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How would you make an "Appalachian doughnut"? Maybe top it with moonshine glaze or fill it with pawpaw puree?
One family has taken up the challenge. In Charleston, West Virginia, they're selling fried dough that reflects local food traditions and, at the same time, builds community. This piece is from guest blogger Jennifer Gardner, who originally wrote it for Charleston Gazette-Mail. Thanks to them both for agreeing to share it here!Is it presumptuous to say a couple selling doughnuts out of a 1960s trailer can grow the local economy?
Probably.
But Charleston natives Stephanie and Josh Woody might be on to something. Last week, the couple debuted “Vandalia Donut Company” — a 6-foot-by-10-foot hyper local bakery on wheels that prominently features ingredients from the Mountain State and surrounding areas.
“I wanted it to be a business that we could take to Chicago and they would know that it’s from the Appalachian region,” Stephanie said. “We’re really proud of where we live, and we want people to know that really good things come from here.”
By “really good things,” she doesn’t only mean her fresh homemade donuts.
“Our goal is to use this as a community builder,” Josh said. “Community is our goal, and we’re just using doughnuts to get there.”
It’s easy to sugarcoat things when you’re talking doughnuts. In fact, launching their company has been far more challenging than either of them thought it would be. For starters, neither has extensive experience in the food world; Stephanie is an interior designer and stay-at-home mom, and Josh is an engineer.
But they had an idea, which became a dream. Turning it into reality meant relying on a whole community of supporters.
The idea came about while the couple was visiting Stephanie’s family in Roanoke, Virginia. They stumbled upon an Amish family selling fresh doughnuts at a farmers market, which sparked the idea of opening a doughnut trailer.
“We thought it looked easy and like something we could handle on the side,” Josh said.
They mulled it over without really committing until May, when Stephanie spotted a 1963 camping trailer for sale in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Facebook. The next day, the two hopped in their car and traveled to pick up the $500 fixer-upper, hoping this might be their pot of gold.
“It had been sitting in a field for who knows how many years,” Stephanie said. “It was a disaster. It was awful.”
But they have a love for do-it-yourself handy work — and some relevant experience. The two had fixed up a camper the previous summer for their family, using Stephanie’s background in interior design and Josh’s experience flipping houses.
“They’re just kind of their own animal,” Stephanie said. “They’re tiny and they have a lot of specialized parts and pieces. There are no square corners.”
They dragged the trailer to an auto shop in Charlotte to have new tires put on, and then towed it home to West Virginia, where it sat for the summer until they began renovations in late August. By then, they were “all in.”
It became a family project for the couple and their three kids. They tore the trailer down to its metal frame and started to rebuild. Neighbors, friends and family were part of the process, from helping build the trailer to taste-testing the doughnuts.
Along the way, they put in as much of Appalachia as they could. Hundred-year-old pieces from Bear Wood Company in Hurricane were used to build shelves, and local artist Kayleigh Phillips painted the logo. Elk City’s MESH Design and Development helped them develop the branding and come up with the name “Vandalia Donut Company.”
Vandalia was the chosen title of a proposed early British colony located in what is now West Virginia and northeastern Kentucky. It never came to be used as the state’s name, but it is still used throughout the Appalachian region.
“We both grew up going to the Vandalia Gathering and loved it,” Stephanie said. “It’s such a family-oriented event that is all about West Virginia culture. Any association I have with that name is positive.”
As for the ingredients: the eggs are from Lincoln County, the apples were grown in Jackson County and the salt is from J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works in Malden. The couple is also selling hot coffee custom-roasted by a man in Roanoke.
“We’ve just had such a good time interacting with Charleston businesses, we wanted to try to support as many local businesses as we could,” Stephanie said. “It’s more expensive, but I feel like people will appreciate supporting the local economy.”
Making doughnuts in a tiny trailer poses its challenges — namely, space. So they make just a few flavors at a time. Each doughnut is made from scratch. The batter must be a perfect 71 degrees to achieve the right texture. Then the doughy rings are fried in a commercial doughnut machine Stephanie found at an apple orchard in Winchester, Virginia.
Vandalia Donut Company’s signature doughnut, Number 42, is the 42nd iteration of Stephanie’s original recipe. The doughnut is flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla.
“I knew I wanted it to be a buttermilk doughnut so it would have a little more fat and be a little more tender,” she said. “I knew I wanted it to be just the most basic, real ingredients. I didn’t want it to have any preservatives or anything you couldn’t make yourself at home.”
Once the signature recipe was down pat, the family began to test seasonal flavors. They decided to feature two specialty doughnuts each season. In honor of fall, they are currently featuring pumpkin and apple doughnuts.
