At festival, it’s OK to be cheesy

By Jordan Cohen

Devotees of the treat travel hundreds of miles each year to get their fix.

NILES — Tara Templeton lives in Cleveland, but Sunday she returned to her native Niles to buy her favorite food at the 75th annual Our Lady of Mount Carmel Festival.

“The cheese puffs — they’re yummy,” Templeton said. “I come back every year just to get my cheese puff fix.”

Ethel Miller, 73, agrees. She has attended the festival at the Robbins Avenue church each of the last 60 years, and her first stop is always the cheese puff line. Miller has come a long way just to buy this favorite considering that she lives in Venice, Fla., and has resided there for the last 15 years since leaving Niles.

“That hasn’t kept me from coming back every year since I moved to make sure I get the cheese puffs,” Miller said.

None of this comes as a surprise to Mike Marrara, who has been chairman of the festival for 11 years.

“They [cheese puffs] have been our biggest seller year in and year out,” Marrara said. “People try to get them elsewhere, but you can’t get them and you can’t duplicate them.”

So what is it about these big fried pieces of dough that attract such a devoted following?

Start with the contents: flour, cheese, milk, margarine, eggs and sugar. Marrara says the key to the pastry’s unique taste is the tradition behind its development.

“It’s all homemade and handed down from our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers,” Marrara said.

Yet, aficionados of the cheese puff and the cheese twist, its sibling — also sold at the festival, may be surprised to learn that the person who directs their production is neither a mother nor grandmother.

It’s Jeff Preston, 47, a St. Joseph Medical Center registered nurse, who didn’t even know about the cheese puffs until his wife, Stephanie, introduced them to him at the festival in 1995.

“I was hooked and offered to help out, and the women here taught me how to mix the dough,” Preston said. “From there I just fell into it.”

Preston and his wife direct a staff in a room inside the church in which young and old shape the flour for the puff or twist and mix in American cheese — two slices for each puff. It’s nonstop throughout the festival and can be rough on the hands.

“Actually, the dough keeps our hands nice and soft while we’re working,” Stephanie Preston said, “but in the morning, our hands are stiff.”

It’s clearly labor-intensive and out of the eyes of puff lovers who only see the finish product dipped in oil. That’s fine with Preston, who said he intends to keep either twisting or shaping the dough “for years to come.”

No one has kept an actual count of the total puffs and twists purchased at Mount Carmel, but Preston and Marrara estimate more than 25,000 are sold throughout the five-day run. Preston said sales of the puffs outnumber the twists by 2-to-1.

But then there’s that touchy subject of nutrition. Health food advocates might cringe at the ingredients of the tasty morsel, especially considering that it is deep-fried, but nothing seems to diminish the demand as seen in the long lines of eager buyers.

“We didn’t say they were healthy, but we did say they’re good,” said Dennis Hayda, festival co-chair.

Hayda is responsible for ordering the massive amounts of ingredients and estimates that the church spends approximately $8,000 just for the thousands of puffs and the twists. Simple mathematics indicate that the pastries more than pay for themselves. Puffs sell for $2.50 each and twists are $2.

Not everyone is sold on the taste of the cheese puffs.

“I’m not a lover of this stuff because to me it just tastes like a toasted cheese sandwich,” said Barbara Scarnecchia of Niles. Yet, she made the comment while standing in line with her husband to buy the cheese puffs.

“My son who is 22 and my daughter, 15, just love them and asked me to get some for them,” Scarnecchia said. She turned toward her husband, Aldo.

“Why are you buying them?”

His answer perhaps best represents the feelings of the thousands of the cheese puff devotees.

“Because,” he said, “I like them.”