Talk:Doughnut

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I hereby request that you include that the "donut" spelling is American English, or people won't know that "donut" is rarely used outside the USA. 2600:1700:14BE:E00:B05B:18DD:BC6C:1E9E (talk) 23:53, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. There also already is a section in the article that appears to include the information you describe. FifthFive (talk) 03:43, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Removed Science Section.

1. was not specific to donuts ... could apply to all dough.
2. was added by Hat36, as a student assignment, in 2016
3. was recently suggested as way to much information and a maintenance tag was added by another editor.
4. did not conform to several WP guidelines, such as pertinent relevance to this particular article..

Captured below in case someone wants to revert some specific information, or move some text to the Dough article, although Dough rheology is way out there, having nothing specifically to do with dough.  • Bobsd •  (talk) 23:19, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

Composition Eggs function as emulsifiers, foaming agents, and tenderizers in the dough. The egg white proteins, mainly ovalbumin, "function as structure formers. Egg solids, chiefly the egg white solids combined with the moisture in the egg, are considered structure-forming materials that help significantly to produce proper volume, grain, and texture." The egg yolk contributes proteins, fats, and emulsifiers to the dough. Emulsifying agents are essential to doughnut formation because they prevent the fat molecules from separating from the water molecules in the dough. The main emulsifier in egg yolk is called lecithin, which is a phospholipid. "The fatty acids are attracted to fats and oils (lipids) in food, while the phosphate group is attracted to water. It is this ability to attract both lipids and water that allow phospholipids such as lecithin to act as emulsifiers." The proteins from both the egg yolk and the egg whites contribute to the structure of the dough through a process called coagulation. When heat is applied to the dough, the egg proteins will begin to unfold, or denature, and then form new bonds with one another, thus creating a gel-like network that can hold water and gas.

Shortening is responsible for providing tenderness and aerating the dough. In terms of its molecular structure, "a typical shortening that appears solid [at room temperature] contains 15–20% solids and, hence, 80–85% liquid oil ... this small amount of solids can be made to hold all of the liquid in a matrix of very small, stable, needlelike crystals (beta-prime crystals)." This crystalline structure is considered highly stable due to how tightly its molecules are packed. The sugar used in baking is essentially sucrose, and besides imparting sweetness in the doughnut, sugar also functions in the color and tenderness of the final product. Sucrose is a simple carbohydrate whose structure is made up of a glucose molecule bound to a fructose molecule. Milk is utilized in the making of doughnuts, but in large scale bakeries, one form of milk used is nonfat dry milk solids. These solids are obtained by removing most of the water from skim milk with heat, and this heat additionally denatures the whey proteins and increases the absorption properties of the remaining proteins. The ability of the casein and whey proteins to absorb excess water is essential to prolonging the doughnut's freshness. The major whey protein in the nonfat milk solids is known as beta-lactoglobulin, and a crucial feature of its structure is that there exists a single sulfhydryl group that is protected by the alpha helix, and when heating of the milk solids occurs, these groups participate in disulfide exchanges with other molecules. This interchange prevents the renaturation of the whey proteins. If the crosslinking of the sulfide groups does not occur, the whey proteins can rebond and weaken the gluten network.

Water is a necessary ingredient in the production of doughnuts because it activates the other ingredients, allowing them to perform their functions in building the doughnut's structure. For example, sugar and salt crystals must be dissolved in order for them to act in the dough, whereas larger molecules, such as the starches or proteins, must be hydrated in order for them to absorb moisture. Another important consideration of water is its degree of hardness, which measures the amount of impurities in the water source. Pure water consists of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, but water used in baking often is not pure. Baker's salt (NaCl) is usually used as an ingredient due to its high purity, whereas the salts in water are derived from varying minerals. As an ingredient, "salt is added to enhance the flavour of cakes and breads and to ‘toughen up’ the soft mixture of fat and sugar." If relatively soft water is being used, more salt should be added in order to strengthen the gluten network of the dough, but if not enough salt is added during the baking process, the flavor of the bread will not be appealing to consumers.

Health effects Doughnuts are unhealthful, though some are less so than others. According to Prevention Magazine, doughnuts made from enriched flour provide some thiamine, riboflavin, and niacin, along with some fiber, but they are high in sugar and calories. Steps to improve the healthfulness of doughnuts include removing trans fats.