The Great Pumpkin doughnut is the Number 42 recipe rolled in cinnamon sugar, topped with pumpkin pie and brown sugar vanilla bean cream, then drizzled with J.Q. Dickinson salted caramel.
The Apple Orchard doughnut is a Number 42 doughnut covered in an apple cider glaze, topped with fried apples and brown sugar vanilla bean cream, then sprinkled with brown sugar.
“The quality is as high as it’s going to get; we’re not cutting any corners,” Stephanie said. “For the apple cider glaze, I have to boil the apple cider for five hours. I wouldn’t do that if we had 10 different varieties.”
The signature and seasonal doughnuts debuted at Bible Center Church’s Trunk or Treat on Oct. 29. The truck was also set up at the George Washington high school football game on Friday.
Next, the bakery will be at the Clay Center’s grand opening of its new exhibits from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Nov. 18. Josh and Stephanie are also seeking a location where they could set up regularly in downtown Charleston, and plan to attend local events, including FestivALL. One day, Stephanie said the company might consider more varieties and even opening up a brick-and-mortar bakery on the West Side.
“Even if we don’t do anything past right now, the relationships that we’ve made with the people who we’ve worked with on this project so far have been so rewarding and so encouraging that it would be worth it for that,” she said.
“We’ve made some great connections with people who love our city and love our state and who value the vision that people have for what we can be.”
The 2016 Appalachian Appetite food photo contest focused on family recipes. These are the kinds of dishes that connect us to forbearers, people who passed long before we were born; dishes that inspire transplants like me to cross state lines, sometimes even national borders, making our way home for a single meal; dishes that produce scents so powerful just one whiff surfaces memories of reunions, holidays, and childhood.
The Revivalist's readers know what I'm talking about. They submitted delicious images, some complete with recipes, showing everything from apple cobbler in a hundred-year-old cast iron skillet to sausage gravy being made by the photographer's grandfather. This special collection illustrated how deep roots run in Appalachia, and a few of these shots inspired people to vote big.
The year's second runner up was an image of chocolate gravy photographed by Emily Roberts in Gallatin, Tennessee. Emily said the dish always make her think of her granny. "She made it as a special treat for breakfast at her house," and was dead-on when she observed that it may be an Appalachian thing to turn whatever you have into some type of gravy.
Our first runner up, Carrie Cox of Salem, Virginia, shared a shot of "Baba's rolls." They were a signature dish of her grandmother's, whom she called Baba. "After she was no longer able to make them," explained Carrie, "my aunt used to make them for family holidays...eventually the recipe made its way to me."
And then we have our 2016 winner. Few things epitomize country cooking quite like canning. Beth Epley Minton learned this culinary art from her mother. "I can remember her canning all summer long," Beth said, "everything we harvested out of the garden." Among the garden's bounty were beets, which were featured in Beth's winning photo alongside cans of homemade sweet mix.
To this day, Beth and her sister still comb through their deceased mother's recipe box, uncovering dishes that date back for many generations. "They mean the world to me."
As the grand prize winner, Beth and a guest will enjoy a weekend getaway at Mast Farm Inn in North Carolina, complete with a meal at Over Yonder restaurant. Our first and second runners up receive one-year subscriptions to Smoky Mountain Living, and all three images will run in an upcoming issue of the magazine.
Thanks to all the shutterbugs who submitted and to everyone who helps keep our unique food heritage alive.
Appalachian food traditions have hit the airwaves in West Virginia. Chef Dale Hawkins is touring the state and uncovering surprising dishes and ingredients in the heart of Appalachia. In the premiere episode of Appalachian Food Evangelist, he makes a lumber camp staple called burgoo. This slow-stewing concoction of meat with veggies was historically based on whatever animals could be found in the woods. He's seen it made from bear, rabbit, even frog and trout.
Today, all of burgoo's surprising variations are celebrated at an annual cook-off. With live bluegrass in the background, contestants dish out their best versions of the stew in Webster Springs, West Virginia, just a few miles from the town of Bergoo, which is believed to be named after this quirky dish.
Have you ever made burgoo or eaten it? What ingredients do you think make for the perfect campfire stew?
Animals were Grandpa Ferguson's passion, both killing and keeping them. A fur trader by profession, he sold the pelts of creatures he hunted and fed his family their meat. Deer, raccoon, squirrel, rabbit, opossum—it was impossible to guess what you might eat at his table—and just as hard to guess what might be living in his yard.
Behind the garage, a bobcat lazed in a big cage. Domesticated raccoons played on the patio. A skunk was treated like kin for many years. There was more predictable pets too, a beagle, maybe a cat or two. Some were injured when they joined his menagerie. Others I believe lost their parents. All needed love, and he gave it readily, which is puzzling—how one man can rear certain animals, naming them and cradling them like babies, while killing others without pause.
