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This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Dining at the Top of the World: Arctic Adaptation, Abundance, and…Ice Cream, first released on February 6, 2024. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

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TRANSCRIPT The Case of the Confusing Bitter Beverages

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode The Case of the Confusing Bitter Beverages: Vermouth, Amaro, Aperitivos, and Other Botanical Schnapps, first released on December 19, 2023. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

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TRANSCRIPT Rice, Rice Baby

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Rice, Rice Baby, first released on December 5, 2023. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.


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TRANSCRIPT Ask Gastropod

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Ask Gastropod: White Chocolate, Jimmies, Chile vs. Mustard Burns, and Asparagus Pee, first released on November 21, 2023. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

LISTENER 1: Hey, Gastropod!

LISTENER 2: Hello, Cynthia and Nicky!

LISTENER 3: Hello Cynthia. Hello Nicola.

NICOLA TWILLEY: Hi listeners! We always say we love hearing from you and it’s really true—Cynthia and I talk to each other all day long, it’s kind of a bubble, so it’s really lovely to hear from you all and realize our bubble is actually a dome!

CYNTHIA GRABER: You all ask us a lot of questions and have suggestions for episodes, and we’ve been thinking: we’d love to answer them all, but sometimes it seems like the story we would tell wouldn’t quite fill an entire episode. So we came up with a solution! Answer a handful of your questions in an Ask Gastropod quickfire round!

TWILLEY: Well, quick for us—I mean, these are really interesting topics so we still had to do our regular kind of deep dive! You listeners really ask the important questions. like, is white chocolate even chocolate? And why is asparagus pee so stinky?

GRABER: What’s the difference between the burn we experience from chile peppers and the sinus blow-out that happens when we eat horseradish and wasabi? And finally, this is news you can use, in particular for people like me who live in New England: why are chocolate sprinkles called jimmies here, and in a few other places in the US, and…is the word jimmies racist?

TWILLEY: We’ve called up the experts and figured stuff out, and we’ve made this episode as our gift to you. To bring you some answers and to say thank you for listening!

GRABER: We now have a favor to ask of you, too. Sometimes when you send us these emails with your questions, you also say lovely things about the show. You say how you are constantly quoting us at dinner time, you’ve told us we’re your favorite podcast, you’ve said we’re one of the best examples of food journalism out there, and honestly, we’re blushing.

TWILLEY: You love us, we love you, it’s a beautiful thing. And we’d like to keep it that way. Which brings us to our question for you: can you support us? We don’t ask often, but we do really rely on listener support, and so we need you to give if you can.

GRABER: You hear ads, and you might even have noticed that sometimes an episode is supported by a foundation, and those are great, but they’re not enough to make the show. If that was all we got, we couldn’t keep putting out Gastropod. You listeners are critical—it’s because of the support we receive from you that we can keep the show going. But we need more of you to chip in.

TWILLEY: Any amount helps, a dollar an episode, a dollar a month, a one-time donation of whatever you can—more if you want the special extra newsletter we save for supporters, but really, any amount you can give us will help us keep making the show that you love.

GRABER: So head over to gastropod.com/support or find us on Patreon, whichever you prefer, and please, if you are a fan of the show, help us keep making it for you. And if you already give, thank you! As we always say, we couldn’t do it without you.

TWILLEY: Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

HOLLIS MICKEY: Hi Cynthia and Nicky, this is Hollis from Anchorage, Alaska. And so I’m calling in because I eat about three ounces of chocolate every single day. And, some of that chocolate is white chocolate. So, in the elitist chocolate community, it feels a little bit like there is some serious shade on white chocolate. And, it feels like maybe white chocolate… isn’t even chocolate? So, can you help me find out: is white chocolate really chocolate? And, am I just a schlub for including it in my chocolate consumption diet?

GRABER: This is a really valid question. Hollis you are definitely not alone, there are plenty of very opinionated people out there on the internet telling you that you shouldn’t enjoy this food you enjoy—because it’s not really chocolate.

TWILLEY: The argument is that white chocolate doesn’t have any cocoa solids in it—so it’s not brown like cocoa nibs or cocoa powder.