Dough rheology

An important property of the dough that affects the final product is the dough's rheology. This property measures the ability of the dough to flow. It can be represented by the power law equation: where is the tangentic stress, is the viscosity coefficient, is the shear rate, and is the flow index. Many factors affect dough rheology including the type and volume of ingredients and the force applied during mixing. Dough is usually described as a viscoelastic material, meaning that its rheology depends on both the viscosity and the elasticity. The viscosity coefficient and the flow index are unique to the type of dough being analyzed, while the tangential stress and the shear rate are measurements which depend on the type of force being applied to the dough.^{[citation needed]}

 • Bobsd •  (talk) 23:19, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

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Add to Category:American snack foods. 194.164.123.216 (talk) 09:38, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

 Done twisted. (user | talk | contribs) 16:40, 19 April 2025 (UTC)

That should be “hollow” or “holed”. 57.138.135.46 (talk) 18:01, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

 Done (CC) Tbhotch^™ 18:04, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

while this is a reddit comment (located here: https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/g053na/til_donuts_were_invented_in_new_york_and_were/fn98xed/ ) made by reddit user "lord_mayor_of_reddit" and doesn't link to sources to verify its claims I do think it is a good jumping off point to independently research the comments claims and find sources to verify its claims and then those potential sources could be used to add to information on "Hanson Gregory":

"This whole TIL and the article it's based on are filled with misinformation. None of this is really true.

First off, they were called olykoeks, which does literally translate to "oil cake" or "oily cake" but no English speaker would have called them an "oily cake". It was a loanword, and the name olykoek was used in English the same way as it was used in the original Dutch. Compare to the Spanish word burrito which literally translates to "little donkey" or "little burro". That's certainly the etymology, but no English speaker goes into a restaurant and orders a "little donkey". They use the Spanish word, burrito. Same with olykoek. That's the word English speakers used, though perhaps spelled and pronounced in a more Anglicized way than the Dutch used it.

Second, the story about Hanson Gregory and his mother is easily proven to be false. Research has found Hanson Gregory was born in 1832. His mother wasn't named Elizabeth, but actually Mary (Barrows) Gregory, and she was born in 1807.

Yet, the Oxford English Dictionary cites a February 11, 1782, diary entry as the first instance of the word doughnut appearing in print, written by Thomas Benjamin Hazard and later published as Nailer Tom's Diary. In that case, Hazard rendered the word in the phrase as "fried donotes".

The word appeared in print for the second time in an advertisement in the New York Commercial Advertiser newspaper on December 13, 1802. The advertisement was for a book or pamphlet (of which no known copies are known to survive) that contained recipes "for making Pumpkin-Pie, Dough Nuts, Sausages, Blood Puddings".

The word was recorded a third time in The Receipt Book of Baroness Elizabeth Dimsdale, which was not published until recently, but the recipes were all written between 1800 and 1808. The book contains a recipe for fried "dow nuts" and the recipe is thought to have been written closer to 1800 than to 1808, but since, unlike many of the other recipes in the collection, Dimsdale didn't specify the date she wrote it down, it's unknown. Regardless, Dimsdale lived in Hertfordshire, indicating the term doughnut was known verbally (and spelled in a variety of ways) in both the U.S. and Great Britain before the end of the first decade of the 1800s.

The word was recorded a fourth time in a January 30, 1808, letter to the editor published in the Boston Times newspaper. Letter writer Grant Thorburn paraphrases his grandfather who had recollected the olden days when "the company sat round the large round table to their tea, while a plentiful supply of fire cakes and dough-nuts furnished out the repast".

The word appeared in print a fifth time in 1809, in author Washington Irving's best-selling semi-farcical novel Knickerbocker's History of New York. This was certainly the most widely-published instance of the word up to that point: "An enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and called dough nuts, or oly koeks."

The implication of these various instances is that the word had been around verbally for some time before it started appearing in print. But in any case, there are multiple instances of the word appearing in print before Hanson Gregory's mother could have had anything to do with it. The first was written down 25 years before she was born, and it had appeared in one of the U.S.'s first locally-written best-selling books when she was only two years old.

The true origin of the word isn't 100% certain. However, the most likely explanation is that it simply followed a trend of the time in which the word nut in the late 1700s had started to be used in English as a word meaning "small cake". So a doughnut is simply a "small cake made of dough".

Around the same time, similar words started appearing in the English language: the term gingerbread nut first appeared in 1775, and then ginger nut in 1786. The term ginger nut is still used in England in the same way Americans more often use ginger snap to describe a hard, ginger-spiced baked good. There are a couple of commercial manufacturers in the U.K. that still call their products ginger nuts.

