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I used to go to a donut place along route I-81 in the middle of the Pennsylvania nowhere with my sister and her husband late at night. We’d sit around and shoot the shit and watch the weird-looking truckers come in and eat the donuts. The goal of the late-night outing wasn’t just to see the weird truckers, but to catch the overweight women behind the counter in the act of changing out their old stale donuts with their new ones. We often mistimed it and got the old stale ones instead; still, even when fresh, the donuts were really just greasy sugar-bombs. It was great.
This kind of donut place, Dough is not. The New York City eatery, centered around the center-less treat, is part of a movement that’s erasing the classic donut’s curse: it’s too delicious for its own good. In other words, it doesn’t seem like a simple deep-fried piece of dough topped with sugar or chocolate or filled with heavy cream requires any improvement.
Fany Gerson is half of a team that disagrees. In 2010, the former pastry chef was invited by her partner to make a new kind of donut. A big one.
“He says, ‘I just want a big donut. Not a heavy donut, but a big donut.’ A sort of celebration.” So Gerson went to work. She spent a couple months testing dough, all day. She knew what she was going for — “It has a bite to it, but it’s not airy”; “it has some seasoning to it — not sweet, it’s not salty, it’s just right” — and when she found it, she knew. “We opened up a few weeks after that,” she tells me, sitting on the window sill of her second storefront, this one in Manhattan.
“Donuts are so quintessentially American,” Gerson says, “and yet so few people making it with the same care and detail as other pastries. It’s like, why not?”