Raised and Glazed: Don’t Doubt the Doughnut

So we have donut holes that are glazed, and then we have the chocolate raised, chocolate coconut raised, raised crumb, raised sugar, raised glazed.

Then we have our old-fashioned and that comes in a maple flavored, a chocolate flavored, glazed flavored, and plain.

Then we've also got the honey wheat, cinnamon sugar cake, chocolate cake, and then above that showcase is the tray with the Oreo raised and the uh raised sprinkles this is a lot of donuts oh did i forget the jelly donuts yes jelly raspberry jelly we do that in raspberry strawberry and this wasn't even all the donuts on offer that morning when nikki and i visited colonial donuts in oakland california as nikki said they make a lot of donuts oh my god i feel like a kid in a candy

kid in a donut shop is what you are.

This entire episode, we are kids in a donut shop.

We're also Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And in case you've gotten lost dreaming about chocolate glaze, this episode is, of course, about donuts.

What are doughnuts and why doesn't the dough come with nuts?

How did the donut get its hole?

Who first punched that one out?

And more importantly, which bright spark figured out how to sell the holes as well as the donuts?

This episode we answer all those pressing questions.

Plus, we have the story of the rise of Duncan and the Donut King King of California who held the Duncan invasion at bay.

Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

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So, people have been frying dough basically ever since they figured out that they could take some sort of a bread product and drop it into boiling fat.

This is Michael Krundel.

He wrote a book about doughnuts called The Doughnut: History, Recipes, and Lore from Boston to Berlin.

We have recipes that go back to the Greeks where they made kind of what you find today called leucumatis.

They had different names for them.

There are records of various kinds of treats in the Middle East and also in India.

And everywhere else too.

Everyone had them, but frying dough and oil is pretty expensive and it creates something that's pretty rich tasting and so it's a treat.

Also donuts are by nature kind of a communal activity.

Because doughnuts aren't difficult to make, but you can't make one donut.

You can't make two donuts or there's no point, right?

So you make dozens of doughnuts.

When you make dozens of donuts, donuts, you gotta get rid of them because they're only good fresh.

And so, since they're expensive and special, and because you need to have a community around to enjoy them, it makes sense that donuts also became associated with holidays.

They're really popular with Jews around Hanukkah because we're supposed to be celebrating the festival of oil, and so we eat fried treats like jelly doughnuts called soufkaniyot.

But we're certainly not alone in this.

Other religions have doughnut festivals too.

So, in the Muslim world, there is a tradition of making various kinds of doughnuts for Ramadan specifically for when the fast ends.

And they're most famous in Central Europe and basically all Catholic parts of Europe for fat Tuesday.

This is the day before the start of Lent, which is a 40-day countdown to Easter, and traditionally Christians had to abstain from animal products for all 40 days.

So they used it all up.

All the butter and lard and pork fat, all used up in one big go the day before.

What do you do with it?

Well, you fry stuff in it.

So one of the things that you would do is you would fry donuts.

And there are these traditions of making doughnuts in Germany, in France, in Italy.

But these fried treats weren't always sweet because sugar was rare and expensive.

Michael told us about what seems to be one of the earliest written recipes for what in Germany was called Krapfen.

Those are the very, very early donuts.

And we don't actually know how they were made.

They just tell you to make a Krapfen, the name for doughnuts in those days, Krapfen dough, and fill it with X.

So they assumed that it would be more or less just an enriched bread dough.

And so what you put into it, oh, is spinach, apples, and fish, and spices, perhaps some innards and spices.

I mean, kind of weird, but probably good.

It's fried.

What's not to love?

In any case, many of these fried treats from all sorts of communities around the world ended up, along with their immigrant owners, in America, the eventual home of the doughnut.

So most likely the doughnut is kind of a combination of all of these different multi-ethnic roots from different immigrants that came in in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Bonnie Miller is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

The one that I think gets the most attention for the history of the doughnut is the Dutch.

They had something called the Ali Kayak.

The Ali Kayak is translated as oil cakes.

The Dutch had settled in New York or New Amsterdam, as it briefly was in the 1600s, and in their dialect, olli was oil, and cook was cake.

Forgive my not great pronunciation.

These days, the Dutch called doughnuts olly bolen, or oily balls, which is super cute.

The olly cook looked like balls back in New Amsterdam, too.

They were small round balls of fried dough that often had almonds, dried fruit, and apples in them.

And they are kind of most well known for being the origins of the doughnut for the American colonies.

Donut is definitely more appealing of a name than oily cake, just from a branding perspective.

But I have to imagine this wasn't focus grouped back in the day.

So where did the name doughnut come from?

