How Rushmore Mountain Taffy became a South Dakota food favorite
Makenzie Huber
This article is about one of 18 South Dakota food favorites. For the complete list, go here.
Rushmore Mountain Taffy: Saltwater taffy created and sold at the Rushmore Mountain Taffy shop in Keystone with a recipe "handed down by several generations of candy chefs."
Rushmore Mountain Taffy: saltwater taffy created and sold at the Rushmore Mountain Taffy shop in Keystone with a recipe "handed down by several generations of candy chefs."
A 130-year-old machine stretches taffy in the window of the Rushmore Mountain Taffy Shop, its motion hypnotizing tourists as they walk by the shop.
Off to the side of the glass paneled room, there's a station reserved for flavoring the taffy before it's stretched. Peppermint, cinnamon, root beer, watermelon and green apple are among the 37 flavors.
The saltwater taffy is eventually separated into bite-size pieces on the machine, twisted into wax paper and ready to be bagged for the thousands of tourists who step through the Main Street Keystone shop.
Jeff Stverak, who owns and runs the shop with his sister, remembers stopping and watching the same process a couple times a summer as a child.
Stverak's parents bought the shop in 1980 after they moved to Rapid City from Yankton in 1978. He bought it from his parents in 1998.
The taffy shop originally started under a different name in 1967, Stverak said, but he couldn't remember the name of it.
The shop has been following the same steps for decades to produce the famous Black Hills taffy — and it seems to be working.
"It just seems we are a very popular stop here in the Black Hills," Stverak said.