Sunday, August 30, 2015

The Cookie Behind the Legend: What makes Sweet Martha's so good?



"I've never felt like I was in the cookie business.  I've always been in a feel good feeling business.  My job is to sell joy.  My job is to sell happiness.  My job is to sell an experience. "  --Debbi Fields


By Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, United States (Sweet Martha's Cookie Jar) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons


Mrs. Fields knew that cookies make people happy.  At the Minnesota State Fair, cookies are more than another snack; they are part of the quintessential State Fair experience.  

At its two locations, Sweet Martha's Cookie Jar sells over one million cookies every day of the Fair, head and shoulders above any other vendor.  Over the entire twelve days, Sweet Martha's takes in over two and a half million dollars on its only menu item:  chocolate chip cookies (plus milk to wash them down, of course).

Here's the thing:  I work at Sweet Martha's.  I will admit I've sampled a good number of cookies--and I've served thousands of them--so I know that not all batches of cookies are the same.  I know that some visitors have waited over an hour for these cookies.  Even so, everyone reaches the front of the line with a smile.  What is it about these cookies that makes these people so happy? 


Behind the Scenes


By Albertine Watson (originally posted to Flickr as f_DSC03006) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsMaybe there's something in the batter.  To start out, here's a little background on the cookie-making setup.  Life for a cookie begins when it is mixed up in massive mixing bowls by one of a few "specialists" (we can't give the recipe to just anyone).  The enormous bowl is then wheeled over to a group of four employees working a mechanical dolloping machine.  They rapidly plunk the dough onto sheets, stack them on tall racks, and put the rack into an oven.  About 1,400 cookies fit onto a rack.  The scale is massive, but everything is made right in the booth.

After eleven minutes of bake time, the racks have a few minutes to cool before servers stack them into a bucket or cone for the happy customer.  Beyond the basic cookie-making-and-serving tasks, employees like me put baked cookies into pails (the cooler cookies form a base for the hot cookies so the whole thing doesn't form a globby mess), slap stickers onto the lids (so you know we sell frozen cookie dough), clean everything, water flowers, and run things between the two booths.  They certainly keep us busy!

The majority of workers are high school and college kids getting a little income before the school year picks up.  Like me.  The other main group of employees are fun-loving adults who love to chat with customers and other workers, making puns and just having a good time.  They're basically the cookie experts.  A few times a day the higher ups (like Martha--yes, she's a real person) come through to see how things are going.  

To get a job here, you have to have a reference who already works at Sweet Martha's.  That means that pretty much everyone knows one another, and if we don't, you are mixed around enough to meet the rest.  The whole establishment feels like a family--maybe the extra love helps!


On Your Side of the Counter


My favorite job is serving.  I love getting the chance to chat face-to-face with the customers, especially as I stack the cookies as high as I can--within reason, of course.  Little kids stand on tiptoe to get their chins onto the counter, staring at the cookies they've been waiting for, eyes getting wider and wider as the stack gets taller and taller...even grown-ups start laughing at the sheer volume of cookies they are about to receive.

That could be a big part of Sweet Martha's popularity.  You get a lot.  The take-home pail gives you about four dozen cookies.  At about 30¢ per cookie, that's the best deal at the booth.  The cones are trickier to balance, but you still get a lot of cookies for the price--a welcome abundance in a world of expensive fair food.  Plus the stacking process is another form of entertainment.

Perhaps people love the cookies because they are so hot and gooey.  Who doesn't love a gooey cookie?  Since they are all made on-site by real people, they feel every bit as homemade as the ones you snitched off the counter when your mom wasn't looking.  Except you can eat as much as you want.  Granted, batches are different, and they don't always have the same gooey center or abundance of chocolate chips; still, you get enough that the few cookies that are only good usually are accompanied by plenty that are great.  


The Cookie Experience


I think the real reason that Sweet Martha's makes people happy is simply that it does.  Fairgoers know the cookies are good.  Everyone talks about how good they are.  Many visitors stop by to finish their State Fair "bucket list" with a bucket of Sweet Martha's cookies, just like they have every year.  Others have been told, "You have to stop by Sweet Martha's!" and are joining in the tradition.

These cookies are unique in a world of pronto pups, cheese curds, and funnel cakes, but they are as much a tradition as the Great Minnesota Get Together itself.  The Fair just wouldn't be the Fair without a bucket of hot, gooey Sweet Martha's cookies.



More Info:

Friday, August 14, 2015

Another Minnesota "Mystery": The Karst of Southeastern MN


On the surface of things, Minnesota is a beautiful state.  We know that.  Descend underground, though, and Minnesota still cannot fail to impress.  There's the mystery of Devil's Kettle and the disappearing waterfall.  There's the Soudan Mine and the high-energy physics lab it houses.  And there's the entire southeastern corner of the state, home to karst topography and most notably Mystery Cave.