I don't know if there's a definitive answer, but there are a couple of theories out there.

One is that in the 17th and 18th centuries, they sometimes put a nut in the middle.

So some believe that that's where it got that nut part of the name, because obviously it's made of soft dough, so the dough plus the nut.

That's one theory.

The other one has to do with the size.

These balls of dough were often about the size of a walnut in a shell, which is about the size of a ping pong ball, maybe a little bigger.

And there are recipes that describe how to make these, and sometimes they would describe them as doughnuts.

Sometimes they describe them as pincushions because they might be cut square.

Yes, indeed.

The square doughnut is not a hipster invention.

But so who coined this magical word doughnut?

What's the first use in print?

A lot of people attribute the name to Washington Irving.

He published a book in 1809, The History of New York.

You may know him better as the guy who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

In the History of New York, he claims that early New Yorkers would feast on doughnuts that were made from hog fat.

These were served at tea parties, which Washington Irving calls delectable orgies, held by the upper classes, aka such as kept their own cows and drove their own wagons.

There might be pie, there might be fried pork, but according to Irving, the table was always sure to boast of an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried fried in hogs fat, and called doughnuts or oli coke.

This feast sounds like a pretty good time, but it turns out that Washington Irving wasn't the first to use the word doughnut in print.

It had already appeared a couple of years earlier.

It was published in an 1803 edition of Susannah Carter's The Frugal Housewife or Complete Woman Cook, which was a recipe book.

It had multiple editions, but the 1803 edition was the first one that actually had a doughnut recipe.

Whatever their origin, the fried doughnut things came in all kinds of shapes.

They came in squares, they came in round blobs, they came in twists, but it seems like among the most popular were these little balls, and they were kind of like an early cliff bar.

And they seem to be popular, they're very much homemade.

They shoved them into their pockets and kind of like go on hikes.

And if you need some quick energy, you pop a few of these into your mouth.

There's a Henry David Thoreau in one of his books where he fills his pockets with these doughnuts and starts walking through New England.

Just the ticket to fuel some meditations on landscape and nature and getting away from from frivolous things.

And that kind of philosophical thinking is all very well, but really the important question is, how did the doughnut get its hole?

The story goes that it's all due to a guy who worked on a boat as a teenager in the mid-1800s.

His name was Hansen Gregory.

Michael says Hansen told this tale in the early 1900s.

According to his story, his job on the ship was to make the doughnuts.

And he thought, well, I can just knock out that center.

And voila, he was, as he described himself, the Columbus of the doughnut.

and so Columbus comes home to his mom in Maine and explains to mom how to make a doughnut this spreads throughout New England and the holy doughnut is born now there's so many problems with this starting with problem number one from my perspective which is a hole means there's less doughnut so why is that a good thing why would you even want to do it well it turns out that the original doughnuts were leavened with yeast but in the 1800s baking powder was invented That meant the doughnuts rose much more quickly, which is great.

But here's the problem.

If you drop a little,

like a doughnut hole equivalent, right, into the fat, it'll cook up fine.

But if you do anything a little bit bigger, because there's so much sugar in the dough,

the outside will burn before the inside cooks through.

And so somebody along the way discovered that, hey, we got this big thing.

The inside isn't cooking through.

What do we do?

We knock out the middle.

So by putting a hole in his donuts, Hansen Gregory was really onto something.

But the other problem is that he wasn't the first.

Other people had put a hole in a doughnut before young Hansen.

And just exactly when this happens is a little bit unclear, because there are versions of

holy doughnuts, for example, in North Africa that go way, way, way back.

But in America, recipes for doughnuts with holes in the middle showed up a couple of years before Hansen's claimed seafaring Columbus doughnut discovery.

So while maybe he did knock out the donut centers while he was on the boat, there's basically almost a 0% chance that he actually invented the ring-shaped doughnut.

Hansen or no, these newfangled baking powder-leavened cakey rings caught on, for one, because they're super quick to make.

And weirdly, they seem to have been particularly popular around New England and also New York.

Other places in America did make them, but often the treats were referred to in cookbooks as New England doughnuts, though frankly, nobody really knows why.

Maybe we just had the nation's most intense sweet tooth at the time.

So by the end of the 1800s, doughnuts have a hole.

They're like the doughnuts we know and love today, but they were still sort of seen as a regional treat.

They're kind of niche.

Then the First World War comes around.

And one of the things that happens in the First World War is that, of course, you've got the military, but then you need support staff.

And it wasn't professionalized at that point.

So, for example,

the medical issues were dealt with by the Red Cross.

And another group that came in for reasons of

morale, I guess you could say, was the Salvation Army.

