Making The Donuts

You’ve heard of the Candy Man; I was the “Donut Man.” I learned the secret in making the best cake donuts when I was a teenager.

Our family business was restaurants. One of my Dad’s places was The Patio in the college town of Westminster, Maryland. The Patio was the place where students from Western Maryland College congregated at night and ordered pizza and submarine sandwiches. During the day, families came for hamburgers, French fries, fried chicken and thick milkshakes. 

Sunday was donut day. It seemed as if everyone in Westminster came to The Patio to order a dozen hot donuts to take home on Sunday after church. While I helped out all over the restaurant working the grill, making pizzas and manning the counter, my main role was to make the donuts on Sunday morning.

I’d get started before the sun came up loading up the commercial Hobart mixer with the ingredients to make the Patio’s famous cake donuts. I had the recipe down to a science and knew just the right amount of each of the ingredients to make the dough just the right consistency.

The fryer was a large, shallow unit with a mesh tray at the bottom. I would load up the fryer with vegetable shortening and heat it up. The oil needed to be at just the right heat to make the perfect donut.

The dough was loaded into a large cone-shaped unit that I could swing right above the top of the hot oil. It had a crank on it that allowed me to drop perfectly measured rings of dough into the hot oil.  I could quickly fill the entire fryer with these dough rings. When the underside was golden brown, I would flip each one over as they bobbed in the oil. Once the other side was golden brown, I would lift the tray of the entire set of donuts and let them drain.

 

What started as a flat ring of dough floating in the hot oil was now a plump, golden brown delicious cake donut.

The secret to creating a great donut is getting the frosting on while the donut is still hot. This allows the frosting to melt right onto the hot donut. The frosting also has to be the right consistency so that it will evenly spread over the hot donut. When I pulled out one tray of donuts from the fryer, I would start the next load frying and then would go about the process of putting icing and toppings on the hot donuts.

The Patio is gone. The building on Route 140 as you enter Westminster is now occupied by an insurance office. But the scent of the Patio’s donuts still wafts just down to road to the State Highway Patrol office. Those officers were some of our most loyal customers.

My job at The Patio got me my first job in radio. But that’s another story for later.

If you are a cake donut fan, here’s an inside scoop about cake donuts in Portland. The wildly popular Voodoo Donuts, where the line of customers can stretch around the block, is moving. They will be taking over the space that was Berbati’s Pan at the corner of 3^rd and Ankeny. That will give them more space and a bigger kitchen to handle the demand. They’ve got the process of making great cake donuts down. 

I’ll take mine with chocolate icing and rainbow sprinkles.