey's Spices)

2/3 cups sugar

1 cup chestnut purée

4 egg yolks

1 cup heavy cream

Boil chestnuts in slightly salty water until they are tender (cut one in half to test how soft it is - shouldn't yield too much resistance when you bite into it).  Heat milk and cream until it just starts to froth, turn down heat, scrape the vanilla seeds into the milk and add the bean pod into the milk - make sure to stir the whole time to avoid burning the bottom of the pot/ scalding the milk.  Let the milk stand for 30 minutes.  

Cream the yolks and sugar.  Combine chestnuts with the wet ingredients and mix until smooth and fully integrated.  Reheat the milk, remove the vanilla bean pods, and SLOWLY combine the milk with the yolk-sugar-chestnut mixture.  Careful not to add it too quickly or you will cook the egg!  Once combined you're pretty much ready to go.  Chill the ice cream thoroughly and proceed making it in your ice-cream-making contraption!

I tasted mine finally today, after "forgetting" to bring it to thanksgiving dinner and it was truly great!

Keep tuned for the next ice cream recipe where I'll be playing around with Star Anise!

Max

From a Cemetery on a Hill

Cemeteries have always intrigued me. When I was a small child, my grandmother and I would visit the grave of my great grandmother, located in a small, overgrown patch of land near the Greek-Macedonian border. The hot dry summer grass swayed gently in the wind and on the way home we would pilfer figs from overhanging trees and enjoy their sweet. St. Louis definitely is not Greece, but those early experiences amongst gravestones and family plots spurred an appreciation for the solitude and peacefulness of cemeteries. I was always fascinated by the fact that I was standing on top of a buried body and I would often fantasize about the lives of the interned, looking at the dates of birth and death to try and read clues about how or why these people passed away. 

St. Louis' Calvary and Bellefontaine Cemeteries, located on the North Side, just west of the intersection of N. Kingshighway and W. Florissant, are both exceptional places as far as cemeteries are concerned; after all, nothing particularly exciting happens at cemeteries. A number of impressive heavyweights are interned here, including William Tecumseh Sherman, William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame), Dred Scott, William S. Burroughs, Adolphus Busch, as well as the mausoleum of the infamous Lemp family. A veritable collection of who's who in St. Louis society.  

The Eternal View

The cemeteries, situated on a hill, command a sweeping view of heavy industry - the landscape below is dominated by warehouses and tractor trailers. St. Louis' wealthiest families are not interned adjacent to this industrial landscape but these cemeteries are also located among some of the most economically blighted neighborhoods I've ever visited. 

While one looks out over the vast landscape of trees, warehouses, electrical lines, and tractor trailers one notices something puzzling about the environment. HARK! What is the divine sweet smell that wafts through the air as one wanders about, admiring mausoleums and obelisks? It is not the sweet smell of death but rather the sweet smell of Wonder Bread and Hostess Twinkies!

At some point when I was a child, I was lucky enough to visit Interstate Bakeries Corporation factory and have been forever mesmerized by the incredible scents that emanate from the industrial complex. The whirring machinery and conveyors, which send loaves of perfect, factory-made white bread flying by at various stages of production, made an indelible impression on my 6 year old self. This was the equivalent of visiting Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory if only he had chosen yeast and flour over high fructose corn syrup. The scents of these industrially produced baked goods are so strong that a stiff wind carries them miles away. Heaven!

This incongruity between landscapes is highlighted further by this synesthetic experience, which combines the visual with the olfactory. Bucolic rolling hills are ravaged by poverty and manufacturing.  River vistas have given way to industrial landscapes. And the smell of death is truly sweet here. The experience one can have at Calvary and Bellefontaine Cemeteries highlights and epitomizes one's life in St. Louis. Life here is never what it seems to be.

Essay: Modern Eating: Meredith Jones

Once upon a time, when we were little, the strawberries tasted like strawberries. Unfortunately, they were only available for about two months during the early to middle summer. Then, a strange thing occurred: strawberries were suddenly available year-round, but they weren’t strawberries anymore. The flesh was dense and gummy where once it was meatier and juicier; and while the deep red color of a ripe strawberry usually indicated that it was at its sweetest, all of these new, strange strawberries were bright red while none of them tasted like it.

