What has a doughnut ever done to you?
It’s recently come to my attention that doughnuts are having a bit of a Moment. Is this old news? Sure! Remember Cronuts? Of course you do, because you probably got one from an Au Bon Pain at the airport and ate it in two bleary bites while drinking a coffee. The cronut is the reason we’re in this mess in the first place. Every doughnut-adjacent pastry is the cerulean sweater worn by Anne Hathaway’s character in The Devil Wears Prada and rightfully eviscerated by Miranda Priestly: a watered down version of something, packaged for the masses.
The metrics for what a doughnut should be are simple—if you can eat it with your hands, then it’s a doughnut. Maybe it’s filled or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s a “hole.” At its heart, a donut is a portable food, meant to be enjoyed while holding a cup of coffee or consumed over the paper bag it came in, so as to catch the crumbs or powdered sugar or a splooge-y plop of cream. It’s also, in my esteemed and very correct opinion, sweet and not savory. Anything other than that is doughnut-esque, but not a doughnut. It’s Instagram stunt food at best and at worst, an abomination to the pastry category that needs to be stopped at once.
Consider the “cruff.” It’s an ice cream sandwich that subs donuts for the cookies. Is it a regular doughnut? Nope! Could you eat this with your hands? Maybe, but you should arm yourself with a Wet Wipe or better yet, do it in private if you respect yourself or anyone within a five foot radius. This doughnut taco is neither doughnut nor taco, it’s a combination of a bunch of expensive foods plus melted cheese stuffed into a ring mold and served for $65.
A doughnut burger is just a fucking cheeseburger with doughnuts instead of buns. The pizza doughnut is kind of a doughnut, if you believe that a doughnut can and should be savory, though it doesn’t pass the hand food test. If you want to eat cannoli, just get some fucking cannoli and walk right the fuck past this donnoli, which is basically a cannoli with a doughnut shell. Bagel doughnuts are not doughnuts, despite the cream cheese splooge and the fact that they look like doughnuts—they’re simply piss-poor imitations of two perfect foods, mashed together for no good reason. The ripple doughnut, which is available at Doughnut Plant in the good ol’ Big Apple, is not not a doughnut, but still gives me pause. Described as a “doughnut in a doughnut in a doughnut,” it’s essentially three doughnuts arranged in a concentric circle and it almost passes muster, though it resembles a coffee cake or perhaps a tear & share and not a fucking donut. You might need a fork and knife for this thing, it’s served like pie, and you certainly couldn’t eat it by yourself while riding a bicycle or walking to the train or masturbating or whatever you do while you eat doughnuts.
Listen to me, a person who has watched every season of The Great British Bakeoff available: if you want a donut, eat a goddamned doughnut!!