For a “midday” break, which happens about an hour before the sun rises and lasts just under two minutes, Herman Blattner grabs a doughnut uniced but still warm, breaks it and takes a respectably large bite.
A bleary-eyed bystander tries out a tired joke about how you can’t really finish eating a doughnut because you can never eat the hole. He laughs politely, but admits that the joke has been told to him a thousand times. Then he gulps some coffee and disproves the joke by swallowing the rest of the doughnut.
“It’s all I ever eat when I’m here. I really like them,” Blattner says.
That’s something of an understatement. Doughnuts are not only all he eats, they’re also all he does. Blattner not only likes doughnuts, he lives off of them and makes them, too, quite literally from scratch, with sacks of flour, dozens of eggs, scoops of sugar and blocks of butter. He’s the owner and head doughnut maker of Amy Joy Donuts in Niles, a bastion of this breakfast treat. On this day, as on all others, Blattner will mix, coax and coddle huge blobs of dough into more the 3,300 plump, puffy doughnuts.
Blattner, a spry, slight man of 61, clad from head to toe in baker’s whites, has an all-consuming interest in doughnuts plus a few of their close kin, such as crullers, muffins and sweet rolls. He devotes his oddly skewed, 11 p.m. to 8 or 9 a.m. days to these seemingly insignificant little poufs of fried dough.
“You have to take the time to understand them,” Blattner says as he pokes a thermometer into a tub of yeast dough. “They’ll do all sorts of crazy things if you don’t know how to handle them.”
Somehow, through one of the inexplicable wonders of the baker’s art, Blattner manages to exercise human superiority over a lesser, but remarkably determined, form of life. A huge, amorphous blob of ever-expanding yeast dough is at his com mand, and by day’s end he will have tamed it into more tempting forms, about 300 dozen.
Some will be stark and plain, just golden-brown circles of dough, fried crisp and put out bare classic dunkers — for those who still take theirs straight. Other doughnuts, after brief moments in a vat of gooey glaze, emerge glistening with a crackly sugar crust. Big round pillows will be probed with a pastry bag that leaves them bulging with homemade custard. Cinnamon-scented apple fritters get a thin, sweet glaze. Many will sport a thick coating of chocolate because, Blattner says “anything with chocolate” is what sells best. On weekends, he gets carried away with scissors and decorating tubes full of pastel icing, turning doughnut dough into sharks, turtles and alligators.
Doughnuts, which enjoyed a long tenure as the munchable half of a morning doughnuts-and coffee equation, have gotten the slam-dunk because they’re fried and fried equals fat. Now, they’re a dirty little diet secret, a forbidden pleasure. In some circles, you may as well admit to wearing polyester leisure suits or having seen the Brady Bunch Movie” as to chomping on dougnuts. So how to explain the steady stream of customers who come to Amy Joy Donuts each day?
After making million of Amy Joys, Blattner doesn’t seem too interested in searching for any deep philosophical explanation of their popularity. When he shares his thoughts on the subject he says that he likes doughnuts and assumes that, fat and calories be danmed, many other people do too.
Fat has become something of a doughnut demon, and Blattner concedes that Americans have changed their eating habits. But perhaps to keep at bay the tedium that comes with a lifetime of moderation, people still cave in to favored indulgences.
“A couple of years ago, people were asking for no-cholesterol donuts so I spent 2 months perfecting them,’ Blattner says. “And I got them on the shelves before Dunkin’ Donuts did. But there’s not much interest in them anymore.”
That includes red-eyed night-shift workers who come in when Amy Joy opens at 3 a.m., school kids who pick out two or three to eat on the run, and expressway-bound commuters who can face a bumper-to-bumper crunch a little more easily with a doughnut to distract them. Area executives break the monotony of meetings with doughnuts: Amy Joy delivers stacks of standing orders to nearby office buildings.
The German-born Blattler says he bought the shop so he could devour a chunk of the American dream. His European heritage and training as a baker are evident in something as American as doughnuts.
Resisting many of the lures of modernity Blattner makes doughnuts from scratch and mostly by hand. He charges 49 cents for each master piece.
The small room at the back of the shop holds a small, disparate collection of equipment: a fryer that holds 200 gallons of deep, dark, bubbling fat; a dough roller that Blattner calls one of the greatest inventions on Earth (though he still insists on rolling out the dough by hand after it has made a trip or two through the automated contraption); hoppers that squirt out sticky sweet fillings; a jumbo Hobart mixer and a sort of steam chamber for doughnuts to rise in.