In my neighborhood Whole Foods, the strawberry season is celebrated with the abundance of ripe, perfect, “real” berries from nearby Watsonville, which has the ideal hot growing climate for this fruit. After about eight weeks, they are gone, but replaced by fake strawberries for the rest of the year. This is a poor, poor substitute, suitable not even for baking, as the average recipe is intended for a completely different little beast than that Driscoll berry that arrives at every grocery store nationwide in large, plastic containers.

So what are we to do? In an increasing amount of places, the focus is not whether the food is organic, but whether it is local. We know this, because it was on the cover of Time magazine about two years ago. If the berries are local, one can assume that they taste better, they cost less to transport, and since everything is increasingly organic, they were probably organic to begin with. Now, I live in San Francisco, which is the perfect Slow Food culinary storm for three major reasons: one, it is one of the so-called “bi-coastal” cities, which means it takes its culinary scene ridiculously seriously; two, really good food grows year-round within a 200 mile radius; and three, San Francisco is renowned for its self-righteously “correct” attitudes about such things as politics, social progressivism, health, and the environment.

Thus, the foodie life here is never-ending. With the coming of every July, people get hopping excited about the arrival of squash blossoms (generally stuffed with ricotta and basil, flour battered, and deep fried) as if it were an annual coming of Christ. And every winter, Bay Area restaurants line up to worship the Great White Truffle, sacrificing just obscene amounts of money to truffle dinners complete with appropriately paired wines from Piemonte. It’s the same as with clothes, when every September, Vogue reminds us that it’s coat and sweater time again and we all get our proverbial panties in a twist about pumpkin-colored Lanvin jackets and rush off to the Gap to buy the knockoff.

I suppose there are worse things to treat as a fad than seasonal food. God knows that traditionally, food fads are a boon for the food industry but generally end up with absurd situations. Right now, people in El Paso are able to order salmon to put on top of their Caesar salad, a combination I will never understand. Meanwhile, we are completely out of wild salmon and have to harvest it, inject it with all kinds of dye and hormones just to supply the demand we so stupidly created in the first place. In the case of San Francisco, when squash blossom season is over, it’s over. Time to move on and look forward to the actual squashes, to be puréed and put into filled pastas, to be made into soups, to be brushed with olive oil and roasted and salted. And then when those are done in the middle of winter, it’s put a fork in it already, because they’re done. When seasonal food is in fashion, everyone is sure to quit the season’s big food at the appropriate time. No sense looking like you’re behind the times. Just as you wouldn’t wear woolen tights in May, or keep your Christmas tree up in February. It’s just…not done.

This summer I went out to dinner with my sisters in Saint Louis. We ordered a wild mushroom pastry, which turned out to be this completely insane construction of masses of puff pastry, ten inches high, towering above a strewing of various mushrooms, sage, and entirely too much cream. The poor sauce was almost separated by the time it got to the table, and who could blame it? Those mushrooms were trying to get out. They were speaking to us.

“Look, damn you,” they said, while choking in their sea of dairy lipids, “We are criminis, we are oysters, we are shitakes. We are all mass-cultivated mushrooms, so it’s totally inappropriate that whoever created this menu decided to call us ‘wild’. We don’t have the delicate flavor of wild mushrooms, but if we did, it would be even more of a sin to put us in so much butter and cream. And this sage is some mass-distributed dried crap. The cows who made this milk are from the Midwest, the mushrooms were grown indoors in some Central Valley Californian mushroom multiplex, and the pastry flour is 100% SYSCO brand, milled God-Knows-Where from God-Knows-What. This is the most geographically and seasonally confused bullshit ever!”
Poor mushrooms, but they demonstrate some of the more senseless acts of eating. While San Franciscans are indeed completely silly for their food seasons, they do have a point. (Just don’t tell them that, please. Some of us Midwesterners have to live here.)

Like Dr. Seuss’ Lorax, I’d like to take a minute to speak for the mushrooms. If it would just occur to every American that, hey, it’s f-ing February, therefore the turkey sandwich simply cannot have tomatoes and butter lettuces on it, then perhaps we’d be doing something about those looming ozone holes and all-time high obesity levels. Until then, gorge on, fellow citizens, gorge on.

Meredith Jones

[Editor's note: Meredith is a St. Louisan in exile. She lives, works, writes, and plays in San Francisco. While she may be gone her spirit remains. Every fifth glint of sunlight reflecting off of the arch is just Meredith winking at us.]

Cupcakes Out. Salad In.

Cupcakes are out, according to today's New York Times.