The people who worked for the Salvation Army in World War I were mostly women, and they were sent over to Europe to help keep up the spirits of the boys from back home.

The funny part is that they were called doughboys, though it had nothing to do with the fact that they were consuming donuts.

It actually had to do with the fact that they were eating dumplings back in the Civil War that they were called doughboys.

But the doughboys were eating lots of donuts.

Because donuts, specifically doughnuts made by young ladies, was how the Salvation Army ended up trying to boost morale, which really needed to be boosted because conditions on the Western Front were horrific.

They're waist deep in mud.

They're being shelled and killed and maimed left, right, and center.

So something to remind them of home.

And so the first thing that the Salvation Army young women did was they tried to make pies.

The problem with a pie is you need apples, you need an oven,

and you need the sugar and the dough and all that sort of thing, of course.

And you're trying to do this with the bombs falling on you and the rain pouring down, and you name it.

And it turned out it was just incredibly difficult to do.

One of the women with the Salvation Army named Helen Pervance came up with the idea that instead of focusing on pies, they'd branch out into donuts.

Because all you need for donuts is a little bit of dough.

You need some fat, a bit of sugar, that's about it.

And you can make them quickly.

When they're freshly made, even the worst possible donuts actually taste pretty good.

And donuts did the trick in terms of comfort and morale.

In fact, soldiers got really attached to and emotional about the Salvation Army doughnuts.

Don't forget the Salvation Army.

Always remember my donut girl.

She brought them donuts and coffee.

When a donut truck got stuck in mud in no men's land, it was national news back home.

And these are supposed to be the donuts that were going to be delivered for Easter.

And it was so notable that the New York Times, which in those days came out with several editions, would have in the morning edition, okay, this is what's going on with the donut truck.

Evening edition, this is what's going on with the donut truck.

Morning edition, this is what's going on with the donut truck.

The Germans bombed for days.

The Americans sent out a mission to try to rescue their donut truck, but they couldn't get there in time.

The truck and its delicious contents were blown to bits to the great dismay of American soldiers and the American public.

Frankly, it's a miracle we ended up winning the war after a blow like that.

But the point is, donuts had become beloved by Americans from all across the country.

They were a symbol of all things good and American.

At around the same time as donuts were claiming their place in American hearts, an immigrant from Bulgaria named Adolph Levitt put his mind to solving the problem of how to get more doughnuts more quickly into American stomachs.

So, what Adolph Levitt did is he hired an engineer and he created an automated donut machine.

And this was the inflection point.

I mean, he started to hawk this machine to every bakery he could.

And as a result, he vastly increased the consumption of donuts across New York City originally.

And then it started to spread to other cities as well.

So he eventually founds a corporation called the Donut Corporation of America.

And very much like today,

inkjet printers are more or less given given away, but where they get you is with the ink, right?

So that you buy the inkjet printer for a few bucks, and then the ink costs you thousands of dollars over the life of the inkjet printer.

So he does somewhat the same thing.

He makes these gadgets for making donuts, but you have to use his mix.

And it's with this mix that he makes huge amounts of money.

Levitt was not a modest mouse, and he called his contraption the, quote, wonderful, almost human donut machine he rented a storefront on Times Square and set up the wonderful almost human donut machine in the window so he could stop traffic with the spectacle Levitt was also the one who made our current lives more complicated by trying to change the spelling of the treat he put out a press release in 1920 that promoted donuts spelled D-O-N-U-T instead of D-O-U-G-H-N-U-T so that it could be easily spelled and pronounced everywhere in the world.

He wanted there to be no obstacle to donuts world dominance.

And he also did all sorts of fun things to promote donuts, including donut queen beauty pageants, which you have to see the photos to believe.

We're putting those in our supporters' newsletter, which you can get by supporting the show, gastropod.com/slash support.

And Levitt was savvy enough to provide his schmancy doughnut making machines to the Red Cross during World War II to make sure the boys always had their donuts.

Of course, he didn't provide the mix for free.

He made some bucks off the U.S.

Army for that.

All of this means that by the end of World War II, the donut was poised to take over the universe.

Starting with Quincy, Massachusetts.

The story of Duncan coming up after the break.

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You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall?

You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back.

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My name is Bob Rosenberg.

For 35 years, I was the CEO of Dunkin' Donuts, now renamed Dunkin' Brands.

Yes, that is in fact the former head of Dunkin' Donuts.

He's also the son of the original founder, Bill Rosenberg, and he recently wrote a book called Around the Corner to Around the World: A Dozen Lessons I Learned Running Dunkin' Donuts.

