Food - Drink
What Makes Utah Scones Unique?
By HEATHER LIM
One of the staples of going to a fair is the wide array of delicious deep-fried food and it’s pretty amazing that a combination of oil, flour, and sugar can produce such spectacular desserts, like donuts and funnel cakes. However, there’s a third dessert that combines the best parts of both donuts and funnel cakes — the Utah scone.
However, the Utah scone, despite the name, isn’t like the English or American scone at all, instead for Utahns, scones are homemade, deep-fried flatbreads coated in powdered sugar that can be whipped up within an hour. With a yeasty dough and crisp outer layer, the Utah scone can be likened to a beignet or a sopapilla.
Utah scones bear a close resemblance to Native American fry bread, invented sometime in the 19th century, and made from government rations of flour, oil, and sugar. This deep-fried staple is speculated to have been brought to Utah by Mormon missionaries who worked in reservations, but nobody knows why Utahns call them scones.
While American and English scones are made with a scraggly dough of butter, flour, salt, and eggs, Utah scones are made with a sticky dough of all-purpose flour, sugar, egg, yeast, baking powder. Mindee's Cooking Obsession recommends serving them with honey butter, cinnamon butter, or a combination of spiced honey butter.