Karst topography occurs in areas of water-soluble rock such as limestone or dolomite, and is characterized by features such as caves, sinkholes, springs, and rivers that drop underground.  The southeastern corner of Minnesota has plenty of sinkholes and even claims to be the sinkhole capital of the United States.

Mystery Cave is the longest cave system in the Upper Midwest, stretching at least 13 miles (plus some possibly undiscovered passages).  It was found by farmer Joseph Petty in the late 1930s when he noticed suspiciously snowless areas during a Minnesota winter (the cave remains 48 degrees year-round, and it had melted the snow on the ground above it).

Mystery Cave and nearby Niagara Cave are popular sightseeing destinations.  The underground worlds display natural artworks beyond traditional stalactites (c for ceiling, t for top) and stalagmites (g for ground).  Some favorite features of Mystery Cave are ribbons of rock called cave bacon, rivulets of color caused by minerals carried on the water, large and small fossils, and Turquoise Lake.  Niagara Cave boasts charismatically-named features like Paul Bunyan's Bed, Elephant's Head, an echo chamber, and, of course, a 60-foot waterfall.  There are tours for all levels of adventure.

The caves of southeastern Minnesota may be invisible when you return to the surface, but the karst geography has a big effect on the environment.  Chilled water that has flowed through the caves provides the ideal habitat for trout.  Unstable ground doesn't hold standing water well, so there are few mosquitoes.  The area is also "driftless," meaning it wasn't squashed by the last round of glaciers, but runoff from the huge chunks of ice formed deep, cutting rivers that resulted in steep valleys and bluffs.  This results in a varied landscape that can provide home to an abundance of animals, compounded by its location between two biomes: tallgrass prairie and deciduous forest.


The long and the short of it is, southeastern Minnesota is a great spot for an August campout: plenty of wildlife, few mosquitoes, cool caves to beat the heat, and geologic sights to see.  And that's not even taking into consideration historic Forestville.

References and Photo Credits

Saturday, August 8, 2015

The Bottomless Pit that Ate Half the Brule River

The Brule River flows 14 miles from Vista Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, drops 800 feet as it flows through Judge C.R. Magney State Park, splits in half, and just before reaching its target of Lake Superior, becomes one of the unsolved mysteries of the natural world.  Half the river follows the traditional route, cascading 50 feet and then flowing onward towards the Great Lake.  The other half, for all intents and purposes, disappears entirely. 

But where does it go?

To answer this question, scientists have turned to the age-old and popular method of throwing stuff into the hole.  This has been largely unsuccessful.  Scientists and hikers have tossed in dye, ping-pong balls, even logs, and nothing has turned up either downstream or in Lake Superior.  Why don't they just throw in a GPS tracker?  First, the thick rhyolite rock blocks any transmission signal from a GPS or other tracking device.  Second, Devil's Kettle (the mysterious wormhole the vanishing half of the river disappears into) is very violent.  The pressure, temperature, vibration, and violence of the water are all reasons they haven't been able to throw cables, cameras, or scientists into the hole to see where it goes.

 How does it just vanish?

Scientists have described and dismissed a number of possibilities based on the geology of the area.  It's not uncommon for the pounding force of a waterfall to bore a hole through rock.  This forms potholes and giant's kettles, but typically water fills the depression and flows over the side.  Some have proposed that Devil's Kettle was a pothole that bored through the rock into an underground river.  This is highly unlikely, as underground caves and rivers tend to form in soft rock like limestone, and the nearest limestone to Devil's Kettle is hundreds of miles away in southern Minnesota.  

Perhaps the waterfall bored into a lava tube: a kind of tunnel that forms when the outside of a lava flow hardens while the inside is still liquid, letting the inside drain out to leave a long tube.  This could form in volcanic rock like basalt, which is found in the Lake Superior area.  However, in order for lava tubes to form, lava has to flow down the side of a volcano--in Minnesota, it bubbled up out of a fissure and spread in flat sheets.  Lava tubes cannot form this way, and no lava tubes have been found in the area.  For the sake of argument, let's say nature bent its rules and one formed by chance.  Even so, it is highly unlikely that it would be oriented in just the right way for the water to flow through it, or even for the waterfall to break through the hard, volcanic rhyolite (which never forms lava tubes) to reach the basalt layer 

One last suggestion:  fault lines.  Sometimes disturbances along a fault line can create openings where water could accumulate--but only in small amounts, never in the type of volume that crashes into Devil's Kettle.  On top of that impracticality, there is no evidence of a fault line in the area to begin with.  

An open case

For now, this spectacle in a remote corner of Minnesota remains an unsolved mystery.  You can check it out by visiting Judge C.R. Magney State Park near Grand Marais; the hike is a little over a mile from the park entrance and contains 200 steps.  But while you're elsewhere in Minnesota, keep an eye out for accumulations of dye, ping-pong balls, and logs--just in case.  




References/Further Reading