That’s the high-tech end of it. The rest of the equipment is hand tools that might be found in any home kitchen. Round doughnut cutters, with and without holes. A big pizza cutter that glides through doughnut dough smoother than through pizza. An array of whisks and pastry bags. And a single rolling pin he and an assistant pass back and forth as they work at the big, wooden cutting table.
“You have to finish rolling the dough by hand,” Blattner says. “You need to feel the dough to know if it’s right, and machines have no feelings. And it’s better to cut them by hand. They’re nicer.”
As if to explain the simple accoutrements, Blattner says, “Doughnuts are very uncomplicated. If you understand the dough, there’s not much more to it than that.”
After working on this particular day for better than 8 hours, his clothes offer few telltale signs–no smears of jelly, no crusted sugar frosting or chocolate spatters. His most recent task has been to coax 2 pounds of butter into a sheet of yeast dough, folding it over and over until there are fully 64 layers. The dough needs a brief rest so he takes one, too, and offers to debunk a big doughnut myth.
“No, the police don’t spend the day eating dougrhnuts. Just a couple of the older fellows come in once in a while,” he says with a chuckle. “They used to. The police department is right next door. But I don’t give away free doughnuts. I tell them to give me a ticket if they catch me speeding and I’ll charge them for doughnuts.”
On June 15, it will be 30 years to the day that Blattner and his wife took over Amy Joy He ponders the milestone for a moment, the late nights early mornings and the mountain of doughnuts that has led up to it.
“Sure, I work hard, probably too hard and long, but it’s been sweet,” he says. Then he goes off to the store room to grab a sack of flour, the start of the next day’s doughnuts.
TENDER SPICED DOUGHNUTS
Preparation time: 45 minutes
Cooking time: 4 minutes per batch
Yield: 18 doughnuts and doughnut holes
1 large baking potato, cooked, mashed, 1 cup
3 1/2 to 4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon each: salt, ground ginger, pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 cup milk
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
Vegetable oil for deep-frying
Confectioners’ sugar, optional
Cider glaze or chocolate frosting, recipes follow, optional
1. Put mashed potato into large bowl of electric mixer. Add 3 1/2 cups of the flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, salt, ginger, vanilla, nutmeg and pepper. With mixer on low speed, add butter, milk and eggs. Mix just until all of the ingredients are moistened and butter is blended in. Gently stir in a little more flour as needed to make a soft-but not sticky-dough. Refrigerate dough for 15 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, pour oil to a depth of 3 inches in a 6-quart dutch oven or deep-fryer. Heat oil over medium-high to 350 degrees using a deep-fry thermometer. Adjust heat as needed to maintain oil temperature during frying.
3. Turn dough out onto well-floured surface. Roll gently with floured rolling pin to a 1/3-inch thickness. Cut with a floured doughnut cutter or with a 3-inch round biscuit cutter and a 1/2-inch round cutter in the middle to make the holes. Gently reroll scraps to make more doughnuts, or fry scraps in free-form shapes.
4. Use a flat, slotted spoon or spatula to add doughnuts to the oil hot. Fry doughnuts, about 4 at a time, turning often, until nicely puffed and golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon to a rack set over paper towels. Repeat to fry all doughnuts.
5. While still warm, sprinkle doughnuts with confectioners’ sugar, or cool and dip in cider glaze or spread with chocolate frosting.
Cider glaze: Mix one-fourth cup unsweetened apple juice or cider, 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice and 2 1/2 to 3 cups confectioners’s sugar to make a thin glaze. Dip cooled doughnuts into the glaze to coat and then let them drip-dry on a wire rack set over a plate.
Chocolate-frosting: Melt 4 ounces chopped semi-sweet chocolate in a microwave oven on low (30 percent power) or in top of double boiler. Remove from heat and stir in 2 tablespoons each softened unsalted butter and milk. Stir in 1 to 1 1/2 cups of confectioners’s sugar to make a thick frosting. Spread over tops of cooled doughnuts.
Apple-cinnamon variation: Omit ginger from recipe and replace it with 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon. After dough has chilled for 15 minutes, gently work in 1 cup finely chopped peeled apple (1 large Golden Delicious). Cut into doughnut shapes or into triangles. Fry as directed. Glaze with cider glaze if desired.
Nutrition information per plain doughnut:
Calories…….270 Fat……………15 g Cholesterol…….30 mg
Sodium……215 mg Carbohydrates…..30 g Protein …………4 g