WILLIE HARCOURT-COOZE: But in actual fact, you know, a cocoa bean is made up of more than 50 percent cocoa butter. And although that white chocolate doesn’t have any solids in it, it has a lot of cocoa butter.

TWILLEY: This is actually a bit of a fangirl moment for me. To answer Hollis’s white chocolate question, we decided to call up none other than Willie Harcourt-Cooze.

GRABER: Nicky, you say “none other than,” but I have to admit, I had never heard of Willie Harcourt-Cooze before we called him up.

TWILLEY: He has a special place in my heart because he makes what is, in my opinion, the best chocolate in the world. I’m not surprised you’re not yet acquainted though, Cynthia—Willie’s chocolate is definitely more well known in my home country of England, which is where he’s based. Willie is famous for his single-origin dark chocolate bars, but he told us that actually, his white chocolate, and the way he makes it, is kind of what it’s all about.

HARCOURT-COOZE: I think my white chocolate, on a pedestal, says it all. Simply because it’s just laid bare.

GRABER: This sounds lovely and a little racy.

TWILLEY: My relationship with Willie’s chocolate is passionate.

GRABER: But we still haven’t actually defined white chocolate, other than saying that it has cocoa butter. Is there a standard definition?

HARCOURT-COOZE: So white chocolate is typically made up of, of cocoa butter, sugar. Milk powder. And some people put vanilla and soy lecithin in if you’re an industrial manufacturer.

TWILLEY: Cocoa butter is the key, there has to be a minimum of 20 percent cocoa butter in your white chocolate for it to even count as white chocolate under FDA rules.

GRABER: We’ve said that cocoa butter is half of the cocoa bean, but to make white chocolate, you had to be able to separate out the fat from everything else, from all the brown parts that could be dried and turned into cocoa powder.

TWILLEY: People only figured out how to do that in the 1820s and 1830s. They were trying to make cocoa powder, but they ended up with cocoa butter as a byproduct.

GRABER: Today we think of chocolate mostly in the bar form. But as you might remember from our chocolate episode, chocolate was a drink for a long time. The first contemporary chocolate bar wasn’t made until the mid 1800s. To make a bar, you needed a special press to be able to separate the cocoa solids from the fat, that wasn’t even invented until the 1800s. And then chocolate bar makers combined the fat back in, in the right percentage for a chocolate bar.

TWILLEY: Like Willie said, more than half of a cacao bean is fat. But a normal chocolate bar—whether it’s white, milk, or dark—that’s usually only something like a fifth or a quarter cocoa butter. So there was some spare.

GRABER: At first, like lots of things, this leftover cocoa butter was used in medicine. Cocoa butter is solid at room temperature but it melts in your mouth, and so it was good to coat things like pills.

SARAH WASSBERG JOHNSON: And so a lot of the early references for chocolate, particularly white chocolate, are pharmaceutical. And I think it’s because of the cocoa butter. It’s a very smooth coating. So it makes it easier to swallow, literally.

GRABER: Sarah Wassberg Johnson is a food historian, and she’s tried to figure out the origin story for white chocolate.

TWILLEY: Leaving the drugs aside for a second, the standard story about the origins of the very first white chocolate *candy* bar—the story you’ll find if you Google it—is that it was invented about 80 years ago in Switzerland.

WASSBERG JOHNSON: Yeah, so generally, the accepted story of white chocolate is that Nestle introduces it in the 1940s with their commercial candy bar with almonds.

GRABER: The backstory for the candy bar takes us back to medicine. Mr. Henri Nestlé actually first used the white chocolate as a coating for a milk and vitamin tablet called Nestrovit. He was working with a pharma company, they’d created a new product that was made up of condensed milk enriched with vitamins, and he needed an outer layer to protect it from heat, humidity, and light.

TWILLEY: And like we said, white chocolate was well known as the perfect way to help the medicine go down. So far, so great for the vitamin deprived kiddies, but Mr Nestlé thought his dried condensed milk and cocoa butter combo was tasty enough on its own to sell as a candy bar.