If you haven't heard of Dunkin' before, I'm kind of shocked because even if you don't live in the U.S., it's a thing.

Chances are there's at least one in your country somewhere.

It's big.

It has grown to something over 13,000 locations in 40 countries around the world.

Basically, it services about 3 million customers a day, sell 2 million cups of coffee a day,

and about 3 million donuts a day.

And all of this from humble beginnings.

Bob's dad, Bill, was born in 1916.

His parents were immigrants.

He grew up from a working-class Jewish family, didn't have a lot of money.

He dropped out of school in the eighth grade.

He was a child of the Depression.

His father had seen his father fail in the supermarket business and had to go to work to help support his family when he was a kid.

After World War II, Bill did a bunch of jobs and he ended up in a business in Connecticut that owned trucks that provided food at factories and on construction sites.

Coffee, donuts, and sandwiches.

And he brought that business back to Boston and started a similar business in Boston and grew that business from 1945 and 1946

to about 1948, 49, very successfully.

Donuts were certainly more popular than ever after World War II.

But although business was good, it soon faced an existential threat.

In the years

after the war, there was the invention of vending machines.

They started to be populated in all of these small locations, small offices and small factory sites, where it was more convenient.

for the

workers rather than go outside and stay in the rain or in the snow, they'd get their coffee and they could get it inside.

At this point, Bill had a partner in the business.

The two of them heard that a brick and mortar store selling donuts nearby was doing pretty well.

In fact, it was doing better in that one store than Bill's 20 or so trucks.

So in 1948, they opened something called the Open Kettle for $25 a month rent on the Southern Artery in Quincy, Massachusetts.

They opened a donut shop serving fresh hot donuts and delicious coffee.

They named it Open Kettle because you fry donuts in a large open kettle of oil.

And that became their first storefront.

Interestingly enough, they had seating in Open Kettle, which was very different from other donut places before.

It may even have been the first to actually have a place where people could sit and linger and have their coffee and donuts.

Which sounds like a recipe for success.

And it totally wasn't.

That first open kettle storefront didn't lose money, but it didn't really make much more than a truck.

And it certainly wasn't the answer they were looking for.

Bill and his partner heard that someone else was going to open a donut store nearby, and they poached that guy's architect.

He came in, he said, you know, this sort of stucco hut with no windows isn't a good place to showcase your business.

Really, what you got to do is rip it down and put in a California-style store, change the name, open kettle, no one knows what you're selling inside.

And so that's exactly what the partners did in an attempt to salvage their dream of a bigger business.

And they ripped it down.

And in 1950, a $1,000-a-week open kettle closed and it was reopened with a $5,500 a week Duncan donut shop that had a California style see-through fishbowl kind of effect, all glass.

Could look into the kitchen and watch the donuts being made.

California-style is very cool, of course, and seeing donuts get made does tend to make you want to eat one.

But the other big boost was the new name.

They were sitting around deciding open kettle wasn't a particularly good name.

What could they select?

And they were doing a sort of a brainstorming.

And someone said, You know, you pick a chicken, you dunk a donut.

And my dad said, Well, that's the name.

At the time, dunking a donut in a cup of coffee was actually super common.

Adolph Levitt had popularized it back in the 20s and 30s.

There were donut dunking competitions.

There was a donut dunking stand at the World's Fair in the 1930s.

He hired Shirley Temple to make a movie called Dora's Dunking Donut.

One of the most banana stunts Lovitt pulled was hiring a guy called Alvin Shipwreck Kelly, who was apparently a famous flagpole sitter, which is a thing people used to do in the 1920s as a test of endurance.

Alvin dunked and ate 13 doughnuts while doing a headstand on a plank that was hanging over the edge of the 54th story of a building in New York City.

Rather him than me.

There were comedy bits about dunking doughnuts, and even the movie star Clark Gable got in on the act.

In the movie, It Happened One Night, Clark Gable's character, a reporter, teaches an heiress how to appropriately dunk a donut.

Oh, now don't you start telling me I shouldn't dunk.

Of course, you shouldn't.

You don't know how to do it.

Dunking's an art.

Don't let it soak so long.

The tip and sock in your mouth.

You gotta hang out too long and get soft and fall off.

It's all a matter of timing.

I'll write a book about it.

Thanks, Professor.

20 millions, and you don't know how to Dunking was such a big deal in those days that the brand new Dunkin' Donuts even made a special donut with a handle to help dunkers dunk more elegantly.

That wasn't the only special aspect of their donuts.

The other was the shocking amount of variety that you could find in this new, light-filled, modern donut shop.

At the time, most of their competitors only had a few options, you know, glaze, chocolate, cake, whatever.

