Top Pot Hand-Forged Doughnuts - Mark Klebeck [3]
With attractive decorations and smart names— like Pink Feather Boa, Valley Girl Lemon, and Double Trouble, to name just a few favorites—our doughnuts appeal to people because they’re delicious and a bit nostalgic, and because they pair exceptionally well with coffee. If you can, come to one of our shops to watch folks pick out their doughnuts. Conversations stop, and grown-ups peer into the case with the intensity usually reserved for choosing an engagement ring—even President Obama gawked a little when he visited in the fall of 2010.
Today, Top Pot is the only American doughnut company both small enough to maintain artisanal, small-batch quality and a vintage mom-and-pop aesthetic and big enough to produce doughnuts available worldwide.
And now you can “hand-forge” them at home.
THE TOP POT BAKERY
Hidden in an old warehouse on Fifth Avenue, right in downtown Seattle, Top Pot’s bakery produces more than 75 million doughnuts each year. We put our cake and old-fashioned doughnut batter in a giant hopper, which our bakers use to deposit forty doughnuts a minute into baths of hot oil that probably rival the size of your dining room table. There are no doughnut-flipping machines, as there are at many doughnut companies—each one is still turned by hand at just the right moment—and each of our yeast-raised doughnuts is still cut, formed, and glazed by hand. Every baker has his or her own technique: they slide the frying racks into the oil a certain way, or rotate their wrists to pop the doughnuts out of the chocolate icing a bit differently, and they all have their personal favorites.
But our bakers also all have two things in common: dedication and speed. The first allows us to trust our employees to provide each of our customers with a doughnut that meets our stringent standards. (Our bakery runs around the clock.) The second lets us produce an impressive volume with relatively few bakers.
Unfortunately, we can’t send our bakers or our equipment home with you, which means that there are a few things that will be different about your homemade doughnuts. For one, they’ll be smaller than ours, so that at home, in your deep fryer or a simple frying pan, you can cook more than one at a time. We’ve changed the proofing process for yeast-raised doughnuts to a home-kitchen-friendly method. We offer icings and glazes that don’t use agar, the natural stabilizing agent we use to prevent the icings from weeping, because they’re simply easier to work with. Finally, we’ve narrowed down our ingredients to things you should be able to find in a large grocery store and a good kitchen supply store. (Just in case, we have provided a list of resources for everything you’ll need.)
Have fun. Our bakers sure do.
A DOUGHNUT HISTORY and PRIMER
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a doughnut as “a small, usually ring-shaped cake fried in fat.” We can’t argue with that, but as is the case with most foods, there’s more to the story—where the doughnut originated, how it became a comfort food, and why it’s enjoying such a resurgence today.
In Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut, author Paul R. Mullins says the word doughnut is attributed to Washington Irving, who used “dough nut” to describe deep-fried balls of sweetened dough, and compared them to similar Dutch treats called olykoeks.
Since almost every culture has some form of sweet fried dough—traces of fried doughnut-shaped cakes were found in Native American caves, and the Bible clearly refers to the use of fried cakes as an offering—it’s difficult to pinpoint where the modern doughnut originated. According to John T. Edge, author of Donuts: An American Passion, some food historians track the American doughnut trade back to a Dutch New Yorker, who opened a doughnut shop in Manhattan in 1776, selling olykoeks and coffee in the financial