It’s national doughnut day. Coincidence? Yes. But here I am at Blue Star Donuts, Portland’s answer to the likes of General Porpoise.
Blue Star’s tagline is “Doughnuts for grownups,” in sharp contrast to Voodoo Donuts, which is doughnuts for cool people. Having just turned 40, I was recently relieved of any obligation to pursue coolness. This type of positioning will become prominent in the advertising served to me, given my swiftly-tilting demographic.
A note about nomenclature – Blue Star Donuts uses the short, fun spelling of “donut” for their name, as popularized by Dunkin’ Donuts and perpetuated by Westernco. Voodoo and Top Pot use the Do-ugh-nut spelling, which looks more serious and/or international. Marianne’s preference is to use “doughnut” for describing things which are actually made out of dough, reserving “donut” for non-dough things which may be using doughnuts as a metaphor – doing donuts in the parking lot, e.g.
Blue Star, I think, uses the fun spelling for their name because everything else about the place takes itself so seriously. It needs a foil. Let’s look at our first doughnut tasting notes, as an example.
The doughnut I chose was the Valrhona Chocolate Crunch. The thick chocolate cap had notes of orange in it, and it sets off the heavy sweet cream filling well. It had a surprisingly heavy dough which was very moist, sticking to the fingers on contact. The recipe is based on a brioche recipe from southern france which takes 18 hours to make and oh my god this is such a serious donut, I better use utensils to eat it.
There’s no way I’m going to come up with an easy way to quantify donuts. I’ll just stack rank them on a couple of axes – fun to serious, and bad to good execution. Oh wait. That was pretty easy.
In terms of execution, I thought Blue Star was on par with Frost and Sophie’s (RIP), below General Porpoise and above Top Pot and Voodoo. It terms of seriousness, it’s way up there at the top with General Porpoise.
Blue Star would never make a cock-n-balls donut, they’d make an anatomically correct unicorn penis doughnut modeled after laboriously researched diagrams from bronze age Pakistan.
5 hours later, Marianne tried her choice. It was the creme brûlée with a pipette of Cointreau protruding from the top. Yes, this is still a doughnut we’re talking about. I don’t know if we’re hungry from all the driving or what, but this one was incredible. Beats General Porpoise. Crispy melted sugar top, and the liquid cointreau infusion a really interesting addition.
It’s pretty clear that I can’t get enough context from a single visit to meaningfully judge a donut place. But that’s true of everyone’s experience of everything, so I’ll just continue to give my narrow-ass reviews.
https://twitter.com/BlueStarDonuts
Next up will be whatever I can scare up in Medford. Yelp says Richard’s Donuts & Pastries, the front desk guy at this super cheap motel said “Country Donut” or something close to that.