Howard Johnson was an important inspiration for Bill Rosenberg, and Bill Rosenberg saw that Howard Johnson's offered 28 flavors of ice cream and that kind of inspired him towards having as big a variety as possible.

And Bill Rosenberg was a visionary.

I mean he always took everything to the extreme.

So he decided that he wanted to have 52 flavors of donuts.

Initially his thought was they would have one new one per week.

And for the first couple decades they offered 52 varieties of doughnuts.

All these good ideas added up to a magic formula.

Dunkin' Donuts took off.

But Bob says it was also a little bit of being in the right place at the right time.

I would call it trends aligned.

There were massive changes.

The highway system came into existence then under the Eisenhower administration.

People started to take to the suburbs.

Women, because of the Second World War, had entered the workforce.

And out of economic necessity or out of desire to be able to add additional income, the growth in women away from home, working away from home and food away from home started to take effect.

And this was sort of the tailwind, the trailing wind that built this whole industry.

There's one other thing that made these new donut shops succeed, and it's that they were opened super early in the morning.

They were kind of the only ones.

There were no real breakfast places open in those days other than McDonald's, which I don't think started to serve breakfast until the mid-70s.

So if you were on the way to work and you needed, you know, a pick-me-up and a start to your day, there was a few options.

This also explains why cops became so associated with donuts.

Cops are out on patrol at all hours, and if they wanted to stop for a quick coffee and a snack to go, they didn't have a lot of other options.

And so it's not really surprising that Duncan became a huge success.

They started to grow and open new stores.

But the reality is, it was their business model more than it was their menu that made them so successful.

And their business model had to do with franchising.

In case you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it or heard our episode on McDonald's, just a quick reminder that franchising is when you basically sell the name and recipe for success to other folks who kind of independently run each store.

And post-World War II was the era of these new fast food chains that were arising and the role of franchising being really key for that.

Bill Rosenberg founds the International Franchising Association in 1959, so he was a leader in the industry.

By the 60s, everything was going great for Duncan.

But remember, Bill was an eighth-grade dropout.

He'd obviously learned a ton on the job and had been super successful, but he didn't feel like he had what it took to keep that growth going.

So even though he was only 47, he stepped down.

In 1963, Bill Rosenberg passes the torch to his son, Bob Rosenberg, who begins to be CEO.

And Bob Rosenberg at the time, he's fresh out of Harvard Business School.

And I was green.

I was 25 years old.

Bob was young, but he started off strong, and he had a series of quick successes that grew the business.

One of the secrets to his success was great advertising campaigns.

And if you were in the U.S.

in the the 70s and 80s, one of these campaigns will likely be stuck in your head forever.

Time to make the donuts.

We hired a guy by the name of Michael Vail to be Fred the Donut Maker to show the competitive advantage of our product being made fresh every four hours.

Time to make the donuts.

The donut.

It isn't easy owning a Dunkin' Donut.

Because unlike most supermarkets, we make our donuts fresh day and night.

But the guys who make supermarket donuts are still in bed.

Side note, Dunkin' typically doesn't make their donuts fresh in store anymore.

They haven't for several decades now.

Streamlining donut production is part of how they continued to grow.

They also don't make that special doughnut with the handle for dunking anymore, sadly.

It lasted up until 2003.

It was finally discontinued because it was a tremendous hassle for the bakers because they couldn't automate the making of the Dunkin' Donut because of the handle.

But it wasn't all streamlining.

They added new things too.

There's one product in particular that helped them grow even bigger, and it's probably the most common way I ate donuts as a kid, the munchkin, the doughnut hole.

At one point though, that was a special once-a-year treat.

We would pick up the centers at Halloween time and we'd put them on the on a sheet or screen and fry them and put them in the little cellophane bags that and then hang them on little holders like you would get in most convenience stores where you would buy potato chips or something like that.

But it was only at Halloween and they were sold in only three varieties of cake product.

It was plain cinnamon and sugar.

And it was only a seasonal product.

And then in 1972, which was a tough time for Duncan and for business generally, Bob got a call from one of his franchise owners in Connecticut.

This guy was also called Bob.

He said, Edna, my wife, has found a way to sell these donut holes and we're doing gangbuster business.

So I said, no, no, you, you know, we used to sell these little things.

They never work.

He said, no, you have to understand.

Edna has developed a different cutter.

It's much bigger.

And she's doing yeast donuts as well as cakes.

She's filling them.

She's frosting them.

She's doing all kinds of things, piling the high in the front case.

And our business is up something like 20%.

Wow,

20% increase in business.

Certainly my ears perked up.

