'The best deal in town': East Bay kids still love cheese zombies, almost 60 years later

Viktoria Kolev, a baker for the Concord High School cafeteria, prepares fresh cheese zombies for students in the early morning of Monday, March 2, 2020. Viktoria Kolev, a baker for the Concord High School cafeteria, prepares fresh cheese zombies for students in the early morning of Monday, March 2, 2020. Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGate Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGate Image 1 of / 20 Caption Close 'The best deal in town': East Bay kids still love cheese zombies, almost 60 years later 1 / 20 Back to Gallery

Recipes for cheese zombies below.

Concord’s an unassuming city.

The deep East Bay locale, 30 miles from the city, has a different air. It's far removed from the bustling vainglory of San Francisco, the excessive hipness of Oakland and the poshness of the North Bay.

Concord is just Concord, your friendly neighborhood suburb, simple but replete with land and history and families. It’s one of the most populous cities in the Bay Area, credited with gifting the world Tom Hanks, Dave Brubeck, at least two of the Workaholics, Waterworld (or whatever it's called now) and the area’s great culinary contribution, the cheese zombie.

I recall zombies clearly from my days at Concord High School in the mid-aughts: bready white cloud puffs containing globs of melted American cheese, brushed with a sheen of salted butter. They were immaculate and nutritionally dubious, made flawless in memory.

Mount Diablo Unified School District students like me have been buying these things since the ‘60s. Early that decade, Mount Diablo High School bakers Decla Phillips and Helen Ballock improvised the breakfast treat in the school’s cafeteria kitchen, reportedly riffing on Ballock's husband's recipe for Piroshki. If Concord ever had a signature food, this is it.

As lore dictates, after zombies first caught on with the kids, Phillips and Ballock would arrive early to work each day and roll out sprawling sheets of white doughy fluff to meet daily demand. After the dough rested, the bakers would stretch it to fit baking pans, and layer it with cheese, and then another layer of dough.

The next step was crucial, as it separated the Concord zombie from a similarly named (but inferior, more sandwich-like) baked good native to the Yakima Valley. Concord zombies had to be sealed off so as to not allow the cheese to seep out of the fragile bun, so they crimped the edges of each roll with a special tool to ensure they’d stay tightly closed.

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The recipe has been tweaked over the decades to make them healthier and to account for changes to the state’s nutrition guidelines, says Dominic Machi, Mt. Diablo Unified School District’s director of food and nutrition services. Nevertheless, the concept is timeless. It’s comfort food, baked from scratch every day to give students a few bites of warmth before class on dry, frigid Concord mornings.

Machi, who is currently working to get MDUSD Eat Real certified (which would make them the first school district in California to do so), says the zombies’ base has been reformulated with whole wheat flour, and its American cheese filling will likely soon get swapped over to a healthier meltable white cheese.

It seems unlikely that the change is going to put any kind of dent in sales. Across the MDUSD’s five high schools and nine middle schools, students (and faculty) are currently buying up 4,200 zombies filled with cheese or cheese and meat in a given week, which equates to around 150,000 sold over the school year.

“It’s freshly-made breakfast,” Machi notes. Plus, it’s still just $2.50. “It’s the best deal in town.”

And Concordians still have fond memories of the food, as detailed by users in a large local Facebook group called Concord Rants and Raves.

“I went to Oak Grove Middle and Ygnacio Valley High and that's what sustained me all those years!” wrote one fan of the breakfast treat. “There is nothing better than a nice warm cheese zombie! I used to have my daughter bring them home for me when she was at Oak Grove.”

My mom, who attended Concord High in the ‘70s, remembers them similarly. They were “soft and squishy,” she says, but not too doughy.

“It’s a good memory: It was filling and really good,” she recalls. “It was something to look forward to. You just had to get there before they sold out.”

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Like the rest of the deep East Bay, Concord’s changed some in recent years. It’s not immune to the new and young tech-employed populations moving in beside longtime residential working and middle class families like mine. Housing prices have gone up. Something is actually happening with the Naval Weapons Station. Todos Santos Plaza is a destination now, and there’s a whole new shopping center with a Dave & Buster’s and a “luxe” cinema.