While whoopie pies have made cupcakes obsolete, as Liza Shore wrote in her great essay, according to 12 people in New York, they have become obsolete for entirely different reasons. School children across the country are apparently being dissuaded from bringing in unhealthy foods for their classmates to enjoy. One would assume that our right to sell baked goods to fund the 6th grade Halloween dance would be upheld by our great constitution but it looks like someone needs to call the ACLU.

It's like Double Stuf Oreos, but more like a bake sale.

Luckily, no one is raining on my parade since these spectacles are dead to me for three reasons:
1. I'm 25.
2. When I went to public high school, "bake sales" were pre-packaged messes, mere masquerades of Nana's recipe for fudge brownies (or Mandel Bread).
3. I was walking down 72nd street in NY one day and at 5th Ave. students from a tony private school were selling cookies to raise money for some kind of exotic vacation to the Maldives or the zoo or something. The cookies looked very good and i already had 3 in my mouth when I was told that I now owed the 12 year old kid with braces five dollars! Five dollars?!?! I'm pretty sure that cookies and brownies at bake sales when I was growing up cost 50 cents!

But this fascist elimination of the bake sale is ridiculous. What's next? Turnips and rutabagas? Bulgur and wheat germ? When are kids going to splurge a little bit? Can't they stuff their faces twice a year with semi-sweet chocolate, butter, cream, eggs, bleached flour, and, if they're lucky, polysorbate 60. If bake sales were not dead to me, I would not hesitate to make this into a political issue. Cupcakes may be dead but as long as we preheat the oven to 400 degrees and bake at 325 for 40 minutes I think we'll make it.

Family Dining

In my family there has been a long-standing tradition of repeating a little quip that my grandparents' housekeeper, Mabel Hall, used to say after a large meal. I tried googling the phrases but I wasn't able to come up with anything about the origin of this joke:

After sharing a large meal, two women are seated at a table, one of whom is hard of hearing. The younger woman pushes her empty plate away and says, "I ate sufficient!"
The deaf woman looks at across the table and asks, "You went fishing?"
"I ate plenty!" exclaims the younger woman.
The deaf woman replies, "What, you caught twenty?"
The younger woman looks at her companion and says, while shaking her head, "Poor soul!"
"What, you broke your pole!?" answers the deaf woman.

It's not so much funny as it highlights the quirky traditions that families and cultures develop in relationship to dining.

Essay: Cooking Silently: Liza Shore

By permission from cooking... silently (See original post: Whoopie Pies)


Ask anyone who even remotely knows me, and they'll tell you: for at least six months I have been proclaiming the whoopie pie as the next big dessert.

Why? Well, I'm glad you asked.

The whoopie pie has humble, but not very detailed, origins. A popular East coast treat, they are most commonly found in the heart of New England. They are often attributed to the Pennsylvania Dutch, but there is not much literature (perhaps this is my calling? Whoopie pie literature?) offering more than that. Regardless, I will forever have an image in my head of early American settlers walking across the landscape holding whoopie pies in waxed paper. There are plenty of urban legends circulating, too. Some say that whoopie pies were originally created to be easily transportable, individual cakes. Some say that they got their name from the exclamations of children who loved the treats. And I remember reading once that their popularity was somehow tied to the invention of Marshmallow Fluff. Wherever they were created and why, I'm just glad they're catching on.

The most wonderful thing to me about the whoopie pie is that it is completely antithetical to the most recent trend in baked goods, cupcakes. I think we're all starting to realize that it's actually very hard to find an exceptional cupcake. It's not hard to find one that LOOKS amazing, but usually the taste and/or texture disappoints. Cupcakes, plain and simple, try to win us over with their looks. Whoopie pies... don't.

Once I embarked on my whoopie pie crusade, it took quite a bit of tinkering to come up with what I felt was the perfect recipe. Part of my goal was to have a really good base recipe-- something that could be altered for flavor without changing texture or consistency. I wanted my dry ingredient proportions to stay essentially the same, so that only the wet ingredients would really vary. It wasn't all fun and games, landing on the perfect recipe. The chocolate batter alone went through several iterations. An attempt at a cinnamon cake resulted in something that tasted eerily similar to Cinnamon Toast Crunch. One crazed night, in an attempt to make perfectly uniform Whoopie Pies, I bought a plunger-gun that supposedly dispenses batter evenly. It didn't. These whoopie pies were turning out to be quite the endeavor, I tell you!

