Notes from "The Donut King"
Donuts remain an iconic sweet treat!
My grandson was in the car with me the other day when we drove by a Krispy Kreme store. He hollered out, “Grandpa Chuck! The sign is lit! That means the doughnuts are hot and ready to go!” He is 8.
Donuts and I go way back.
In 1969, I was “The Donut King” in my hometown, Sidney, NY.
My father bought a donut making machine and his market was the first one in the village to make its own donuts (of course bakeries and coffee shops had been doing that for years). So, it was my duty to make a daily variety of donuts in that monstrosity. I had a sign over the machine and I’d write down how many I made each day. Our customers would poke their heads in to see what I was up to. By the time my reign as “The Donut King” ended, I had made more than a quarter-of a million donuts.
All kinds: plain, sugar, cinnamon, glazed, green ones for St. Patrick’s Day, pink ones for Valentines Day, etc. It was fun. In 1971, I moved out of Sidney, and I sadly gave up my royal scepter.
What is it about a donut, or doughnut?
People just go wild for them, and my customers back at my dad’s Don’s Super Market were no different. Think Krispy Kreme gone wild.
During my college years in Albany, I worked at Freihofer’s Bakery. I stood on an assembly line putting cherries on cupcakes. I watched donuts by the tens of thousands being scooped up out of their bubbling vats, placed on drying racks and then shipped out to stores all across the Northeast for sale.
This was a venerable Capital District bakery, started by Charles Freihofer in 1884. He delivered his baked good by horse and carriage. In fact, his donuts even today carry an image of that early horse and buggy on each box. They were good, too. Especially the glazed ones. I ate as many free ones as I could stomach when I worked at that bakery 60 years ago in Albany’s Arbor Hill district.
Another iconic donut was the Spaulding kruller. They came in an unmistakable orange and white striped boxes. This was “our” donut because their bakery was in Binghamton, their distribution center was on Market Street in Oneonta, and they could be found in every mom-and-pop store in every community no matter how big or how small.
They mastered the art of making the sugar donut. Rather than just being a snowy dust ball that ended up flaking all over your new shirt, the Spaulding sugar kruller had a mysterious paste-like quality to it that allowed the sugar to stay (mostly) on the donut and not on your clothes. Spaulding eventually went out of business, being bought up by Stroehmanns and today they are owned by (believe it or not) Bimbo Bakeries!
Spaulding krullers still come in the familiar orange and white striped box that carries their company slogan, “famous for flavor.” It may be just me but now that they’re made by Bimbo they don’t taste anything like the ones that came out of the bakery on Exchange Street in Binghamton oh those many years ago.
But there was another donut in my youth. Kind of a mysterious one. We only got it once or twice a year. And it was the best of the best. Click below and see it:
