There are at least two noteworthy doughnut places in or near Atlanta, GA. Given how well these bold places have been going over, we choose the boldest first – boldly named, anyhow. Revolution Donuts in Decatur, which is a suburb of Atlanta.
One of Marianne’s side quests is to get all the blueberry doughnuts she can. It was one of her favorites back in the GADS days, and they seem to elude her. On two separate occasions (in two separate cities) we arrived at places which serve blueberry doughnuts but were too late to get any. They sell out fast, apparently.
Revolution had blueberry doughnuts on hand, and we got one! Achievement progress. The peppy, fast-talking, and very friendly man behind the counter told us that their most popular doughnuts sell out quickly, early in the day – and that we should get to the shop early if we wanted to try their best. This is generally true for doughnut places. We schemed to return early in order to pick up some elite treats.
As for the ones we got, they were quite firm! Almost like sourdough bread, the raised doughnuts were. They were still made of tasty doughnut bread. It occurs to me that cheap doughnuts are always very soft and chewy to start with – maybe this sturdy puffy doughnut texture is hard to get right. Is it the mark of a fine doughnut? In this case, it works well – the glazes (we were only able to get glazes) were thick and sweet, and quite tangy, if I may use the word tangy again.
The best doughnut we got was the orange pistachio. It looks fun, too. Who doesn’t like a bright yellow doughnut? I’m smiling just thinking about it. The rest were also above average for this trip – triple chocolate, true blueberry, and caramel bacon.
Revolution gave us more than doughnuts. They took us to doughnut school. They categorize their doughnuts by the method used to produce them. They separate them into yeast doughnuts, cake doughnuts, and baked cake doughnuts. Now I can say with certainty that yeast doughnuts DO involve rolling the dough out. Donut Country’s slogan (“That’s how we roll”) is vindicated.
Yeast doughnuts are made with a yeast risen dough which is rolled out and then cut into circles, then fried in oil. Cake doughnuts are mixed into a batter which uses baking soda as a structuring agent, and dropped out of a special doughnut extruder into the frying oil. Baked cake doughnuts are cake which has been baked in toroidal cake molds.
We learned all this from a set of doughnut life cycle posters. Like this one for yeast style.
So what happened to our plan to stop by early in order to get some of the in-demand items? We were on our way to the airport (Marianne must sadly return to the West today) and we stopped outside Revolution again.
There was a line stretching out the door and down the block. We were not expecting that. In fact, we sort of forgot about lines after Franklin BBQ. If we weren’t rushing to catch a flight, we probably would’ve gotten out our hats and umbrella.
