Looks like Homer Simpson had it right. Sweet and airy or dense
and filling, doughnuts make even the health-conscious salivate.
Dozens of rainbow-colored sprinkles crown a bed of glossy chocolate icing. Embedded in the crevices are pockets of sugar that didn’t quite make it to the dry stage between exiting the glazing line and reaching their final destination. Underneath the icing lie razor-thin layers of fluffy dough, meshed together to form a slightly asymmetrical circle smack dab in the center.
It’s the doughnut, and whether you like ’em raised, cake, old-fashioned or custard-filled, admit it: You like ’em.
And though you might pride yourself on being a doughnut connoisseur, chances are you’re not as dedicated to the fried delight as Mao Yath, owner of Donuts & Things in Morgan Hill.
Every day, Yath arrives at his shop at 1:30 in the morning to start mixing the dough for the first batch of doughnuts – the cake variety – made from flour, water, baking powder, sugar and dried milk. While the fryer is warming up, Yath shapes the dough into circles, dumps them into a vat of oil and begins preparing the icing with sugar and water.
Cake doughnuts are fried at 350 degrees for three to five minutes. Another variety – raised doughnuts – are cooked for the same amount of time, but in oil about 25 degrees higher. The warmer temperature gives the doughnuts a lighter, more airy texture than the cake variety, as does the substitution of baking soda for baking powder and the addition of eggs to the dough.
Raised doughnuts take about an hour longer to make than cake doughnuts because the yeast needs time to rise, hence the title “raised” doughnuts. While cake doughnuts are fried, glazed and ready to inhale, raised doughnuts require a little more preparation.
After the dough is mixed and before they’re fried, raised doughnuts sit in a proof box, which is a tall, glass case with a conveyer belt inside. The doughnuts travel throughout the case on the belt and are exposed to a very specific amount of heat and humidity, which activate the yeast.
When the yeast become active, they eat sugar and release carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide expands and creates air pockets throughout the dough, giving raised doughnuts their characteristic fluffy interior.
After the doughnuts have inflated to create a sufficient doughnut shape, they’re ready to be cooked.
At Hollister’s Spudnuts & Deli, owners Annie and Sun Suy, from Cambodia, churn out a wide variety of doughnuts daily. The shop’s namesake comes from a particular kind of doughnut made from potato flour called the spudnut.
The Suys’ best-selling doughnuts are the glazed variety, which have a thin layer of sweet, whitish-clear icing drizzled on top and sell for 60 cents each. Less popular are the fancier, larger doughnuts that have additional topping embedded in the icing, such as the old-fashioned cinnamon crumb. Children tend to gobble up any kind of doughnut, raised or cake, as long as it’s adorned with sprinkles, Annie Suy said.
One of Annie’s favorite parts of owning a doughnut shop is the interaction she has with customers as varied as the doughnuts on the shelves. And, of course, there are the regulars.
“A lot of the same people come in every day,” she said. “There’s a group of retired men who come and sit with their coffee and doughnuts and talk for hours.”
Like the Suys, Yath has come to know many of his customers well since he opened his shop about 10 years ago. Yath also came to the United States from Cambodia, first living in Washington to attend college before moving to California to help his mother run her doughnut shop. Although Yath planned to study engineering, he decided he was better suited to the life of a baker.
“It’s enough to pay the bills and meet a lot of people,” Yath said.
Besides, owning a doughnut shop means an unlimited supply of his favorite kind: custard-filled, chocolate-iced long johns, which are made with the same dough as doughnuts but shaped into a roughly six-inch bar and filled with an eggy, creamy pudding.
Over his years making doughnuts, Yath said he’s learned to decipher from their texture a good batch from a bad one almost immediately after the doughnuts come off the line. One of the biggest contributing factors to the quality of a batch is the weather, Yath said: The cooler the climate, the warmer the water should be when added to the dough, and vice versa.
Both Yath and the Suys said that while they usually notice a slight dip in sales after the New Year – thanks to New Year’s resolutions to eat healthier – within a few weeks, business is back to normal. Some people, however, stick to their promises, such as Gilroy residents Mike and Susan Mister, carrying groceries to their car from Nob Hill on First Street Thursday afternoon. .
“We don’t eat doughnuts,” Susan Mister said. “It’s like eating grease that’s been dipped and dipped and dipped in oil.”
Ten-year-old Abraham Espinoza and his brother Martin, 13, take a different approach. They eat doughnuts at least once a month, usually for breakfast but sometimes for dessert. Martin likes glazed doughnuts the best, but Abraham gravitates toward chocolate. As they browsed through the toy aisle at Nob Hill Thursday, Abraham explained why.
“They’re so chocolatey,” he said. “And they’re yummy.”
Americans love their doughnuts, but the fried treat actually originated with early Dutch settlers, who cooked “fried cakes” that had nuts embedded in the dough (hence the name “doughnut”). The hole in the center of the dough is credited to a young boy named Hanson Gregory, who in 1847 suggested to his mother she carve a hole in the center of her fried cakes to ensure the dough was evenly cooked.
Every week, famed doughnut-maker Krispy Kreme makes enough doughnuts to stretch from New York to Los Angeles. Collectively, Krispy Kreme’s stores could make a doughnut stack as high as the Empire State Building (that’s 1,454 feet) in 22 seconds. A typical Krispy Kreme store can produce about 3,000 doughnuts per day.
And every year, Krispy Kreme:
Makes about 2.7 billion doughnuts worldwide.
Uses up to two Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of chocolate.
Uses about 1 million pounds of sprinkles.
Source: www.krispykreme.com
