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It’s a donut face-off for The Cinnamon Snail’s Adam Sobel, tonight on the Cooking Channel

August 7, 2013 Heather Chin
Vendy Award-winning The Cinnamon Snail and its chef, Adam Sobel, are featured on The Cooking Channel's latest episode of "Donut Throwdown." (Photo courtesy of The Cooking Channel)
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Beloved New York food truck The Cinnamon Snail conquered the stomachs of eaters and voters at the 2012 Vendy Awards by winning the People’s Choice award, and now vegan chef Adam Sobel is taking his creative treats to TV, on tonight’s “Donut Showdown” episode on The Cooking Channel.

He’ll compete against an international array of donut-makers, including Grayson Sherman of Jelly Modern Doughnuts in Calgary, Alberta in Canada, and Alison Smith of Glazed Gourmet Doughnuts in Charleston, South Carolina. All three will have to tackle a mystery ingredient, before the final two contestants will have to craft donuts with a “Bollywood” theme in order to win over the judges and take home the $10,000 prize and bragging rights.

(If you missed the August 7 original airing, then catch the episode on Saturday, August 10 at 8 p.m. or Midnight, Sunday, August 11 at 10 a.m., or Saturday, August 17 at 10 a.m..) 

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It has been three years since The Cinnamon Snail began dishing out all-vegan, organic sweets and savories out of their truck, and five years since they first started selling doughnuts and pastries from a table at their local farmer’s market in Red Bank, New Jersey. This fall, they’ll be moving their kitchen to Brooklyn — in Williamsburg’s artisan food community at the old Pfizer building — so it is a busy and exciting time for the whole Snail crew.

We caught up with Sobel before the episode to get his thoughts on doughnuts, food trucking, the importance of ingredients, and making the leap from the Big Apple to the big screen.

 

How did you feel when you got the call about the show? 

It’s awesome. We were delighted. We were contacted by the network that they’re doing this doughnut show and it actually got filmed the day after Thanksgiving in Toronto.

Was it hard to decide what you were going to make?

Yeah, it was kind of tricky to decide because it was very spur of the moment, what equipment would we have, but that made it fun and exciting and interesting. I was confident I could rely on my creativity to make things as interesting as possible.

What was it like filming the show? 

It was really fun for us because donut making was a secret art form,not a lot of cookbooks teaching donutmaking so you really have to learn it through tiral nad error and experimentation, so having the opportunity to hang out with other contestants on that show for weekend. Behind the scenes we were excited to hang out, pick each others brains, hwo to execute process of donut making, so really fun time for everyone involved on the show. So was really fun to swap tricks and stuff.

Do you consider this  your biggest stage yet?

Not in my opinion, not that it wasn’t exciting. I think the biggest spotlight for us is having been at the Vendy Awards a few years ago, like the Oscars of treats. We won the People’s Choice Award an award for our vanilla bourbon crème brulee donut the year before. That’s a huge deal for us because we were exclusively head-to-head with non-vegan/vegetarian food environment.

How has Brooklyn and New York impacted you as cook and truck?

I started working in restaurants when I was young in New York City. Had a lot of opportunities to work under really talented cooks and chefs. That was sort of my culinary school for me. I was able to pick everybody’s brains and learn a lot from the culture around me. They inspired me to have a lot of integrity with the ingredients and respect for the experience of the people eating our food.

When we started running our food truck, we started in Hoboken. Then when got our license to run in NYC about a year and a half ago, which quadrupled the volume of food we served every day. It’s really exciting, to serve a lot of people, a lot of non-vegetarians. And that’s kind of the whole point for me.

What made you want to make The Cinnamon Snail’s menu all-vegan and organic?

I’ve been vegan now for just about 12 years. my wife had been vegan for a really long time before and it was something I agreed with and respected the ethics behind but wasn’t really ready to make a commitment like that. When our first daughter was born, I just had this revelation about how important nursing was gong to be for her both physically and emotionally and I didn’t want to be in the way for that for any other living creatures.

You mentioned the importance of the integrity of ingredients. What maintains that integrity? Is that the key to your identity and success?

I think it’s definitely one of the ingredients in what makes the food extra wonderful, but I think the real key to our success is doing it with a lot of love and caring about the food, our customers, and our staff.

Do you think there will be a more mainstream re-emergence of doughnut-making?

Doughnuts started as this very handmade mom and pop type of thing and over last 50 years especially it became this highly industrialized automated process that places like Krispy Kreme and Dunkin Donuts took to an extreme. It was a lifeless, loveless kind of food with very little contact with human beings who can put extra love into making it nice and with care.

I think in last eight years or so, there has been this huge emergence in the U.S. and Canada of small artisan donuts. I think that’s what this show tries to focus on – bringing together different doughnut places throughout the country that really are doing things from scratch with fresh ingredients. So I think it’s definitely something that is reemerging.

What advice would you give to aspiring food truckers?

Keep experimenting in small batches, tweaking tweaking. Do it on a very small scale before doing it for a thousand people. You’ll be really able to perfect your craft.


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