As a former resident of Knoxville, who went to status dough the day they opened their first location, im so happy to see this. Truly some of, if not the best donuts out there.
Graduated from UTK last year, and I’m sad I never of heard of this place till now. Although, it’s out there near Turkey Creek, so it was a little out of where I drove.
I developed a minor addiction to homemade donuts at the beginning of Covid and now I won’t even eat the commercially mass produced donuts such as KK for the reasons Adam mentions. I learned a few tricks from this vid I’ll implement into my own creations! Edit: Just wanted to clarify since it came up, Adam mentions how national chains that add a lot of sugar to the dough end up with a melt-in-your-mouth, "cotton-candy like" texture and once I had a doughnut made in the style of Status (as in, I made it myself from scratch) I soon lost the taste for those. Not saying they're bad, just not for me anymore.
the krispy kreme nearest to me is run by a pack of liars, to boot. they leave the "hot now" sign on all the time and the donuts are _never_ hot. lousy donuts.
I also made my own yeast donuts during Covid. They're so good! But the deepfrying and the sugar means super calorie bomb... really can't make them often
Really appreciate the video. I have a small farm in Virginia between Richmond and Fredericksburg. We started selling jelly doughnuts made using jellies from the farm and fritters using fruit we grow. Those guys make it look easy. It's really hard work! As far as the weeping issue, we've never had them last long enough to matter. No joke about when you have to get up to cook them, either.
Donuts are a food that there is a huge difference between cheap and expensive. As I got older and ate fewer donuts or pastries as I watch my calorie intake, I started to buy mostly only “premium” donuts and pastries. The $1 donut at Dunkin’ or Krispy Crème or other cheap stores just taste low quality but that $3-$4 donut is often so much better. It’s with that extra $2-$3 for something I only eat on occasion.
@@hxhdfjifzirstc894 I agree though I think it works only for their popular glazed donut. For all other donuts they have, that overly sweet and no texture just doesn’t work.
Definitely seconding that quality matters. I can buy donuts at my local grocery store that are... okay. But I've mostly stopped because a little ways past the grocery store is a dedicated donut bakery where the taste and texture is far better. And not any more expensive either! Just more of a walk. Which I need anyway. :p
I absolutely love Status Dough. Had them the first time downtown the summer before the pandemic and it changed my life. It's been hard for me to eat Krispy Kreme ever since hahaha
Just moved to knoxville and was craving some donuts, remembered Status Dough from this video and it did not disappoint. The yeast donuts have so much flavor in the dough. That said, the buttermilk ones are also just perfectly cooked and glazed. Thank you Adam for shouting out some local gems here!
Way way way back in the day. I got my start in a bakery, 2 and 3 am starts. Not sure if I miss it or not lol We used to make them fresh just like this. It was a nice throwback to long ago.
Can confirm, the knife is lovely to use. Also, those melt in your mouth Donuts right off the line are something special and fantastic for when that craving hits.
The art and science of the donut is astounding. That said I will shovel in any donut-shaped food without thought or care. I basically stay away from donuts altogether cause it's hard for me to not binge on them
Two things: I have yet another reason to travel to Knoxville and man do I want some Krispy Kreme now. It may not be good but it's HERE and not THERE - (also: astonished to learn that THOSE are cake doughnuts, and yes they do melt in your mouth when warm and yes they're very sweet. fun to watch 'em cook in the shop though.)
Another great and informative video as always! I definitely caught wind of the veiled slight against a certain, popular doughnut chain. I went to college 10 minutes away from that chain’s original store, and I’ve always LOVED the “melt-in-your-mouth” quality of their fresh doughnuts! To each their own, though!
I know I'm a bit late, but this is the origin of the hole in the donut: back in the day the donuts were regular spheres. It was harder to control the temperature of the oil, so most times by the time the outside was golden brown, the inside was still raw. So people put a nut in the middle of the dough-nut, in order to get rid of the undercooked center. And some steps later in the donut evolution people just put holes in the center instead of the nut. So it's basically just there to make it cook evenly
I grew up with cake doughnuts - usually supermarket cinnamon ones - so encountering yeast doughnuts was something of a surprise. As my aunt said (it was a box she bought one time Mum and I were staying at her place, for Xmas I think), "fluff and bubble". I don't think that a bad thing, as sweet bread is a nice treat (Bread Top bakery chain, and brioche loaves are good stuff).