My other goal was to come up with a perfect, and shortening-free filling. For whatever reason, most whoopie pie recipes call for shortening in both the filling and in the cake. And, while I may tend to have shortening on hand in my freezer at all times, I know most people don't. It's an ingredient that people are scared of, hesitant to buy: "When else am I going to use that?" Lucky for us, there's butter!

So, regarding frosting, there are two options in my opinion. One is a simple butter/powdered sugar frosting. The key to this is creaming the butter forEVER, otherwise it will taste too thick. Cream it, cream it, and then cream it more, until it is super light and fluffy. Remember: when it comes to frosting, you really can't over-cream. Add a splash of vanilla and a pinch of salt with the powdered sugar. The other option is an italian meringue buttercream, a rich frosting lightened with egg whites. Recipes vary in quantities, and I haven't found one that I'm married to, but Martha Stewart and Dorie Greenspan will never lead you wrong.

And now, without further ado, my Whoopie Pie recipe-- fluffy, spongy, moist, and delicious slathered with frosting.

Chocolate Whoopie Pies

2 c flour
1/2 c cocoa powder
1 1/4 t baking soda
1 t salt
1 c buttermilk
1 t vanilla
1 stick butter
1 c brown sugar
1 egg


Whisk together dry ingredients. Add vanilla to buttermilk. Cream butter and sugar. Beat in egg. Alternate additions of wet and dry ingredients, beginning and ending with the dry. Bake at 350, until cakes spring back to the touch.

Recession 1 Prosperity 0

Scanning the daily food digest "Grub Street," of New York Magazine, I was directed to a hilarious article in today's Chicago Tribune about the measures McDonald's is taking to increase their bottom line during these difficult times!  Several weeks ago, when the stock market really started to tank, investors were scrambling to determine what were safe investments.  Campbell's Soup and Walmart stocks jumped without too much surprise while McDonald's certainly has been doing comparatively well with an 11% jump in 3rd quarter profits.

How will McDonald's continue to boost its profits into the 4th quarter as most of us are downsizing to Church's Chicken?  Amidst the collapse of financial giants like Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers we now have a new casualty... CHEESE!!!

That's right, McDonald's is re-arranging its 99 cent menu by removing one of the two slices of cheese from its double-cheeseburger and renaming this new Frankenstein the "McDouble."  The original double-cheeseburger can still be purchased for 20 cents more, but why would you want it when the McDouble is much much more healthy for you.  Times are tight folks, so think twice before you throw your next wine and cheese party (or charge your guests 20 cents for that extra Kraft Single).
(Read the original story here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-mcdonalds-double-cheeseburger-oct28,0,4587964.story)

The Great Saint Louis Donut Hunt: Breakfast of Champions

Donuts or Diabetic Shock?

I woke up to a fine gray misty rain, which soon turned into a steady, driving downpour.   With great difficulty I emerged from the warm cocoon of my bed and stumbled downstairs through the frigid house to put on a pot of coffee, wishing that the radiators were on.  It should have felt like Christmas morning - I had been looking forward to my great donut tasting for a long time and I knew that I would have to get over this morning hump and look past the rain.  Last week I had arranged for an informal tasting panel of Washington University medical students to test the strengths and weaknesses of the donuts I planned on bringing in.    With my route established (see map of the Great Donut Triangle below) and map in hand, I set forth with a mug of coffee and a growling stomach at about 9:15am.  Note that in donut time, this is the equivalent of waking up at noon.  I figured since I was unable to have a traveling tasting panel to experience the luxury of hot donuts, that a few hours would not make a big difference.

Before I write further, I want to thank all of the lovely people who helped me, most of whom were the owners of the establishments I visited.  These bakers work hard, love what they do, and are unanimously enthusiastic about the products they create each day.  I also want to thank all of the owners who refused to take any pay for their donuts, making this venture less costly and allowing us to taste a wide variety of specialties.

Our first stop: Lamar's Donuts on Brentwood Blvd.   Lamar's, headquartered in Nebraska, was the only donut chain we tried.  Set up like a coffee shop/ café I sauntered to the counter and was helped promptly; the display was attractive and the donuts looked fresh.  The baking is done offsite (on Olive Blvd.) and thus, unfortunately, the store did not smell incredible as I had hoped.  Instead it smelled of coffee (and so there were no complaints).   The employee behind the counter was happy to serve me and proudly claimed that Lamar's donuts were "bigger and better" than other places.

The display case at Lamar's.