GRABER: He launched it in Europe, in mainland Europe it was called Galak and in England it was called a Milkybar. Until now I’d never heard of either one.

TWILLEY: Are you kidding, Cynthia? You grew up without the Milkybar kid?

SINGERS: The Milkybar kid is strong and tough, and only the best is good enough; the creamiest milk; the whitest bars; the good taste that’s in Milkybar.

MILKYBAR KID: The Milkybars are on me!

TWILLEY: Milkybars and Milkybar buttons are two sweetshop staples in the UK, and, as a youth, they were part of my regular rotation alongside Snickers and Mars bars.

GRABER: But so this story of the invention of the Milkybar, this is the legend. Nestle was the first. They used it as a vitamin tablet coating, and then they launched the world’s first use of white chocolate as a confection. But Sarah wasn’t so sure this story was true.

WASSBERG JOHNSON: So one of the first print references I found to white chocolate was from 1869. From the Royal Cookery Book, which is the English translation of a French book, Le Livre de Cuisine, by Jules and Alphonse Gouffé. It’s a cookery book, but it also includes a fair amount of confectionery.

TWILLEY: And one section is devoted to different flavors of what are called caramel tablets. They sound kind of like toffees.

WASSBERG JOHNSON: And then they, so they have a crème de thé, right, a tea caramel. And then underneath that they have white chocolate caramel tablets. So instead of boiling sugar and double cream, instead, you’re boiling sugar and cocoa butter.

GRABER: Sarah found a number of references to white chocolate that show it was being used in sweets before Nestle.

TWILLEY: What’s more, Nestle’s Milkybar or Galak—that wasn’t even the first white chocolate candy *bar.* The very first white chocolate bar was made in the USA, and it was called a Zero Bar. Apparently you can still find it today.

WASSBERG JOHNSON: A zero bar is like, a caramel nougat with almonds, right? And then instead of being enrobed in regular chocolate, it’s enrobed in white chocolate.

GRABER: So clearly Nestle wasn’t the first!

WASSBERG JOHNSON: The zero bar was introduced around 1920. And then it gets the official Zero Bar name in 1934, and that’s really the earliest commercial application of white chocolate in a candy.

TWILLEY: Surprise, surprise the internet is wrong about the origins of white chocolate. But is the internet correct when it says that white chocolate isn’t really chocolate?

GRABER: So one of the reasons people say it’s not chocolate is because it doesn’t taste like chocolate. It tastes like vanilla and sugar. And Willie says that’s because of the industrial white chocolate complex.

HARCOURT-COOZE: Typically, they’re using industrial cocoa butter, which has no flavor or taste. It’s been deodorized, you know, it’s been made from very poor quality beans, which might have all sorts of flavors you can imagine. And so they take all the flavor out of it. So it’s basically just the fat.

TWILLEY: There I was thinking deodorizing was just something you did to your pits. But no. Deodorized cocoa butter has all the chemicals that would give it a smell or flavor removed, using either steam heat, or a solvent, or a mineral-type filter or some combination thereof.

GRABER: Commercial chocolate companies do this for a couple of reasons. As Willie said, they’re often using bad quality beans, so they want to get rid of any off flavors, like something a little rancid, or maybe some notes of mold. But they have other aims in mind, too.

HARCOURT-COOZE: If you’re producing something on a large scale, you know, you want to be able to control the flavor notes all the way through. And by having deodorized, you know, they can make sure their product tastes the same year in, year out.

TWILLEY: So if the only product of the cacao bean in white chocolate is cocoa butter and that cocoa butter has been deodorized, what are your flavor notes?

HARCOURT-COOZE: None at all. None at all. I’ve tasted it. It’s flavorless. It’s absolutely, it is literally just the fat. It’s got no odor, no flavor.

GRABER: So these industrial white chocolate makers have to create a flavor.

HARCOURT-COOZE: They would use white sugar, which has no flavor at all, just sweetness. And they would use milk powder, which probably has very little. It makes things a little bit richer. And so they have to put vanilla. If they don’t put vanilla, there really isn’t any flavor. So that’s why people always associate white chocolate with the flavor of vanilla.

TWILLEY: Oof, things are not looking good for white chocolate here. But then Willie told us that actually, if you start with good quality cacao beans, the resulting cocoa butter does have a unique flavor all of its own.

HARCOURT-COOZE: Oh, it’s, it’s soft, aromatic, cocoa-y… you could almost say sweet, but it’s not. It has a very rounded, full flavor. It’s very hard to describe, actually. When you, when you smell it, it smells like it’s got a cacao aroma of softness.

GRABER: We were able to get our hands on some of this beautiful undeodorized cacao butter from another chocolate maker, his name is Eric Parkes and he makes incredible chocolate in Somerville, called Somerville Chocolate. And he loves to make white chocolate bars too.

TWILLEY: Okay I’m unwrapping my cacao butter.

[PLASTIC CRINKLING]

GRABER: It looks like soap.

TWILLEY: Crumbly soap. It is yellowish. Creamy yellow.

GRABER: Yup. But it has that like fatty look. Like you might kind of rub it on your body, which you do. [NICKY GIGGLING] People do that with cocoa butter. So you know, no reason not to.

TWILLEY: I mean, people do that with chocolate Cynthia I hate to break it to you.

[CYNTHIA LAUGHS]

GRABER: I meant as a moisturizer.

TWILLEY: Oh, my god. [SNIFF] It smells like chocolate.

GRABER: It smells like chocolate. It smells like chocolate. This is not deodorized.

TWILLEY: So it passed the sniff test, but what about taste?

TWILLEY: Hmm.

GRABER: Hmm!

TWILLEY: So when you taste it, it’s more just a melting experience.

GRABER: Mm-hmm.

TWILLEY: Although I will say there is an aftertaste of the chocolate-y cacoa perfume, whatever. Whatever we’re calling that.

GRABER: But it’s very delicate.

TWILLEY: Yeah, it’s very delicate, but it is very kind of—it’s slightly floral and very delicate and.

GRABER: It has a sweet flavor… without being sweet, it has, like, sweet notes. I certainly wouldn’t eat it on its own, but if I were to close my eyes and you put this in front of me, I’d know it’s chocolate.

TWILLEY: So when Willie started making white chocolate, of course, he used this high quality un-deodorized cocoa butter. And he didn’t dress it up too much.

HARCOURT-COOZE: You know, I put 30 percent sugar in it, whereas everybody else was putting 40 to 60.

GRABER: So better cocoa butter, less sweet—*and* he didn’t put any vanilla in, because he wanted people to get the real taste of the cocoa butter.

GRABER: So, shall we move on to Willy’s chocolate bar?

TWILLEY: Why not?

GRABER: Okay.

TWILLEY: All right.

[UNPACKING CHOCOLATE]

[SHARP SNAP]

GRABER: Okay. That was a satisfying break there. [BITE] Oh, my goodness.

TWILLEY: Mm.

GRABER: Mmm.

TWILLEY: Oh, my God. Mmmm. [EATING] Oh, I’m just getting a wave of pleasure.

GRABER: And it doesn’t—amusingly or interestingly, the smell isn’t as strong a cacao smell as just the plain cocoa butter. And so that and the experience of it is less chocolate-y than the smell of the cocoa butter itself was because you have all this other stuff, you have the milk solids and the sugar and all that. But it’s not like that boring white chocolate covering like, industrial stuff at all.

TWILLEY: No, it tastes like a, very creamy… slightly cocoa-y. Not very cocoa-y. Very creamy. Delicately sweet.

GRABER: Mmm.

TWILLEY: Rich. Melty. Goodness.

GRABER: Yeah. There’s definitely cocoa notes to it.

TWILLEY: This is kind of the naked version, like Willie said—it’s bare, the cocoa butter really shines. And it’s lovely. But Willie says the other lovely thing about white chocolate is how well it captures and brings out the best in other flavors. He makes a raspberry white chocolate bar, and a matcha white chocolate bar too.

HARCOURT-COOZE: Because matcha is such a delicate flavor, and the matcha was super high quality, it’s Kotobuki, which is ceremonial quality matcha, I lowered the sugar all the way down to 23%, and then suddenly you could taste the matcha in its glory. So, you know, white chocolate is a great medium.