So of course, Bob got himself down to Connecticut.

And sure enough, those donut holes looked great and were selling like hotcakes.

Bob's smart enough to steal a good idea when he sees one, so he made it a national thing, and they called the new invention munchkins after the Wizard of Oz.

People kept telling my mother, I look like a munchkin.

Well, this is what a munchkin looks like.

They have put out a dunkin doughnuts in quite a few flavors, like cheeky jelly, and cheetah chack, chikili cret, and dunkin' the magic munchkin.

And it really was a real salvation, a real important impact in the 1972 life during the oil embargo and gas rationing time.

Our sales again were up about 12 or 15 percent with the introduction of munchkins.

So at this point, it seems like there's no stopping Duncan.

But that's only if you don't consider California, which was the personal fiefdom of the Donut King.

We went to California to tell his story.

That's coming up after the break.

This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.

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Be unstoppable.

Come into your local store today.

My name is Ping Yamamoto and we're at Colonial Donuts here in Oakland on Lakeshore Avenue, 3318 Lakeshore.

Ping's parents owned this very donut store for nearly 40 years.

Nikki and I visited early one Friday morning and it was, of course, time to make the donuts.

The dough we already mix it.

Right now we put over here we're gonna drop it.

You see that?

How long are they in there?

This one I put for three minutes.

And what are you using to move them around?

This one is called chopstick.

Just flip it.

So, this one I put for three minutes

and then wait for three minutes.

Yeah.

There is definitely an art to making doughnuts.

Shaping them, flipping them, keeping the oil at exactly the right temperature.

But although you can make unlimited varieties by switching up the flavors and toppings, Bob told us basically there's just three mixes.

Three different recipes that are used as the basis for all the different doughnuts.

There is a cake mix, which is leavened by baking soda, which is very cakey, made of soft wheat.

There is a yeast product that's leavened by yeast, and that makes the rings that you see, the fluffy rings.

And then there's a crawler mix, which is nothing more than a popover fried, which is what a French crawler is.

It's got eggs and flour.

At Colonial, they riff off those basic recipes and make around 50 different varieties.

Ping would have handed us as many as we wanted to try, but there's only so many donuts a person can eat at any one time.

We had to be a little juicy.

We need to try a crawler.

We need to try a raised.

Maybe an ube cake?

Yeah, can you?

Maybe we should try an ube cake.

I know.

There are decisions.

So many decisions.

We basically kind of gave up and ended up with eight donuts, which was really too many for two people.

But we suffer for our art.

We started with the donut of my childhood and the one I always think of as my favorite, which was a yeasted donut with a chocolate glaze.

Oh yeah, this is my typical donut.

I've still my favorite donut

so far.

I like the chewiness, I like the airiness, I like the chocolate glaze on it.

Listen, this is a very good version of a classic donut.

I just

was too light and fluffy for me.

Then we moved on to one that is apparently very traditional but was new to me, a buttermilk cake doughnut.

This is a much more substantial and dense.

Yes, it is.

It is cake-like.

Mmm.

A little tangy.

That was really good.

I've never had this before.

This is delicious recipe in my whole life.

And then we moved on to an ube doughnut.

Ube is a dark purple and super sweet tuber and the donut also had lots of crunchy bits all around it.

Alright this is a beautiful purple.

It is.

On the inside too.

It has sweet potato and ube in it.

Mmm.

That was really good.

I like the crunch of the like

extra crispy cake crumb bits around it.

It's so soft and so cakey and not too sweet at all.

And the flavor is incredible.

This is a dream.

It might be my new favorite.

While we snarfed up Ping's delicious donuts, she told us a little bit about her story.

She'd only recently come back to work in the family business.

Previously, she'd had a tech job in Silicon Valley, but she basically grew up in her parents' donut stores.

Growing up, you know, I was...

At school, I was called the donut princess because everyone knew that my parents had owned the local store, you know, donut shop.

And so it was, it was almost expected that for my birthday, I brought in donuts for everyone.

She didn't just eat the donuts, she started working in the shop too.

Absolutely.

I started at nine, nine years old, and I still remember learning how my mom was trying to teach me to do change and I just like could not get it.

Ping's parents were refugees from Cambodia.

My

dad was in the war for four years, my mom five, an extra year because she was a refugee in Thailand.

In the 1970s in Cambodia, there was a civil war.

Here's a very basic overview of a very complicated political situation that America was also involved in.

But overall, the Khmer Rouge took over the country and Pol Pot became the dictator.

This is from an episode of the TV news show Dateline from 1975.

The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh.

They evacuated the capital.

Two million people.

including thousands of hospital patients, were forced onto the road and marched into the countryside.

