Gobble a Gob
Trying to start a food trend is a little bit like trying to give yourself a nickname — it almost never works. Yet a young writer/entrepreneur/baker named Steven Gdula seems to have done it. The food trend; not the nickname. Although we COULD call him “Stevie.”
Gdula was born in western Pennsylvania and raised on “gobs,” a confection that an outsider could be forgiven for confusing with a whoopie pie. Gobs, however, differ from whoopie pies in that they are filled with cream cheese frosting or buttercream, not marshmallow. They are also — at least in Gdula's interpretation — smaller, about 2½ inches in diameter. You eat them as you would a mini-cupcake or a cookie.
In 2008, Gdula followed the American imperative to go west and landed in a fixer-upper in San Francisco that, he says, “would've given Boo Radley a chill.” An underemployed freelance writer in need of an income, Gdula decided to join the ranks of the city's street-food vendors by baking and offering the treats of his childhood: gobs. In another nod to his youth — his favorite song, “Pinhead,” by the Ramones, with its refrain of “Gabba Gabba Hey” — Gdula named his business “Gobba Gobba Hey” which is also the title of his new cookbook (Bloomsbury).
Traditional gobs are chocolate with vanilla filling and are made, back in western Pennsylvania, with vegetable shortening and margarine. Gdula supplies both the traditional and the “S.F.” (San Francisco) version, substituting unsalted butter for margarine and Crisco, and Green & Black's organic cocoa powder for Hershey's.
But then he takes the gob far from its Cambria County roots. Familiar combos like carrot cake with citrus cream cheese filling and chocolate gobs filled with peanut butter segue into some fairly exotic offerings: Green Tea Gobs with Lemongrass-Ginger Filling (infused with Vietnamese coriander, aka “rau ram”), Horchata gobs (based on the Mexican rice, milk and cinnamon drink), and Coconut Gobs with a filling made from ube, a kind of yam used in Filipino cooking. When you are just a novice gob gobbler, you might want to start with the original, below.
Gdula's flavor combinations are gobsmackingly inventive. Way to go, Stevie.
Ÿ Marialisa Calta is the author of “Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the American Family” (Perigee, 2005). More at marialisacalta.com.