GRABER: Eric of Somerville Chocolates also loves making chocolate bars with white chocolate and he agreed that it can showcase more delicate flavors. We got a couple of those to taste, too, one with maple sugar—it’s kind of like Willie’s naked bar but with a hint of maple. And then another that’s infused with saffron.

TWILLEY: Maple. Okay.

GRABER: Mm-hmm. [EATING] Mmm.

TWILLEY: Mmmm. The thing that I’m liking about both of these chocolates is there’s a lot of lingering effect, you know.

GRABER: And you get the cocoa notes too with this too.

TWILLEY: Exactly. And they keep coming through, like the maple is the first note, but then the cacao follows. Mm. Yum.

TWILLEY: And then the saffron.

[OPENING PACKAGE]

TWILLEY: This is my favorite activity that we’ve done for Gastropod in a long time.

[LAUGHTER]

GRABER: If you don’t like saffron, you would not like this because it has such an intense flavor.

TWILLEY: Wow.

GRABER: Mm-hmm.

TWILLEY: Mmm! This is actually fascinating because saffron is such a… interesting flavor.

GRABER: It’s not usually a dessert flavor.

TWILLEY: No, but it works Really well.

GRABER: Mm hmm.

TWILLEY: I like this a lot. Mm hmm. It feels very sophisticated. I mean, Which is the opposite of what people say about white chocolate. That feels like oooh that’s a grownup chocolate.

GRABER: It does.

TWILLEY: So our research has conclusively proven that good white chocolate is great for carrying flavors, but it can also have a unique taste of the cocoa bean—not the dark cocoa-y part we associate with chocolate but its more delicate floral side in the cocoa butter. And to Willie that means that white chocolate it is indeed chocolate.

HARCOURT-COOZE: Well, I’m a chocolate maker, you know, and white chocolate is most definitely chocolate. We’ve talked a lot about flavor, but actually, you know, you know, what is it about chocolate that is so beautiful and lovely? You know, that’s why they call it food of the gods, you know, because it melts at body temperature, what melts body temperature, cocoa butter, you know, so, you know, cocoa butter, whether it’s white chocolate or dark chocolate, it’s all food for gods.

GRABER: Yum. But let’s get back to Hollis’s other question, and it’s whether she’s not being refined enough by eating white chocolate, whether she’s kind of a schlub, as she says, for including it in her chocolate consumption.

HARCOURT-COOZE: Well, it’s funny, you know, people really see it as a, you know, a poor cousin of chocolate. And actually, that’s simply because of the manner it’s made. And so if you’ve got a beautiful white chocolate with low sugar and all the flavors from the cocoa butter and the, and the, the sugar and the milk powder, then of course it’s on a completely different level. It’s no longer the poor cousin. And it’s a real gem.

GRABER: Eric told us when he first added white chocolate to his lineup, he thought he’d get people yelling at him for making such a lowbrow bar. Instead they came out of the woodwork wanting to buy it, but they were kind of embarrassed, like, “um, can you get me another four bars, put it in a paper bag, meet me in the parking lot…”

TWILLEY: But Willie says no shame necessary. Good white chocolate not only qualifies as legit chocolate, it’s actually the first thing the world’s greatest chocolate connoisseurs want to eat.

HARCOURT-COOZE: Funnily in, in the Salon de Chocolat, which is a very famous, you know, chocolate fair in Paris. I always used to sell out of white chocolate first.

GRABER: So the answer is: you should enjoy your white chocolate, Hollis, and don’t worry about the haters. We have links for how to find Eric and Willie’s chocolates on our website, gastropod.com. But onward, we still have asparagus pee, wasabi heat, and sprinkles to go.

TWILLEY: All the elements of a balanced diet. Coming up after the break.

[BREAK]

GRABER: Next up, a burning question.

GINO SEGRE: Hi, I’m Gino. I’m calling from Berkeley. And… I had a question, or many questions, about wasabi. I’ve always been curious about why that spicy experience is not the same as what you would find in peppers.

