Will Drive For Food

I can’t remember when we started the Bakery Quest. It wasn’t conceived as a road trip; it was a lifestyle. The pure Bakery Quest is this: we want to visit all of the bakeries in the world. To that end, when we see a bakery we haven’t been to the appropriate action is to immediately pull over. We order all things that look good and divide them between all members of the party. Vocal judgements are made and the wisdom of returning or not returning is established.

We have found some incredible bakeries this way, most notably when driving on a small highway in rural Utah after a weekend of hiking. We happened upon it in one of the few months it is open (during the high season of Zion National Park) and we haven’t found it open on any of our subsequent visits. That’s why you strike while the iron is hot: who knows when you’ll cross paths with this bakery again?

So when I started reading William Least-Heat Moon’s Blue Highways and felt the tug of the road, I immediately thought of food. There is a joy in finding obscure food that you love or that other people love. It creates an instant connection. And after a year of being mostly homebound we are itching to get back on the road. Because of the pandemic I didn’t want to stay overnight anywhere that wasn’t in my bubble so I limited myself to day trips and uniquely Utah foods (of which there are many). When a crowdsourcing post on Facebook got 47 replies in 10 minutes I knew I had hit a vein. So what food do Utahns feel strongly about? Fry sauce.

Until I moved to Utah, fry sauce was my own private concoction. I assume that at some point my parents (both native Utahns) taught me how to make it, but it feels like I have just always known that ketchup is a runner-up for fry accompaniment. If you have access to mayo and mustard you can turn that ketchup into a plate-puddle of the good stuff. It wasn’t until my freshman year at BYU that I ever had commercially prepared fry sauce. It felt like people were trying to shrink wrap my grandmother’s applesauce cookies.

Because of that, I’ve been more of a passive Utah fry sauce consumer. I don’t seek it out specifically, or, rather, I didn’t until now. Now I want to try them all. It won’t be the same as a carefully proportioned salmon colored blob with white and yellow at the edges on a melmac plate, but few things are.

I want to try all of the fry sauce within a day’s drive of the Provo area and I will evaluate them here as I go along. I have made the fry sauce survey form available on the cloud for downloading/printing here. Please fill it out and send it to me (email at the bottom of the form) if you, too, want to be mindful about your condiments (because I probably can’t hit all of the places personally and because your perspective is also valid). I’m also up for trying your personal recipes so send those along too (no house calls unless I know you personally and Covid precautions are in place).

The first place we went to is Arctic Circle. I know. Talk about fast food commercialism. But Arctic Circle lays claim to the title of First Fry Sauce in the U.S. Well, technically, they call themselves “America’s First Fry Sauce” but what they mean is the United States. The ketchup/mayo combination purportedly originated in Argentina in the mid-1920’s at a golf club and is know as “salsa golf.” Don Carlos Edwards, the founder of Arctic Circle, started marketing it here in Utah in the 1940’s (with no knowledge of golf sauce). This is the earliest documented evidence of the sauce in Utah so I had to start there.

I was unimpressed. It was perfectly ok, but not something to bring a person to Arctic Circle above all else and really just one click above ordinary ketchup. We finished the cup just because it was there and we had fries. I sure hope Utah, Idaho, and select portions of Arizona have more to offer. Also, I learned upon hitting up our first fry sauce joint that my youngest kid hates fry sauce, a fact that had never previously been voiced. She prefers the Bakery Quest. Of course. Everyone does. That’s why the Bakery Quest a lifestyle and fry sauce is a fleeting obsession.

Any bets on how long before we can turn her into a fry sauce connoisseur? Tune in for more in the next installment of On the Road to Fry Sauce.