Pol Pot, Pott, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, he had this idea that everyone should work the land.

Intellectuals or people with Western connections were mostly executed and families were sent out to the fields where they were split up with kids as young as six taken away from their parents.

Estimates are that between one and a half and three million people died during this time and those who could get out got out.

About 150,000 Cambodians came to the U.S.

And my aunt, who was already in the States, she ventured to California because she heard that there was a lot of, you know, donut businesses that are making money.

And, you know, that's the American dream, right?

They want to own something and, you know, have

something to do that, you know, it's hardworking, but something that they can do.

Turns out, this is a story you can hear about donut shops all over California.

Yeah, so my family, both sides of my family are Cambodian refugees.

They came escaping the genocide, the Khmer Rouge that happened.

My dad, who was like in his teenage years, was forced to build trenches or like really rudimentary dams.

Other people had to farm.

My mom was doing rice.

Michelle Su's parents escaped the Khmer Rouge and ended up in California, in their case, LA.

And like Ping's parents, they too ended up owning a donut shop.

At night time, I would learn to fall asleep on the benches that we had because we would clean everything up.

My brother and I would, you know, have our chores basically.

Like instead of chores at home, it was chores at the donut shop.

We also had weddings for family weddings.

When those ended, we still had to go back to the donut shop.

And so instead of returning home, we would have to run in our like wedding dress, guest dress attire to close up.

Donuts were life for Michelle.

Her uncles and her whole family, they pretty much all owned donut shops and were in the donut business.

And I had no idea.

I knew the circle that I lived in in Southern California as family.

And so I just thought it was like a funny coincidence that so many of my family members own these donut shops.

But I had no idea that it was a true community of people.

And that's beyond just the family members that I know, but rather a whole community of immigrants that had found a way to

start a life in a country like this where it's undoubtedly difficult to find a way through without a lot of education or opportunities to have education.

One thing they could do was own a donut shop.

Turns out that today, 90% of all the independent donut shops in California are owned by Cambodian refugees.

And that's because of one guy, Ted Noy, the Donut King of California.

He got out of Cambodia just before the Khmer Rouge took over, and he was a refugee in Southern California where he was working at a gas station.

I remember it was a slow night, about midnight, and there's no traffic.

I run real fast, come to this window right here, and I say, lady, I would like to buy some donut.

Say, okay, I sell you a dozen donut

I fall in love with donuts from that moment then I have a bike this is Ted himself the donut king from a documentary about his life called you guessed it the donut king so I asked lady if I can say up to three thousand dollar do you think I can open a donut shop like this and she said no don't open your own donut shop just go to learn from Winchell Winchell's is still a big donut chain in California and Ted took the advice.

He completed their three-month training program, he took over a Winchells shop in Orange County, and he and his wife Christie worked and worked and saved and saved.

For one, they didn't hire anybody, they just did everything themselves.

Cutting down on payroll meant that soon they'd saved up enough money to buy their own donut shop, which they named Christie's.

They were still running the Winchells, and then they kept buying more and more donut shops until they owned 25 of them.

Ted and Christie were some of the earliest refugees from Cambodia to arrive in the U.S.

To get out of the camps, you had to have a sponsor, and so Ted started to sponsor other families.

And because he was so successful, lots of his fellow Cambodian immigrants came to him to figure out how to also be successful in America.

And he showed them all the way of the doughnut.

Me and Christie, we talk among ourselves, then we kind of create a leasing program.

One store, after all, had makes $7,000.net, I list out for $3,000.

Let's family make $4,000.

I only see two Cambodian races.

One Cambodian family then taught another and another, like how Ping's aunt heard about it and then told her parents.

All the Cambodian refugees learned they could make a living and a life in California by owning a donut shop.

And so you'll see a lot of donut shops that are independently owned but are connected one way or another either through relatives or community, just you know, family and friends.

When you come to a country that without an education and you can work hard and still make a living, I think it's it's something that they're like, hey, we can do this.

And they did.

And because there were so many of them and they worked so hard and kept payrolls so low by putting their entire families to work, these Cambodian-American indie doughnut shops were able to hold even the mighty Duncan doughnuts at bay.

Duncan had to make at least $50,000 a month for survive.

And Cameron Branzo make $10,000 against a vote.

And I didn't have enough ad dollars at the time to have national advertising.

So as a result of that, pretty much stayed away.

Tried a couple of abort attempts, but basically I stayed away from the West Coast and was not particularly successful in the few forays I had.

While Cambodian immigrants claimed the West Coast donut scene, Bob worked with plenty of immigrants in Duncan's markets.

