Poppin’ fresh Puffed pastries delight Jordan Pond House patrons

Recently, for the first time in 12 years, I stood in the kitchen of the Jordan Pond House restaurant and ate a popover.

I ripped open the puffed pastry, letting the steam inside escape and rise into my face. I spread a wedge of butter on the exposed doughy membranes and spooned a dollop of strawberry jam into a crispy hollow to add to the flavor of the treat. Popping part of the pastry into my mouth, I savored the delicious morsel.

The taste of the popover and its resulting popularity were the reasons I could still remember the recipe I followed when I made popovers in that kitchen, even though I haven’t worked at the restaurant in more than a decade. In the two summers I spent away from my college studies working as a cook at the Jordan Pond House, I routinely made a couple thousand popovers each day to feed the demand of the customers.

According to Jesse Fish, the restaurant’s current popover cook, not much has changed since I worked there in 1989 and 1990. Even though the restaurant offers a full menu for lunch and dinner, popovers are still what draws visitors from all over the country and the world to this restaurant and its tea lawn that gently slopes toward Jordan Pond and the surrounding mountains of Acadia National Park.

“That’s what a lot of people are coming here for, the popovers and the tea,” Fish said as he stood in front of the convection ovens used to cook the Yorkshire puddinglike treats. Fish was about an hour away from cooking the first batch of the day and had already turned on the four ovens used exclusively for making popovers.

John Wight, the food services manager for the restaurant, said that when he was in Australia and New Zealand last winter, he came across people who had been to the Jordan Pond House, which has been making popovers for most of its 100-plus-year history.

“They were like ‘yeah, popovers!’,” Wight said. “It’s world-famous.”

The restaurant still makes between 2,000 and 3,000 of the pastries a day, depending on how busy it is, and still uses the same type of six-basin muffin tins to cook them in, according to Wight. The batter for the hollow, custard-ish treats also can be used for making pancakes and crepes, he said.

Some things, however, have changed over the past 12 years, according to Fish. The recipe I remembered has been doubled. Instead of using 50 eggs, 11/2 gallons of milk and 8 pounds of flour, the recipe now calls for twice that amount. Included in the doubled recipe are four tablespoons of salt and 1 tablespoon of baking soda, Fish said.

Also, each bucket of popover batter is now left in the walk-in refrigerator for three days before being used. This practice reflects what my colleagues and I knew years ago, which is that the popovers come out smaller and paler if the batter has not been given time to chill overnight. There is some separation in the chilled batters, and the top layer has to be skimmed off and discarded before the remaining batter is poured into the tins for cooking, Fish said.

The cooking cycles have been extended from the 10- and 15-minute time periods the restaurant followed in my day, according to Fish. Each batch of popovers now gets 20 minutes with the fan off and then 20 more minutes with the fan on in a convection oven pre-set to 400 degrees.

Because of the demand, the pace in the kitchen and at Fish’s popover station can get pretty busy. Fish said he continues the practice of putting tinfoil down under the mats on the floor and on the counter where he fills the muffin tins in order to make it easier to clean up splashed batter at the end of the day.

“It’s a lot better when it’s busy because the time just flies,” Fish said.

The fast pace can be stressful, and has been known to affect restaurant employees. I can remember members of the wait staff shoving each other as they battled for the freshest popovers that came out of the convection ovens and were placed in a warming oven.

Fish said they have a more advanced system today that involves a sign-up list when cooked popovers are scarce. There is still some competition among waiters and waitresses for the best ones, he said.

“A couple of times they’ll bump each other because they’re stressed out and they want to get the popovers out there [to their customers],” Fish said.

Amy Osborne, a Jordan Pond House waitress, acknowledged that wait-staff competition for the best of the available popovers can be a little “cutthroat.”

“I’m picky about them,” she said, adding that the popovers that have been in the warming oven for a while tend to shrink a little. “They’re not as visually appealing.”

When she delivers fresh, big, brown pastries to a table, she said, her customers are appreciative.

“A lot of people are like ‘oh, my!’ because they’re so puffy,” Osborne said. “They’re not expecting something so explosive.”

Kathy and Ron Simisky, vacationing away from their home in Leicester, Mass., said they had been to the Jordan Pond House twice in the past week just for the popovers.

“They’re wonderful,” Ron Simisky said as they sat at a table out on the tea lawn. “We went out last night for lobster but [my wife] said she’d rather come here for popovers.”

Fish said that as the popover cook, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. His urge to eat the popovers has faded away, he said.

“People assume I eat them all the time,” Fish said. “I probably [last] had one two weeks ago, and it probably wasn’t even a whole one.”

According to Wight, one man who regularly comes to the restaurant does so specifically for the popovers, but not because he likes to eat them. He takes the deflated and discarded treats that never make it out to the customers and feeds them to his pigs.

Wight said the man has never asked for jam and butter to take with him.

“Just the popovers,” he said. “Pigs aren’t too fussy.”