Chef Filling Sufganiyot With Mercury Suspects Exotic Bakery Competitiveness Going Too Far

“What’s next, lava? Little pockets of sulfuric acid?”

Jerusalem, December 8 – A worker at one of Israel’s prominent bakery and confection chains voiced concern today, as he injected a doughnut with an expensive, dangerous substance, that perhaps there exists the possibility that such establishments seeking to outdo one another in vying for customers before and during Hanukkah by pushing the boundaries of culinary convention might, just might, have become a tad excessive.

Ori Shenhav, 26, an employee at the Mahane Yehuda franchise of Roladin, set down his injector after finishing his part in the production of a run of doughnuts, or sufganiyot, for Hanukkah, which begins this Thursday evening and lasts eight days. The kitchen assistant remarked to no one in particular that he though about suggesting to management that the steps the chain has taken to stand apart from the sufganiya competition have trod, year by year, gradually closer to, and then beyond, the line between the merely extravagant and the outright irresponsible.

“It’s mercury now, because that’s so edgy,” he muttered. “What’s next, lava? Little pockets of sulfuric acid? This has got to stop before someone gets hurt. Or killed.”

Shenhav conceded he does not wish to return to the days when sufganiyot only came with strawberry-flavored jam filling or, if one lucked out, a paste that was almost but not completely, unlike dulce de leche. “I’m not one to long for the austerity of that time,” he acknowledged. “But there’s some distance between a gentrified society that can now support establishments that produce finer products, and a society that has cast all caution to the wind in the pursuit of the next big, push-the-envelope marketing gimmick. It says good things about our economy that we can charge fourteen shekels (about US $3.50) for a fancy piece of decorated fried dough. But I started shaking my head a few years ago when Corporate decided edible gold trim on sufganiyot would be a good idea. It’s been downhill from there.”

Other staff at Roladin expressed few or no misgivings about the growing Hanukkah trend. “I’ve had some radical sufganiya ideas for a while that only now do I feel like they might get listened to,” gushed a worker named Maya. “Even just last year or two years ago, I didn’t think the world was ready for this, but the way things have been going, I ‘m confident enough to say it out loud and expect to be taken seriously. So you know how sufganiyot go kind of stale after just a couple of hours? So, Styrofoam sufganiyot. That’s it. That’s the idea.”

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