TWILLEY: For Gino, wasabi and chiles feel really different, and for different amounts of time, too.

SEGRE: Why does the… heat disappear from your palate so quickly, unlike other spicy foods?

TWILLEY: Turns out Gino is not alone. A bunch of you are curious about why different hot things are, well, different. Like why is the tingle of mustard and horseradish different from the burn from chiles, and why does it go up your nose?

GRABER: So basically, botanically and biologically, is the heat from mustard and horseradish and wasabi the same as the heat from a chile pepper?

PAM DALTON: No. [LAUGHS] They’re not the same. They are produced by two different chemical compounds and they bind to two different types of channels in our airways. And so the way we experience them is and should be different.

TWILLEY: Yay, it’s Pam! Pam Dalton is a scientist at the Monell Center in Philadelphia, she was on our chile pepper episode. And in the lab she studies the particular sensory system that feels the burn.

DALTON: We have a third chemical sensing system that’s separate from smell and taste. We call it chemesthesis, but actually it’s more like chemical feel.

TWILLEY: It’s really different from how we sense taste or flavor—it’s more like touch.

GRABER: So Pam said that wasabi and chiles bind to two different channels, those channels are part of a group called transient receptor potential channels, or “trip” channels. These go from our mouth and our nose to our brain.

DALTON: And those are the ones that different chemical irritants bind to and activate differently. So for example, TRP V1, the vanilloid receptor, is the one that the capsaicin, the spicy component of chile peppers, will activate. Whereas the compounds that are irritating in things like mustard or wasabi, horseradish, even radishes, those are isothiocyanates and those bind to the TRP A1 receptor channel.

TWILLEY: Pam says its not like wasabi and mustard only light up the TRP A1 channel—those chemicals also register on the same TRP channel as chile peppers—but they trigger the A1 channel more strongly. So the burn is literally different at the receptor level.

GRABER: And so then how about the fact that when I eat horseradish at the seder on Passover, I feel like my sinuses are getting totally blown out. Hot sauce burns my mouth and my lips but horseradish burns my nose. Why is that?

DALTON: So, even though you put them in your mouth, they vaporize, and they travel up the back of our throat into our nasal cavity. And that’s where they hit those TRP A1 channels and start the burn. And that happens really quickly. It’s, it’s, it’s like somebody punched you in the face, right? When it’s really pungent.

TWILLEY: Pam says there’s also more TRP A1 channels in your nose, there’s just a lot of them there. So of course you feel that wasabi or horseradish especially hard in your nose.

DALTON: In contrast, capsaicin is not volatile. It really only gets semi-volatile when you heat it. So you’ve probably experienced that, if you’re cooking a lot of hot peppers on the stove, and you will volatilize some of the capsaicin then. Now, it doesn’t mean that capsaicin can’t burn your nose. You know, if you rub it on your fingers and then rub the inside of your nose, it will hurt. But that capsaicin isn’t going to be able to be volatilized in your mouth. So it’s not going to hit your nose the same way that the other chemicals in mustard oil, for example, do.

GRABER: Don’t touch the inside of a chile pepper and then stick your finger in your nose, folks. Because while the sinus pain I experience on Passover blows over pretty quickly, and as Gino says, so does wasabi, a chile burn sticks around.

DALTON: Right. Well, certainly when it comes to the mustard irritant, that’s very quick, right? I mean, you feel it almost immediately and then it peaks very quickly and then it’s gone. Capsaicin, on the other hand, has a much different duration. It builds slowly, but once it’s there, it can last for quite a long time. And that’s because it’s not washed away by our saliva. It’s not water soluble. So you can drink all the ice water you want, and it’ll make your mouth feel temporarily cooler, but it’s not going to get rid of those capsaicin molecules that are in your oral cavity. So. Mustard oil, fast, but quickly over. Capsaicin, a slow rise, but it can burn for a really long time.

TWILLEY: So basically they’re activating different receptors, they’re hitting different parts of your body, and they stick around for different amounts of time. Totally different kinds of burn.

