Drexel Students Mix a Better Concrete in Shake Shack Contest
This summer, make sure you take a long look at the menu at Shake Shack’s University City location on Drexel’s campus. One of the delicious blended frozen custards, also known as “concretes,” will be designed by a Drexel student, with a portion of the dessert’s sales benefiting the Drexel Food Lab in the Center for Hospitality and Sport Management.
The winning concrete will be the last dessert standing in a culinary competition where Drexel students collaborated with the Food Lab and the Shake Shack corporate culinary team to design possible Shake Shack concretes. The contest was held over winter term, and the top three finalists — “Tahini-Meeny-Miney-Mo,” “City of Butter-ly Love” and “Banana Boathouse Row” — were announced at a special tasting event on April 5.
Out of the 15 recipe submissions, from students studying culinary arts as well as those majoring in business administration and hospitality management, seven were re-created for Shake Shack judges including Mark Rosati, Shake Shack’s culinary development manager, and Ryan Hux, general manager of Shake Shack University City. Now that they have picked the top three treats, Rosati and a Shake Shack team will work with the students, Drexel Food Lab Manager Ally Zeitz and Professor of Culinary Arts and Food Science Jonathan Deutsch, PhD, to perfect their recipe and evaluate each potential concrete’s cost, functionality, name and niche, among other deciding factors.
Though Shake Shack has several locations on college campuses across the country, Rosati has never collaborated with a university or culinary students before.
“This was my first time working with college students to develop potential Shake Shack products and it was great hearing their ideas and the reasons behind them,” he said. “We have our style of how we create our concretes and our flavors at Shake Shack, so it was very refreshing to see what the students came up with.”
Shake Shack creates specific concretes with hometown ties to its 88 national and international locations, including Philadelphia. Already, the University City location features concretes made with ingredients like coffee beans from its fellow Chestnut Square neighbor Joe Coffee (known as “The Study Buddy”) and donuts from Federal Donuts on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus (called the “Declaration of Donuts”). Drexel students were encouraged to design concretes with a Philly tie-in.
Emily Lloyd, a culinary arts junior currently on co-op working with both the pastry and bread teams at La Colombe in Fishtown, did just that when creating two concretes that later made it to the top three. Her “Tahini-Meeny-Miney-Mo” concrete used vanilla custard, honey, sesame brittle and Soom tahini, a Philadelphia brand that she had previously worked with in the Drexel Food Lab.
“What I loved about this concrete was how the sesame and honey worked together with the crunch from the sesame candy. It’s something you don’t see too often,” said Rosati.
Lloyd also designed the “City of Butter-ly Love” using vanilla custard with butter cake (a Philly favorite), caramel and brown butter bits. She had previously made butter cake in a class and thought it would be great to incorporate in a Shake Shack concrete with a Philly connection.
“I loved everything that was going on between the cake, the caramel sauce and those butter bits too. There was great texture and great flavor all around,” said Rosati.
Dana Bloom, a culinary arts and hospitality management senior, designed the other wining concrete. Her “Banana Boathouse Row” used chocolate custard, bananas, graham cracker crumbs, PB and Jams almond butter (another local brand) and toasted marshmallows. She was inspired by the banana boat treat she used to make during Girl Scout camping trips, where a banana is split open and filled with marshmallows and other sweet toppings and roasted over a campfire.
“I thought there were so many textures between the marshmallow and the banana and also the graham cracker on top. Normally when we create concretes, we only try to get one or two different textures,” said Rosati.
Other student submissions included fried waffles, nuts, edible flowers and bacon.
Though the University City Shake Shack had worked with Drexel’s Department of Culinary Arts and Food Science in the past, it was only able to put together a way for student items to be placed on the menu this past year, thanks to its general manager. Hux realized that a change in the custard schedule to feature concretes weekly instead of daily could make a special concrete really stand out, especially if it happened to be created by a Drexel student. He then reached out to Deutsch to make a partnership.
“Whenever we open a Shake Shack, we try and figure out how to become part of the community. We’ve been able to cross paths and work with Drexel on a few things in the past, but nothing that ever made it on the menu. It was always a matter of when the timing is right more than anything,” said Hux.
The resulting winner of this sweet competition and collaboration will be announced in a couple of weeks, just in time for summer. The combination of a frozen dessert benefiting Drexel just seems like too sweet of a deal to pass up.