Maybe grandpa followed that verse in Genesis, the one that grants humans dominion over fish and birds and beasts. He was probably raised that way. Or maybe his perspective shifted over time. Before he was out of grade school he was hunting and fishing on his own. Perhaps living alongside animals for so long, he came to consider us beasts among beasts, killing and loving like all the others.
It's too late to ask. Cancer took him in 1992, and even before that, it would have been a strange conversation. Grandpa never involved me in hunting or animal rearing. He saw, I suspect, that I was more interested in comic books at that age than my own heritage.
Years after his death, I began to explore my cultural roots and around the same time, question my responsibility to other animals. Do I have the right to eat them? How should livestock live, the billions of animals raised in U.S. factory farms each year? And what about wild ones, what does rampant human development do to them?
This summer, these questions of humanity and heritage collided around one dish—wild rabbit hash. I knew that Appalachian Appetite 2016, my food photo contest, would focus on family recipes, so I started digging for more of my own.
During an online chat, my father mentioned grandpa's rabbit recipe, one I don't remember eating, one that had never even been written down. He jotted it from memory, and I stared at his email a long time, realizing that if I featured this dish, I'd have to find a wild rabbit or, at least, one that was humanely raised.
Years ago, I decided to only eat meat from animals that lived decent lives. Sometimes that can be real work.
Bunny's had been grazing in my yard all spring, and I imagined trying to discretely yet swiftly kill one amid row houses. A gun was out of the question. An arrow promised to go horribly wrong. An air rifle maybe.
While pondering methods, I also began to imagine skinning and gutting the animal, and the more I thought about it, the more attractive simpler family recipes looked. Everyone loves potato salad, and cookies are always a hit, right?
Then I thought about my upcoming drive through the Shenandoah Valley. With a few clicks and calls, I discovered that the good folks at Polyface Farm sold rabbits that had lived well and were fully dressed. On my way South, I dragged my husband and our pup down gravel roads, miles out of our way, to pick up the animal, which was then hauled in an insulated bag to Roanoke for an overnight stay and on to Asheville, where we would spend a week with my niece and nephew.
City kids, they didn't know what to think about the dead bunny traveling with us. On cooking day, I sprawled it on a cutting board, cleaver in hand. My niece left the room. My nephew lingered at a distance while I quartered the rabbit and started soaking the pieces. Once it was cooked and shredded, looking more like meat they're accustomed to seeing, they both agreed to help. They chopped veggies while I fried the rabbit and thought of grandpa. What would he make of all this—me cooking a recipe he never thought would interest me alongside two grandkids he never met.
“When I make this dish, I experience something my grandpa experienced, taste what he tasted," I'd later write in a media release for the photo contest, "But not just him. He learned to hunt from his daddy, who learned to hunt from his. This goes a long way back.”
All that is true. I was thinking of forbearers as the ingredients came together, as I offered my husband and the kids a bowl of hash and they all refused, as I dug into one myself and tasted, for the first, a dish that was nearly lost between generations.
I'll never know who all made it. My grandpa likely learned the recipe from his parents down at our homeplace in Stewartsville, Virginia. Maybe one of them learned it from their parents and so on, perhaps back to Silas and Polly Dearing who established the farm in the 1820s. Whatever its origin, it tasted delicious with flavors of onion and pepper on top, the rabbit lending a gamey undercurrent, and it tasted important, like a heap of rediscovered heritage right there in my bowl.
1 large rabbit (wild or humanely raised)
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped celery
2 tablespoons flour
Toast or biscuits
Seasonings: salt and pepper
STEP 1: Clean and quarter rabbit.
STEP 2: Soak meat in water with teaspoon of salt overnight.
STEP 3: Drain salt water, and then boil quarters in fresh water until meat will come off the bone—about five minutes.
STEP 4: Pull meat from bone and, in chunks or shredded according to your taste, fry in iron skillet with tablespoon of vegetable oil until cooked through and just starting to brown.
STEP 5: Remove meat and add cup of chopped onion and cup of chopped celery to skillet, sautéing them until tender.
STEP 6: Return meat to skillet and add two tablespoons of flour and two cups of water. Cover and simmer, stirring every few minutes untll the juices thicken to a gravy-like state.
STEP 7: Serve over toast or biscuits, adding salt and pepper to taste.
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The Appalachian Martini
3 ounces Absolute Citron citrus vodka
1/2 ounce St-Germain
2 tablespoons pawpaw puree
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake. Strain into a martini glass.
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