A trip to my grandmother's house was never complete without the dish of fairy-ring mushrooms she collected and fried, and a batch of her sour cream and nutmeg cake donuts. They had no frosting, so as a kid, it took some getting used to, but they were SO good. I miss them . .. and her. But such good memories : )
@@tomhalla426 It's not an urban legend. He literally did. "Ich bin ein Berliner" means I am a Jelly Donut. The proper German would have been Ich bin Beliner (meaning I am of Berlin). But everyone absolutely knew what he meant.
@@Rocketsong oh, Kennedy did say it. The urban legend was that the audience thought he was calling himself a jelly doughnut. “Feli from Germany”, a native speaker, did a post on that. In context, it was good grammar. The legend part was from a spy novel, with an unreliable narrator making the claim.
Cool to see, didn't know the "buttermilk" doughnuts were just slightly different cake donuts! There is a 3rd type of donut I'm familiar with in some shops around her, it uses Choux pastry, which is partially pre-cooked to produce large air pockets for crullers and eclairs.
Yeast and cake doughnuts are definitely very different products. I love the former, but I've never cared for the latter at all. If I wanted cake, I'd eat cake.
I agree, as a kid, I remember always feeling lied to if some place said they had donuts and I ended up with a little round cake. I still feel this way to some extent as an adult.
Man, instant respect for these guys. True tradesmen. We need so much more of this in our world. The sterility and mundane, homogeneous nature of industrial production is a plague upon our world and our species. Industrial processes absolutely have their place, but they shouldn't be the only option.
For some reason I never thought about it, but now it makes absolute sense to me that the "Krapfen" (aka Bismarck or Berliner) is related to the Doughnut. Really good video! Learned something :)
I drive through Knoxville regularly, I'm gonna have to stop by this shop next time in there! But side note, you can rip those light, airy, melt in your mouth donuts from my cold dead hands... 😂 Those are my favorite, especially with coffee in the morning.
I used to work in an independent donut shop and our cake donut hopper was a hand cranked one. Extremely difficult to get right, and looking back, I would've loved the mechanical one
Many years ago I had to find a job very quickly in my (failed) attempts to avoid being homeless. I got offered 2 jobs in the same day, across the street from each other. One was as an overnight shift donut maker, and the other was as a bouncer. I was going to take the donut job, until some people told me how difficult the job could be. A few of us from the nightclub would go to the donut shop after work each night, and I really learned to appreciate the wise choice I made.
Nothing but respect for Status Dough but the dryness of their dough is exactly why Krispy Kreme will never be beat in my mind. All of the fancy local donut shop donuts are... A lot to bite into and you really just get a mouthful of bread. A Krispy Kreme donut, made from wet and admirably yeasty dough, OTOH is a single bite of pastry perfection to me.
Krispy Kreme is way too sweet and I consider them the worst donuts in the country. I'd rather have any supermarket bakery donut. I've never had a Status donut and never will (hate the name)... but I'm goddam sure they're better than Krispy Kreme.
@@hxhdfjifzirstc894 pro tip: if you go to a Krispy Kreme during hot light hours, they will give you a fresh fried donut before it hits the icing if you ask for it. I regularly do this. One of these days, I'm gonna bring my own cinnamon sugar.
KK donuts are just nasty, pointless fluffs of sugar. I much prefer a donut with substance and texture, and a real flavor that differs from the donuts on the next shelf over.
Doughnuts are great and I'd eat them everyday if I could, but I'm more excited to see a dekopon in Adam's hand. I'm so glad that variety has gained popularity in the US.
I passed Status Dough in Nashville a lot and had never gone in because I didn't like the name. Gonna have to give em a shot now since those doughnuts look rly good.
