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New Strange Donuts Corporate Chef Mary Boehne and not-new co-owner Corey Smale.
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Ready or not: Less than a week into the job and Mary Boehne is already part of Strange's wacky marketing machine. Note: The dates of the Get Mary-ed promotion are July 31 - August 2.
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A recent "Stranger," the "Mai Pho King Done" (heh heh), made in collaboration with Chef Qui Tran of Mai Lee.
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Strange Donuts co-owner Corey Smale keeps an eye on us.
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Smale's donut tattoo is the same shade of blue as the donut shop itself.
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The ever-popular chicken-and-waffle donut
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Mmm... an entire rack of fresh donuts.
SLM A-List Winner Strange Donuts, already a force majeure in the St. Louis bakery and restaurant world for their knack for viral marketing, has retrenched and hired a pastry chef to take it to the next level.
Chef Mary Boehne, lured from the swank hallways of the Four Seasons Hotel St. Louis and its diadem eatery, Cielo, will oversee no less than the conversion of every facet of the Strange Donuts menu. With the blessing of Strange owner Corey Smale and partners, she aims to review and revamp just about every glaze, frosting, chopped nut and custard filling in the joint. Perhaps her biggest task will be to eventually develop a blend of ingredients to make the basic cake and yeast donut doughs from scratch. As far as we know, only one donut-maker in town currently uses a mix he creates himself, rather than a commercially available dough mix. The changes Boehne represents to the Strange menu are significant.
“Mary is the biggest hire [co-owner] Jason [Bockman] and I have made,” said Smale. “We have a great staff of people, but as we're looking to grow, we want the best in every way – the best video games, marketing, donuts, everything. We went to Chicago last Monday to get inspired by other shops. We want to continue to elevate. Mary is the next natural step. There's a little work to be done on our donuts yet for sure. We didn’t come from the bakery world but we ended up in it.
“We have been doing workshops and she's been teaching the guys and gals how to make things from scratch. We started with the glaze [for the basic glazed donut]. We made eight different ones and winnowed it down to the one we liked best. [Author's note – it is fantastic.]
“Yesterday I had a caramel sauce made from scratch. I don’t even know how to describe it, it was so good.
“Mary allows everyone to get better.”
Let's hear from Boehne herself.
Donuts are a potent food. Tell me your how deep your donut desires go.
Donuts have been one of my all-time favorite guilty pleasures. I lived in Colorado for about a year and looked into opening a donut shop there and was even researching flavors, but it never really came to fruition. Growing up, my family would go to our favorite donut shop, the Donut House on Union near Bayless, every Sunday morning and get a dozen and bring them home. We all looooove donuts. I grew up trying tons of different donuts.
What, specifically, would you like to see created at Strange Donuts?
I'm really excited to turn classical flavors into donuts. The guys at the shop are very creative and like to make wacky flavors. I'd like to bring in my pastry background and do a Linzer Torte donut, a Black Forest cake donut, an opera-cake donut, a tiramisu donut – to turn the classics into donut flavors. I think people could relate to that and we could really blow their minds with it.
What will change there?
We are putting our hands on everything, whether it's already made from scratch or not. We want upgraded versions of everything. As a team, we are looking to improve and enhance everything on the menu. And if we could brand our own Strange Donut mix, that would be awesome. I'm really excited to work with all of the bakers at Strange. They're extremely innovative and an awesome group to work with. They are pros.
Describe the most extreme kitchen disaster you had to deal with during your time at the Four Seasons.
At a very high-end, 500-person banquet, someone forgot to write the bread order on the event sheet. Nobody ordered bread for the event, so there was no table-side bread for a party of 500. We ended up having to clean out the freezer of every single backup bread. We sliced baguettes, focaccia, anything we could get our hands on, and we made it work.
Did you make bomboloni with former Four Seasons St. Louis Chef Fabrizio Schenardi when he introduced the donut stand at the hotel?
I did. And they still make those and other kinds of donuts at Cielo. It's a different process. It's its own confection. It's filled before it's fried, which I always thought was interesting.
Big changes are afoot with plans for a second and third location of Strange in the works.
Hopefully Strange is on its way to becoming a St. Louis institution, like Ted Drewes.
Editor's Note: Mary Boehne's first day at Strange Donuts was July 28.
Strange Donuts
2709 Sutton
Maplewood
314-932-5851