They mostly franchised to immigrants from the Azores on the East Coast and from India and Pakistan in the Midwest.

And that's been a big part of Duncan's success story, too.

All of which meant that just a few years ago, Duncan got big enough to try its luck in California again.

Today, that's a different story.

Today, Duncan has tens of millions, maybe $50, $60, $70 million worth of ad weight that they can use on TV.

And the fact that they can do it under a brand where the Cambodians had individual stores, didn't have access to a central company to create new products, new marketing techniques.

They're now, I think, very successfully embarking on developing the West Coast.

on average.

In LA, we've got one shop for every 7,000.

A similar kind of donut war played out when the chain Krispy Cream started leaving its stronghold in the southeast and attempting to encroach on Dunkin's territory.

We'll tell you about that in our special supporters newsletter.

Needless to say, it ends with more doughnuts all around.

Even the more recent hipster donut and cronut trends, all they've done is keep increasing the overall donut pie, so to speak.

And to be honest, Dunkin' Donuts doesn't mind all this donut competition because these days they've actually officially changed their name to Dunkin'.

It's honestly more about the coffee today than the donuts.

The business has migrated and changed over the years.

When I first became CEO in 1963, it was 60% donuts and 40% beverages, and that's all flipped between beverages and snacks, including donuts.

America runs on Duncan.

America runs on Duncan.

America runs on Duncan.

This is Duncan's current advertising slogan.

No more time to make the donuts.

Instead, it's all about America and where America goes to get caffeinated.

I mean, you're not running on a donut, are you?

And this next bit isn't about donuts exactly, but we couldn't ignore it.

We don't get many excuses to get Hollywood A-list celebrities on the show.

In Boston Duncan's home turf, the most all-American local boy who's regularly seen getting caffeinated with his large iced Duncan coffee in hand is Ben Affleck.

And earlier this year, he, well, let's just say he took on a bit of a side hustle.

Talk about, wow, some customers at a Duncan drive-through near Boston got quite a surprise today.

I pulled up and there he was handing me my iced coffee.

He was actually really funny, super, super nice, really funny, and everything I expected him to be, he was.

Ben Affleck, working the window.

A little side hustle that ended up as a Super Bowl commercial.

Welcome to Duncan, a new special.

Dunkin' run, medium or large coffee.

Get a donut for an incremental dump.

What are you doing here?

Ask me if I was.

Is this what you do when you say you're going to work all day?

I gotta go, guys.

Grab me a glaze.

J-Lo loves a glazed doughnut, supposedly.

Ben clearly loves his Duncan.

But really, everyone loves donuts.

Everybody.

All age groups, all socioeconomic.

Everyone around the world, too.

As we've said, almost every culture has some sort of fried doughnut-y-type food.

But really, the doughnuts we know and love were invented and perfected here.

They've become kind of quintessentially American.

In Europe, doughnuts were a special occasion treat.

You would have them on special holidays a few times a a year.

Here they became every day.

And one of the things about American food is abundance and ubiquity.

So that these special occasion foods are something that you can have day in and day out for, in the case of donuts, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Every day is special in America.

But also, donuts are part of the immigrant story that's so central to this country.

In that way, they have brought different kinds of cultures to the United States, and these have melded and blended and turned into, you know, the melting pot of doughnut dough.

Another way the donut story is all-American is that it's really all about that small business entrepreneurial spirit.

Even though Dunkin is so huge, donuts are one of the strongholds of the indies in corporate America, and that's kind of cool.

Actually, in terms of profit, small operators, small donut shops, and chains are roughly equivalent in sales to the combination of Dunkin' Donuts and Krispy Kreme combined.

So there's been an amazing persistence to independent and small chain operators that I think allow for more innovation.

And I think that's where you see more of these

specialty donuts and different flavors and culinary innovation coming out because they're able to do that for their customers.

And maybe because of all of that, these shops are often about more than donuts.

They're about community.

They're a place where you can run into people you know and buy a box to take with you to share.

It's the nostalgic feeling of warmth and comfort and security and I think and I hope that's what our donuts bring for people and that's why they keep coming.

Thanks this episode to Ping Yamamoto of Colonial Donuts in Oakland.

I can't stop dreaming about their ube cake ring.

And to Michelle Sue.

She's helped gather the stories of the second and third generation Cambodian American kids who grew up in their families' donut shops at Pink Box Stories.

Links to that online.

Thanks also to Michael Crandall, Bonnie Miller, and Bob Rosenberg.

We have links to their books and research on our website, gastropod.com, and thanks as always to our fabulous producer, Claudia Guy.

We'll be back in a couple of weeks.

Till then.