How to Cook a Moose (32 page)

“You're the owner,” I said. “That makes sense. By the way, this iced coffee is amazing.”

“We use coffee ice cubes,” she said with pride. “So it doesn't get watered down.”

I looked into my cup: yup, coffee ice cubes. No wonder. I took another sip.

Leigh was born and raised in Portland, Maine. She attended Deering High School. After graduation, she worked in “every restaurant in town. I can't walk a foot down the street without seeing someone I know. Every single aisle in the grocery store.”

Three years ago, she was a single, recently divorced mother, living in her parents' attic with her young daughter and working as a bartender while she worked toward a degree that would enable her to be a Spanish teacher.

“In those days, right after I left my ex-husband,” she told me, “I just wanted pleasure.” She paused and smiled. “After we split up, I
went on a pleasure-seeking kick: food, wine, decadence, freedom. And I was obsessed with donuts.”

“I'm obsessed with donuts, too,” I said, smiling back at her.

“I was dating the guy who owned the place where I was bartending,” she said. “He loosened me up, encouraged me to drink, eat, have fun. We traveled, and everywhere we went, I had to find the donut shop. Because we didn't have that here. This town had a total lack of good donuts. And more than anything else for me, donuts represented decadence, pushed that button for me. They are the ultimate pleasure food. Life is short, it's full of drudgery; we need pleasure!”

I ate the last bite of my own donut, nodding in total agreement.

“One night, my then-boyfriend and I were having dinner. And out of the blue, he looked at me and said, ‘You know what you should do? You should open a donut shop here in Portland.' Straight out of nowhere. I said, ‘That's a weird idea. I have no business skills, no baking skills, and I'm a single mother with no money.' I went home and slept on it, and when I woke up, I know it sounds corny, but I knew he was right; I knew that this was my life's calling.”

Shortly after he provided her with the inspiration for her life's work, they broke up.

“He was the angel, the muse behind this place,” she said. “He gave me the idea. And the rest of it was one hundred percent me.”

That next day, Leigh went to the nearest Borders and looked through cookbooks she couldn't afford to buy, writing down all the potato donut recipes she could find.

“I made donuts starting at the crack of dawn when the babysitter arrived, five days a week, for the next three months,” she said. “I was a madwoman in the kitchen, like I was on a mission from God. They were awful. The recipes were wrong. But if I didn't make donuts for one day, I felt like that day was wasted.”

She eventually hit on the
Joy of Cooking
recipe; it was perfect.

“The potatoes are peeled, then boiled, then put through a ricer, not mashed. It makes the donuts velvety.”

She brought samples of her now-excellent donuts around to coffee shops and other businesses. Orders quickly started coming in and growing, from two or three dozen a day to twelve, forty, and then one hundred dozen a week. Her father, recently retired, helped her fill orders.

After only seven months from the day she'd made her first donut, Leigh left her bartending job, moved out of her parents' attic, and opened the first Holy Donut shop in a former market. Her father came along as her business partner.

“We use all fresh ingredients—organic sugar, Vermont flour, local eggs. And local berries, lemons and limes zested by hand, and the best chocolate, Callebaut super-dark chocolate and Bensdorp cocoa powder. It's a strange way to make donuts, it's so labor-intensive; it takes seventeen people from start to finish, mixing the dough, hand-shaping each donut, frying them, glazing them. It's not the most profitable way, but I don't take any shortcuts.”

While Leigh talked, she had not missed a single thing that had happened in the place. Now she turned around and then quickly got up.

“Empty racks. Do you mind if I get up and refill them?”

I watched her bring in trays of fresh donuts, including one of the gluten-free dark-chocolate sea-salt. With difficulty, I resisted the temptation to eat another one.

“How did you hit on the idea to make gluten-free donuts?” I asked her when she came back.

“It was sort of a fluke,” she said. “I found I had the time and energy to experiment again. The science of gluten-free is beyond me, but again, I got lucky. I use a combination of Arrowhead Mills and Bob's Red Mill gluten-free flour blends. Other blends are inedible, like cement, but these two together are perfect.”

“And they're really gluten-free,” I said. “I've watched them make them at the Park Avenue place. They use separate fryers.”

“And a separate room to mix the dough and glaze them, separate glazes and ingredients,” she said.

“I've eaten many of them, and I've never once had a bad reaction,” I said. “And I've heard from people who've eaten both kinds that your gluten-free donuts are even better than the regular ones.”

“They're more dense, more cakelike,” she said. “Maybe they are better. Every now and then I eat a dark-chocolate sea-salt one and go, ‘Holy shit, these are magnificent.'”

According to the old joke, a Maine farmer who's asked what he's growing answers “Rocks.” But the truth is that Maine, although it's the most wooded state in the country, with a short growing season and long, harsh winters, is a very good place for farming, thanks to Maine farmers' tried-and-true techniques and scrappy know-how.

