I recently had the best doughnut of my life — a life happily spent looking for the best doughnut. It cost six dollars. It was a doughnut, and it cost six dollars.
And I’m pretty sure that it was worth every penny. It was a brown butter-glazed cake doughnut from Damn Fine Hand Pies, and it was so good that my wife, who does not particularly like doughnuts, tried a small taste and ended up eating maybe a third of the whole thing. And it was so hearty and filling that I did not mind losing a third of it to my wife.
In my considered and well-traveled opinion, St. Louis is the greatest doughnut town in the country and probably the world. Entire epic poems could be written about the apple fritter alone at Old Town Donuts in Florissant.
And yet, I’ve been noticing something ever so slightly amiss about some of the region’s other doughnut emporiums. The doughnuts are beginning to taste like the oil in which they are fried. Worldwide inflation after the COVID epidemic has hit everybody hard, and unless doughnut shops are willing to charge six bucks for a doughnut, they are likely to cut back in certain ways.
So maybe some are not changing the oil quite as often as they should. Or possibly, they are frying too many doughnuts at once, lowering the temperature of the oil. The cooler the oil, the longer it takes the dough to fry.
And the longer it fries, the more oil it absorbs. They have a faint undertaste of oil. Perhaps nobody will notice.
It’s such a tiny thing, but it burro.
