Bringing Home the Donuts
An ode to the greatest dessert of all-time
I’m hard at work researching and compiling the next piece in my series on Wikipedia manipulation — read the first post here. In the meantime, I wanted to get a post up before March came to a close.
Of all the go-to icebreaker questions, I find “What’s your favorite food?” to be the hardest to answer. How does one compare a carne asada burrito packed as thick as your bicep to a platter of french toast crisped to perfection? Does chicken soup count as your favorite food if you only consider the specific recipe made by your grandmother to be the best?
Other icebreakers invite such difficult comparisons across styles. An animated children’s classic like Toy Story has little in common with The Social Network, but at least they are both movies. The constraints of the medium allow for some level of comparison that is not present with food. But if I was forced by a maliciously compliant genie to pick a favorite food, I would have to say donuts.1
The donut is versatile in a way other desserts, save perhaps ice cream, are. Donuts can be filled, hollow, miniature, glazed, frosted, crunchy, doughy, and served with fried chicken in between. For the record, I tried the KFC Fried Chicken & Donuts Sandwich shortly before the COVID pandemic erupted in the United States. I felt terrible about myself after finishing. It was also delicious.
I grew up in Central New York. My hometown is small and often late to catch on to cultural trends that have already swept the nation. As an example, I remember my boss at the ice cream stand I worked at freaking out about the wave of froyo stores opening in the area. This was in 2014, two years after froyo had already boomed and busted for much of the nation.
But we did not lack for Dunkin’ Donuts.2 Manlius alone has two Dunkin’ Donuts within the town limits separated by a five-minute drive, and there is a third location just across the boundary with East Syracuse.
My mom, a proud New Englander, was a passionate purveyor of runnin’ on dunkin’. She visited the closest location so often that the staff would start brewing her coffee order as soon as our family van pulled into the parking lot.
Her frequent trips to DD no doubt instilled in me my lifelong love of donuts. If I was assigned to bring dessert for a class party, she would pick up a few boxes of Munchkins for all to enjoy. Our family hoarded Dunkin’ Rewards points the way doomsday preppers stockpile canned vegetables, and we followed the release of seasonal donuts with glee.
Another unique quality of donuts is how they are frequently served in otherwise buttoned-up situations. It is hard to imagine a church serving key lime pies after mass or your boss bringing in chocolate cake for your morning meeting, but donuts? They were there to reward restless adolescents like myself after sitting through a grueling homily, just as they are mainstays in the office breakroom 15 years later.
As I have moved across the country, first to Indiana for college and then to California for work, it has been fascinating to observe how donut culture varies by locale. South Bend, Indiana offered students relatively easy access to DD and Krispy Kreme, but the standout donut vendor, the one resident advisors ordered from when they needed to entice students to attend a dreary information session, was and remains Rise’n Roll Bakery.
Owned and operated by the local Amish community, Rise’n Roll takes the opposite approach to donut baking from DD. Whereas the big chain offers a wide variety of pastries, most of which are good but not great, Rise’n Roll puts its energy into perfecting one recipe: the cinnamon caramel donut.
If I could teleport back to Notre Dame tomorrow, my first stop wouldn’t be the Grotto or my old dorm or any other spot on campus. It would be Rise’n Roll.
Nearly four years since my last trip to South Bend, I still dream about Rise’n Roll’s Cinnamon Caramel Donut. The Amish have created a magical donut, one that is soft without becoming gooey, sweet without tasting artificial, and powdery without making too much of a mess. Four years of Rise’n Roll elevated my donut palette, opening my eyes to worlds of flavor far beyond the staid consistency of Dunkin’s donuts.
Then I moved to California.
Donut culture in the Golden State is very different from that of the East Coast and Midwest. San Francisco, a city roughly 25-times as populated as Manlius, has zero DD locations, and the only one in the East Bay is right next to the Oakland airport, an area you are unlikely to visit unless you are taking a flight. There is a similar dearth of Krispy Kremes. The two major donut chains failed to catch on to the same extent in California as they have elsewhere for one simple reason: the Vietnam War.
In 1975, Ted Ngoy arrived in San Diego. A refugee fleeing the Khmer Rouge regime that came to power in Cambodia due in no small part to the United States’ war in neighboring Vietnam, Ngoy had never tried a donut before moving to the States. After one bite, he was hooked, and he went on to open his own independent donut store.
By 1980, Ngoy owned 20 donut shops of his own. He had also helped hundreds of other Cambodian refugees establish their own bakeries. The commercial trend spread out from Los Angeles, and to this day many of the local donut shops across California are run by Cambodian families.
The largely independent nature of donut baking forced me once again out of my donut comfort zone. Each shop has its own quirks, and the same donut variety will taste different from one spot to another. Over time, I learned which bakery in my area excels at which flavor. I now know to go to Colonial Donuts if I am craving a filled long john and that Hometown Food & Grocery bakes their maple-frosted donuts exactly how I like.
While the changes in recipe from store to store force me to take more risks with my donut orders than I did in New York in Indiana, the regional variations also expose me to more donut options than ever before. Within a 1-mile radius of my apartment, I have access to vegan donuts, savory donuts, sprinkled donuts, ice cream sandwiches made with donuts, and even donuts topped with the marshmallows from Lucky Charms cereal. I live in a donut utopia, spoiled for riches beyond belief.
Donuts are by no means healthy. But compared to completely artificial sweets like gummy candies or soda, donuts are a far healthier option for a dessert. One could conceivably bake their own donuts at home. The same cannot be said about Nerds Ropes or Mountain Dew. And no one will judge you for eating a donut as the sun rises, which is not the case for most other desserts.
I still think the concept of having a favorite food is absurd. But if I had to pick a single cuisine as my go-to, I would choose the mighty donut every day of the week and twice on Sunday. And I mean that literally, as nothing fends off the Sunday Scaries quite like two freshly baked donuts, still warm from their time in the fryer.
Things I Recommend This Week
‘I think Ueli Steck lied’ | El Pais
Take a Trip through the Transbay Tube | BARTable (YouTube)
In Baton Rouge, there’s a $100 million football coach and everyone else | The Washington Post
WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS |
🇨🇦 Jesse Marsch, unintentional diplomat, takes a stand at the right time |
What’s your favorite donut? Leave a comment or reply to this message and let me know.
Thank you as always for reading. I hope your week is filled with delicious donuts.
The AP Stylebook uses “doughnut,” but the AP Stylebook also forbids the Oxford comma, which is stupid.
The chain is now legally known only as “Dunkin’,” which is also stupid.
Next trip home we have a donut shop for you to try! Local people making outrageous donuts 🙂
Zany donut varieties are always exciting, but nothing beats a proper glazed circle. Sue me.