In the
Portland Press Herald
's Source section's inaugural issue, in their essay tracing the history of Maine farming, Mary Pols and Meredith Goad wrote,

“Ezekiel Holmes, an 1824 graduate of the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin College, [. . .] was essential to opening Aroostook County to farming, visiting in 1838 and authoring a report that spoke glowingly of the enticements of the potential farmland there. He urged men, ‘just starting in life' with strong arms and good courage to ‘Go to the Aroostook.'

“And the men—along with some women—did just that, beginning in earnest in 1842 and making their way along a new road built during the 1838–39 Aroostook War. By 1860 there were 22,000 people in Aroostook County. By 1870, it had 3,209 farms and 133,024 acres of improved land.”

The conditions turned out to be ideal for these “rocks,” as were the cool nights and warm days of summer, precipitating a cycle of May planting and September harvesting. In the mid-twentieth century, Maine produced more potatoes than any other state—even Idaho. Over the centuries, the quiet, humble potato has been as important a contribution to the state's economy as the iconic lobster; it could be called the state vegetable.

“In the early 1800s,” said Jim Gerritsen, an organic potato farmer, in a 2006 speech to the members of MOFGA, or the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardener's Association,

“the first white settlers to Aroostook County started carving fields out of the forest and immediately began planting potatoes. What they found was that unlike the marginal soils covering most of New England, the geologically distinct, well-drained, fertile loam soils of Aroostook along with the cool northern climate were perfect for growing potatoes. Over the next hundred years, farmers made steady and massive efforts to clear the trees from hundreds of thousands of acres in order to grow potatoes.”

Gerritsen went on to explain how Maine's Potato Empire was created in Aroostook County. The marriage of good soil and annual precipitation, along with the arrival of the railroad, meant that by the early 1950s an annual crop of almost a quarter million acres anointed Maine as the leader in United States potato production.

This is no longer the case. A switch to heavily publicized Idaho russets, as well as an increasingly industrialized food industry and subsidizations of Western farms, and low prices, have caused the Maine potato to lose its national sovereignty in the market; it's now a quarter of what it was at its peak. But Maine's potato-farming culture is still closely knit and cohesive, largely unchanged in 150 years.

“Going back many generations,” said Gerritsen, “everyone in Aroostook has worked in the fields, picking potatoes. We are one of the last areas in the United States where schools are still closed
for Harvest Break so that kids can help farmers get their crop in. Often the teenagers that we hire are taught potato-picking technique by their parents and grandparents who, they themselves, learned when they were young pickers.”

“We used to get our potatoes from Fryeburg,” Leigh told me. “We peeled and boiled and riced them by hand. But we outgrew that. Now we sell one-point-two million donuts a year—”

“Over a million,” I repeated, amazed.

“—so we don't have time to process the potatoes ourselves. Five hundred pounds a week! We buy them already peeled and parboiled from a number of Aroostook County farms.”

I looked around. The line of people waiting to buy donuts had stretched to the door again, but the place still felt peaceful, comfortable, quiet.

“Do you ever think of franchising?” I asked.

“I'm scared of losing the soul of the place,” she said. “This country is so full of retail chains. I want a family business, where you walk in and feel that it's local Portland people, trying to hold our own here. I'm disenchanted with corporate crap. I feel it the minute I walk in the door if it's a chain; it makes me feel flat. I'm passionate about being local, supporting local.”

“I can tell,” I said. “You feel it in this place. But what about creating the same feeling in donut shops in other cities, that same sense of homeyness? Could it be done?”

She thought about this.

“My father and brother-in-law are on board; they're psyched about the idea of growing the business. But I don't think more stores would equal more happiness. I could go insane; I'm already close. I'd have to
oversee the design of each shop, and then make sure everything was done right.”

“It does seem like a lot of headaches,” I said.

“I just want to stay the course. We serve two things: donuts and coffee. People say I should expand my products, sell pies, sandwiches, smoothies, merchandise . . . but I want to keep it simple, stay true to what we do really well. I want a strong business, but I want my original vision to be reflected in the experience. It would be easy to lose that. Having two shops is exciting; I feel very proud and so lucky. I mean, three years ago, I was bartending, I was dirt-poor. Thank God for my parents' attic! But I thought I would be stuck there forever.”

“I'm still wrapping my mind around more than a million donuts a year,” I said. “That is amazing.”

“I am profoundly grateful,” she said. “I love being self-sufficient. I expected a one-woman operation, clearing maybe two hundred dollars a week, enough to pay the bills, a little college fund. When you're down-and-out, you have to be resourceful. I had family support, a college degree, and creative passion. Luck is ninety-nine percent hard work. This town needed a donut shop and I was the conduit. It makes people happy. It's a nostalgia thing; it smells and tastes like Grandma's cooking. I want coming in here to be a nice experience. I was craving that, deeply craving a place that makes you feel good about life.”