But inside the public high schools of the Mount Diablo Unified School District, zombies are dependable, stalwart. They're cheap and always available, every morning. Everything else evolves, but in the annals of East Bay life, zombies are the constant.

Machi, who grew up in San Francisco, says when he moved to Concord he learned swiftly about that cultural importance of the specialty food. After he took his job with the Mount Diablo Unified School District, he says, he “had people come up, like, ‘Do they still make the cheese zombie?’”

The significance was not lost on him. Now, he says he has no plans to phase out the food from school cafeterias.

“It’s a tradition that definitely I’m going to keep going in my tenure as director,” he adds. “It’s a signature dish, and it reflects a positive memory for our students presently and the alumni. It’s a big part of [our] history.”

Those without an in at the local public schools can still find them sold by vendors at Todos Santos Plaza farmers markets, at Patty’s Original Cheese Zombies near Concord High, or in the recipes below.

Recipes for the Official Mount Diablo Unified School District's Cheese Zombies:

Whole Wheat Dough

Yield: 5 lbs of dough, 20 4-0z. portions

Ingredients:

1/2 cup yeast, Active Dry

1/2 cup fine granulated sugar

4 cups warm water



Step 1. Make sure water is at 105 degrees

Step 2. Combine water, sugar and yeast in a bowl.

Step 3. Dissolve yeast and let sit / bloom for 10 to 15 minutes until bubbles form.



Ingredients:

5 cups white flour

6 cups whole wheat flour

1 Tbsp table salt

1/2 cup olive/canola oil



Step 1. Using a mixing bowl, add both flours, oil and salt to yeast mixture.

Step 2. Mix on low speed until combined, then on #2 speed for 10 to 15 minutes, more if making a larger batch. Let the gluten form.

Step 3. Pour dough onto floured table and form as needed.



Cheese Zombies

Yield: 20 portions

Note: 4 cuts to the pound.

Ingredients:

5 lbs. whole wheat dough (see above)

160 slices American cheese

Step 1. Zombies are formed by placing 2 oz. of cheese (4 slices) in center of 4 oz. of dough and enclosing the cheese within the dough. Make sure to pinch the dough together so the zombie does not leak.

Step 2. Form the dough into a round bread shape.

Step 3. Mist with water, place in proofer for 15 minutes to rise.

Step 4. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes, turn and bake another 5 minutes.

Step 5. Take from oven and brush with butter to glaze zombie.

Cheese and Pepperoni Zombie



Yield: 20 portions

Note: 4 cuts dough to the pound, 2-oz. of cheese, 1-oz. pepperoni, 2-oz. sauce per zombie

Ingredients:

5 lbs. Whole wheat dough

140 slices Sliced Clean Label (or any sliced meltable white cheese)

2 1/2 lbs. mozzarella cheese

40 ounces marinara sauce

20 ounces pepperoni

Step 1. Zombies are formed by placing 2 oz. of cheese (4 slices), 1 oz. pepperoni and 2-oz. sauce in center of 4 oz. of dough and enclosing within the dough. Make sure to pinch the dough together so the zombie does not leak.

Step 2. Form the dough into a round bread shape.

Step 3. Mist with water, place in proofer for 15 minutes to rise.

Step 4. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes, turn and bake another 5 minutes.

Step 5. Take from oven and brush with butter to glaze zombie.

Ham and Cheese Zombie

Yield: 20 portions

Note: 4 cuts dough to the pound, 2-oz. of cheese, 1-oz. ham per zombie

Ingredients:

5 lbs. Whole wheat dough

160 slices American cheese

20 oz. ham



Step 1. Zombies are formed by placing 2 oz. of cheese (4 slices) and 1 oz. ham in center of 4 oz. of dough and enclosing the cheese and ham within the Dough. Make sure to pinch the dough together so the zombie does not leak.

Step 2. Form the dough into a round bread shape.

Step 3. Mist with water, place in proofer for 15 minutes to rise.

Step 4. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes, turn and bake another 5 minutes.

Step 5. Take from oven and brush with butter to glaze zombie.

Edit: This article has been edited to correct the last name of Helen Ballock.

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGate digital editor. Email: alyssa.pereira@sfgate.com | Twitter: @alyspereira