I came into this video as a fat guy who loves donuts. I'll be leaving this video as a fat guy who loves donuts, but also really loves how much Adam Ragusea sounds a LOT like a younger Alton Brown. Subscribed.
Those Bismarcks really look like what we in Germany call "Berliner" (or at least most of Germany does that). They're basically available everywhere and i love them
I think a better comparison between yeast and cake donuts would have been oranges and tangerines or something, rather than an orange and a banana. Both kinds of donuts may have a different texture, but taste very similar. Also, it kind of amazes me that yeast donuts are more expensive than the cake ones. It takes a lot more work to make them, only for them to turn out maybe half as good tasting as the cake ones. In my experience, yeast donuts are a lot tougher and chewier, while cake donuts are softer and don't take a lot of chewing to get down. Though I personally think it's the lack of sugar in yeast donuts that really kills it for me, if I'm eating a dessert food item I want to KNOW it's a dessert, and not just some bread with icing on top to try and disguise it as a dessert. I'll still eat a yeast based donut if someone gave one to me, but I would never actively choose to have one over a cake donut
I've always very much preferred the yeasted donuts more than the cake, to the point where I am always disappointed by most of the new donut stores that are just cake.
My favorite are easily old-fashioned (Lower mid at 0:13). They are for me, not a breakfast food, because I am a night person. I like to sleep from 8 A.M. to 2-4 P.M, so for me, they are exclusively a dessert. The only real typical thing for me is "Breakfast" still has both coffee (far too much coffee) and eggs, generally eaten with some kind of porridge, Grits or Congee easily the most common among them.
@@WalterDEgger yeah we are a weird bunch, normally only two but I have times I just 70 hours or so and so I just get a normal level of sleep a few days in a row and I am good.
I am convinced that the Ragusea chef knife is made by the same people as the Babish knife (which I own). This means 2 things to me. 1 it is absolutely worth the sticker price and 2 I can get the Babish knife for 1/3 the price. I am probably going to get it but I have to convince myself.
The recipe for these yeasted doughnuts remind me of traditional russian perogi. They are not the boiled stuff you buy at the super market, in russian we call them vareniki because they are boiled (varit') but baked or fried. Perogi traditionally uses yeasted, slightly sweatened dough for a lot of recipies, and puff pastries are actually quite a recent addition to eastern European cuisines. They have the practical benefit of being easier to transport than western style pies because this pastry can tolerate a lot more abuse.
owns a donut shop but doesn't understand his 'secret trick' is called letting the dough rest which is like marinating ur meat. the longer it rests, the more flavour and even darker crust/outter. but its fair bc adding rested dough will definitely add more flavour
When I lived in Chicago the "old fashioned" (lower oil temperature -> jagged edges) style was very popular. Now I'm in Boston and I literally cannot find one of those anywhere. Can you explain this regional preference/tendency?
There's a special name for those donut holes in vancouver, Canada. I remember getting a few on a trip there years ago. Does anyone know what the name is,?
Definitely a yeasted donut person myself. Its so hard to find a good one where I live, but its always worth it when I do. Unlike cake donuts, which are always underwhelming IMO
Huh, I've never heard that jagged donut called old-fashioned (always called a sour cream everywhere I've seen them), the fully smooth cake donut is what's referred to as "old-fashioned" here.
It's bizarre to me when yeasted products are referred to as "special and artisanal". After all, it's just instant yeast (fresh yeast is also instand yeast, just in a different form). It's still relatively quick to make, the fermentation is around 2 hours or so. I make fully sourdough doughnuts. THOSE are the real artisanal, boutique that take a huge amount of time and effort. If you make sourdough bread and you never made sourdough doughnuts, you're missing out, try it out.
Hi Adam. Would you kindly consider making a homemade guide for asian style soft bread? Like japanese milk bread, or Cantonese style sausage bun? Would love to see your approach for those recipes
Always been a big fan of the yeast doughnuts, lot airier, less fatty tasting, and they usually have minimal frosting on top. I dont really like a doughnut that is more sugar than dough.