The term spice-nut never quite caught on, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, had appeared in print by 1829 to refer generally to any spiced baked good that Americans might call a cookie and the British would probably called a biscuit.

The question, then, is: why call a small cake a "nut"? This is also unknown, though it is certain it had started appearing in print in the 1770s and 80s. The explanation most often offered is that the small cakes were usually shaped like a ball, and in this rounded shape, they resembled a large nut. The second explanation is that a "nut" referred more specifically to nutmeg as being one of the ingredients. The OED cites "nut" as being a synonym for "nutmeg" between the 1400s and 1600s, however, it had stopped appearing in print this way by the 1700s.

Which brings up the third incorrect claim in this article. The article claims that olykoeks "looked like small pancakes with nuts and fruits" which isn't true. If they were shaped like small pancakes, it kind of negates the claim that a hole was needed in the middle in order to prevent them from being too doughy. The whole point of a pancake shape is that it's basically impossible for them to be doughy in the middle, because they're too thin for that. They cook quickly and evenly.

In fact, all the earliest mentions of olykoeks indicate they were shaped more like doughnut holes, as fried balls. Some sources indicate that there was no single uniform way to cook them, but that they were shaped in all sorts of ways, but, like doughnuts and unlike pancakes, they were somewhat thick.

Hanson Gregory himself, in fact, never claimed he or his mother invented the term doughnut. He only claimed that he invented the ring shape, or the "hole" in the doughnut. Other later writers came up with the false claims that doughnut followed from Gregory and his mother adding nuts to the middle, which, as detailed above, is easily proven not to be the case.

But even this more modest claim doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. Gregory's claim was that he came up with the shape in about 1847 or 1848, when he was a sixteen-year-old cook on a ship. Yet, in 1847, two different cookbooks were the first to give recipes for doughnuts to be shaped as rings. One was in Mrs. Crowen’s American Lady’s Cookery Book ("these cakes may be made in rings and fried") and the other was in Mrs. Abell’s Skillful Housewife’s Book (the "excellent fried cake" is to be "cut as jumbals" that is, into rings).

According to the book Doughnut: A Global History by Heather Delancey Hunwick, the Hanson Gregory myth doesn't really hold any basis in fact:

"Many myths claim to explain how the doughnut acquired its hole, but there is little concrete evidence supporting its attribution to a Maine seafarer, one Captain Gregory, who poked out the dense centres of his mother’s doughnuts. Another seagoing version has Gregory lamenting to a fellow seafarer that ‘a doughnut was just a square chunk of dough, greasy and indigestible’, prompting him to ask a shipmate to fashion a suitable cutter for doughnuts complete with hole. But, however appealing these popular stories were to New Englanders, they do not stand up to scrutiny; Abell’s cookbook mentioned ring-shaped doughnuts in 1847, the same year as Captain Gregory’s claim."

It should be noted, too, that Gregory's claim didn't actually appear in print until a March 26, 1916, article in the Washington Post, when Gregory was an 84-year-old man, by which time ring-shaped doughnuts had been the norm for decades and people were wondering where they came from. So him claiming to have invented the hole in the doughnut about 69 years earlier should be taken with a grain of salt. It was more likely just the fanciful claim of a man wanting to gain a bit of fame in his twilight years, when there is plenty of evidence that contradicts his tall tale. Later writers perpetuated the myth, but there is nothing in the historical record that backs up the claim.

Nicholasjosey (talk) 19:03, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

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Please change "Ring doughnuts are formed by one of two methods: by joining the ends of a long, skinny piece of dough into a ring, or by using a doughnut cutter, which simultaneously cuts the outside and inside shape, leaving a doughnut-shaped piece of dough and a doughnut hole (the dough removed from the center)." to "Ring doughnuts may be formed using a number of methods. They may be formed by joining the ends of a long, skinny piece of dough into a ring, or by using a doughnut cutter, which simultaneously cuts the outside and inside shape, leaving a doughnut-shaped piece of dough and a doughnut hole (the dough removed from the center)."

The sentence currently states there are two methods for forming a ring doughnut, however the paragraph goes on to describe an additional two methods. Brentblueallen (talk) 05:07, 23 November 2025 (UTC)

 Done with some minor changes to the proposed wording. Day Creature (talk) 05:29, 23 November 2025 (UTC)