The second stop was the Donut Drive-In on Chippewa. The employees at the Drive-In were friendly and the store, which was claustrophobically packed with to-go boxes and baking supplies, smelled great. "Tender loving care" makes the best donut, claim the women behind the counter who let me take a quick snapshot before I made out with  glazed and buttermilk donuts, as well as an apple fritter.

Pay no attention to the women behind the counter.

The house that donuts built.

As I got back into the car, the skies opened up.  While I was happy to be dry and warm, I was out of coffee, starved, and feeling cranky.   The car smelled good but I didn't dare break into any of my loot.  After all, I had only made it to two of eight planned stops and had 6 donuts to show for it.  I wasn't going to break down and sneak a taste and I certainly wasn't going to eat the unappealing banana, which I had brought with me, thinking that I should eat some fruit to counteract all the lard and sugar I was going to consume in the forthcoming hours.  I continued south to my next stop, the St. Louis Hills Donut Shop.  Momentarily lost and turned around, I was happy to spot the green shack of deliciousness.  

At this point, I have to admit, it was already late for donuts and this establishment was set to close in 2 hours and had been open since 5am.  The baking certainly had been done and the owners were probably ready to head home and rest up before returning later in the night.  The owner, who was very nice, testified to the hard work that it takes to making a good donut.  It was a homey place and I made out with a cheese flip, a glazed donut and a buttermilk donut.

Big Green.

I continued my trek to the southern-most point on my itinerary, the Donut Stop, which was a good distance from downtown, on the outskirts of Jefferson Barracks.  The store was big, smelled great and the owners were still hard at work keeping the display cases fully stocked.   Serving the community's donut needs for the past 55 years, the present owners believed that attention to detail and strong relationships with their clientele proved to be the key to their long-standing success.  I left with a box stuffed with donuts of every variety.  Luckily there were two plain glazed and I wolfed one down in the car.  Not bad...

Donut lighthouse on a gray day.

The Donut Stop family.

I began to head north along Broadway, which was a great drive taking me past an interesting stretch of storefronts, all of which looked like they could have enormous potential in the urban renewal of my dreams.   Sadly, Broadway runs along a terrible strip of the Mississippi river, replete with heavy industry and a sewage treatment facility.  Pharaoh's Donuts was my next intended stop but I had difficulty finding the store.   Time was tight and I was hurrying to meet my 1pm deadline. 

Soulard Market's stall #115 was next on the list, featuring a unique local donut experience; unfortunately, I discovered that Mini Donut, LLC. was closed as they only operate on the weekends. They serve, if I recall correctly, only cake donuts, which come either powdered or plain and are made fresh from a rickety donut-making contraption.  I didn't have time to linger, or get a sausage in the market, so I cut across 7th street and Broadway to John Donut.

Homey and warm.

Disappointed that he was out of the plain glazed donuts, John, the owner, loaded me up with a nice variety of the donuts he had left.  The 26 year old storefront served breakfast and snacks to a wide range of loyal clientele.  The donuts are made nightly from high quality ingredients and stuffed with home made custards and jellies.  John believes that the store's consistency is what sets them apart from other establishments.

Not much was left after a successful morning.

While I wanted to linger over a cup of coffee and some breakfast, I had to move on to my final stop, World's Fair Donuts.

Meet me in St. Louie, Louie...

World's Fair on, open for 32 years, a wonderful throwback to a bygone era.  The woman working the counter had a terrific bee-hive and the bakery somehow reminded me of the Eat-Rite Diner on Chouteau.  Two bakers prepared fillings and plain doughnuts behind the counter and were friendly when I asked to take some photographs.  Old timers sipped coffee and traded stories and, presumably, had just polished off breakfast.  Certainly things were all-right at this shop and there was a comfortable vibe to it.  Maybe it was because it felt like both the establishment and the employees had been frozen in time, a part of south St. Louis that resisted, even scorned change.  When I offered to give this website's address the woman serving me told me that she didn't own a computer and that she laughed that she relied on snail mail.   This was not so surprising but definitely added World Fair's charm.  Fruit top donuts, apple fritters, and plain glazed are the specialties here and I was sent off with a nice variety.

Working hard or hardly working?

Loaded with donuts I drove back north to Barnes Hospital to meet my panel, which was looking forward to a little bit of a pick-me up.  The below photograph shows our loot with third-year student Laura Billadello eagerly cutting into a cake donut before the tasting.  I was so hungry at this point and I was in absolute diabetic shock after the tasting that I neglected to take additional photographs of the tasting and the mass of white-coats that flocked to the free food like moths to light.

Did somebody say free?

