In 1931, The New Yorker reported on a circle of dough that was becoming an exponentially popular phenomenon: “Doughnuts float dreamily through a grease canal in a glass-enclosed machine, walk dreamily up a moving ramp, and tumble dreamily into an outgoing basket. Twelve hundred doughnuts an hour are turned out.” The writer was describing a doughnut machine that had been created just eleven years before, by an inventor named Adolph Levitt. In just over a decade, he’d built a twenty-five-million-dollar-a-year business selling them.
The few employees of Dough, a bakery in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, cut circles of dough by hand, punch out the holes, and fry them in a small vat of oil, just one tray at a time. Since its opening, in 2010, Dough has gained a cult following, and, while the owners are itching for more space (“We’re really quite tight in here. It’s hard.”), they’re hesitant to expand and compromise quality.
Dough’s doughnut selection, however, is in constant motion. Fany Gerson, the owner, loves experimenting with new flavors; on Thursday, there were dulce de leche with toasted almonds, lemon poppy seed, and hibiscus with cacao nibs. Currently, the doughnuts are all yeast doughnuts, but Gerson is experimenting with cake-doughnut recipes. Last week, she riffed on a strawberry shortcake by slicing a glazed one and piling homemade whipped cream and sliced strawberries between the halves.
As a child, Gerson, who grew up in Mexico, would offer to help her mother run their clothing to the dry cleaners, only because of the jelly-filled doughnuts offered at the bakery next door. “She totally knew why I wanted to come each Saturday,” she reflected, laughing. These fried rounds of dough have a place in everyone’s heart, no matter their culture. And these days, between the slew of doughnuts increasingly appearing on restaurant menus, Krispy Kreme’s soaring stock prices (this quarter, the company revealed a net income of eight million dollars, two million more than a year ago), and cronut mania, it seems that the doughnut, oft filled with cream and always filled with history, is the new confection of choice. Later, cupcakes.
Video by Sky Dylan-Robbins and Kristina Budelis.