So the tasting looks less extravagant than it really was.  It was unfortunately difficult to really spread out without a long table and since I don't have something like a conference room readily available, we had to make do.  In the end we had 6 donut stores representing.  We luckily made a few tasting categories in order to objectively look at which donuts were worthwhile.  The first category was the plain glazed.  The plain glazed donut is the unanimous workhorse of the donut world.  Judge a person not by the color of his donut shop, but by the quality of his/her glazed.  Sadly, John Donut was disqualified from the running in this first category since they had sold out of their plain glazed.  Theoretically this would make them the automatic winner since they were good enough to completely sell out, but this would not be fair to our other contenders.  We looked at flavor (obviously), mouthfeel, and appearance as the main criteria for judgment.

The rankings were objective decisions and the panel was generally unanimous with their conclusions.  In the category of plain glazed donuts the first place went to the Donut Stop.  These donuts were exceptional, slightly crisp but soft and light on the inside.  They had a slight vanilla flavor to them and were exceptionally good.  They were not overly greasy either - I could have eaten a ton of these things.  Donut Drive-In clinched second place but their flavor just could not match those of the Donut Stop.  St. Louis Hills had a very nice donut - slightly smaller than the others and was a solidly delicious pastry.  It unfortunately lacked the pizzaz that the other two had but nonetheless was very good.  World's Fair, unfortunately did not fair so well.  The donut was super-saturated with grease (lard, to be exact) to the extent that it ruined its flavor.  The texture was good but maybe they should replace their frying medium.  Finally Lamar's proved that bigger is not necessarily better.  The donut was light but had a bread-like quality to it.  The flavor was not there and it could not hold its own.

The next category consisted of Apple Fritters.  We had apple fritters from 3 shops.  John Donut's was laden with fresh-tasting fruit and was absolutely phenomenal.  The balance of fruit, cinnamon, icing, and dough was perfect and was a unanimous favorite in the tasting.  Donut Drive-In's apple fritter was similar but did not taste as fresh.  I don't know if they use canned or fresh filling but clearly the secret is in the fruit.  Finally World's Fair could not hold up against the other two.  The fritter was completely coated with icing which made the pastry overly-cloying.  

Since we had a large variety of donuts and focused so much on the plain glazed, we were unable to compare donuts in all the categories.  John Donut and Donut Stop both had great custards and jellies as well as cake donuts.  John Donut received enormous style points as their selection looked particularly refined - their cake donut was also absolutely terrific.

All in all we had a very successful tasting with eight medical students stuffing their faces.

Looking back on the tasting and subsequent need for dialysis, I couldn't help but feel that more could have been done.  St. Louis is a city with many hidden gems and many locally owned stores worth exploring.  Obviously I would have liked to have been able to taste all of the listed stores but a huge time and effort went into even this small tasting.  I will continue tasting new places and will hopefully add a few more places as I continue to explore.

These hard working families have kept donut giants like Duncan Donuts and Krispee Kreme at bay, proving that in a fiercely competitive market, the best donuts are the ones that receive the most attention and care; baking requires a certain amount of love as well as respect for your product.  Hopefully, with the economy shifting towards a serious recession we will see the re-emergence of the donut as people turn to comfort foods in these times of uncertainty.

No matter what happens, there's something comforting knowing that you can easily find a good donut and a cup of coffee. 

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

OK so I have been pondering the future of this enterprise and mulling over exactly what should be the focus of this blog/ future website. I may be wrong but it seems to me that most "blogs" on St. Louis food focus on reviews that are neither exciting nor all that well written. A full review is only possible after dining at a restaurant several times - I believe 4 times is standard for food criticism. It takes a few times to decide if a restaurant is great, which gets to be both expensive and time consuming and to be honest, not all that interesting if you're just musing over some sort of meat, starch vegetable combination that was most likely delicious but neither exciting nor innovative. I think what I'm trying to say is that I think that most of the big name restaurants in St. Louis (most but not all) churn out very tasty dishes that are comfortable. Trends in general take a long time to break through to St. Louis (if they manage to do so at all is sometimes a miracle) but that is also what is so great about this city. We have the potential to spark great things but the unfortunate reality is that St. Louisans are not always receptive to the cutting edge. This is nothing new. We sealed our fate with cotton and the Mississippi and paid the price. Chicago got the skyscrapers and we got a stainless steel arch. I'm saying I'll take it.

Stay tuned for next week's first real post on... The Great Donut Hunt!