GRABER: What would be useful is a way to measure the burn-i-ness of both of those burns. And in fact Pam told us that one of her colleagues is trying to compare the burn from a bunch of these chemicals at different potencies. She’s doing the study in mice and trying to come up with, like, a rating system.

DALTON: Which would be a more objective way of doing it than actually asking people to put it on a scale. And it would be helpful to a lot of people, I think, in the food industry. You know, in chemical regulatory things. To know that you could scale potency of irritation without having to ask a person.

TWILLEY: When Pam’s colleague is done, dear listeners, you’ll be able to put a cold hard number on your varying burn sensations rather than just enjoying them.

GRABER: But here’s the real question: they might be different burns, but they’re all burns, so why are we eating something that feels like it’s hurting us? Clearly these channels in our mouth are there to protect us.

DALTON: Well, this is obviously a system that can sense noxious pain, noxious cold, and also chemicals that produce inflammation. So, this is a safety system for us to be able to experience these. Now, that always begs the question as to why people enjoy having these noxious sensations. And there’s a million speculations about this. Some of it has to do with it being sort of like, being on a roller coaster, doing something that feels dangerous, but you ultimately know isn’t, and it’s over and you’re fine. And that little bit of endorphin rush that comes from that.

TWILLEY: We talked about these endorphins in our chile pepper episode, and you should go listen to that. But meanwhile, if you’re a fan of heat in all its shades of burn, then spare a thought for the poor naked mole rat and also all birds—they can’t feel this kaleidoscope of different burns. Birds can feel wasabi heat but not chile heat, and naked mole rats don’t get a tingle from either.

GRABER: Many reasons to pity the naked mole rat. But onto question number 3:

CHRIS BRAINARD: My name is Chris Brainard, and I am from Maynard, Massachusetts. And my question is, I’ve heard that… sprinkles can come in chocolate variety and rainbow variety, and I’ve also heard the chocolate sprinkles called jimmies. And I’m curious to know more about where that came from. I was out for ice cream with a friend of mine and, you know, I’ve grown up calling them jimmies. And so I asked for, you know, my normal chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream with jimmies on them and my friend was horrified that I said the word jimmies. And I said, you know, I had no idea what I’d said wrong.

TWILLEY: Chris’s friend said that the term jimmies is racist, and Chris wanted to know, is that really true?

GRABER: We are here to investigate. So I should say that I grew up in Maryland and then moved to Boston a little after college, and that was the first time I’d heard the term jimmies.

TWILLEY: This episode is the first time I’ve heard it.

GRABER: So to define them for all you listeners out there, jimmies are chocolate sprinkles.

RICHARD AUFFREY: And they’re usually put on ice cream, cakes, and as a decoration, an added little chocolate bit for a lot of desserts.

TWILLEY: This is Richard Auffrey, a freelance food and drink writer who has gone deep on sprinkles. Or jimmies, assuming it’s not offensive to call them that.

GRABER: It seems like there are a few places where you might have grown up calling chocolate sprinkles jimmies. New England and the Philadelphia area seem to be the two prime ones, and there are a few others… sprinkled around the US. Not a lot, though.

TWILLEY: But why? Why call a sprinkle a jimmy?

AUFFREY: The most prominent legend is Just Born candy company. Which was, originally up in New England somewhere. They claimed that during the 1930s, they were making these chocolate sprinkles. And one of the operators of the machine was named Jimmy. So they decided to come up with this cool name using Jimmy. To call their new chocolate sprinkle invention.

GRABER: So Just Born says they invented chocolate sprinkles from scratch and they claim they invented the name ‘jimmy’ for this delicious creation.

TWILLEY: Just Born is still a legit candy company today, they make such gourmet delights as Peeps, and Mike and Ikes, and Hot Tamales. But Richard felt like their jimmy story was not so legit.

GRABER: So he started to do some research.

AUFFREY: Well, I tried to find where they might have originated first, going through all old newspaper archives.

TWILLEY: And sure enough, chocolate sprinkles turned up in the archives before Just Born’s supposed invention in the 30s.

AUFFREY: Around 1915, they were called chocolate shots. And it was basically, that’s what a sprinkle was, was a chocolate shot.

GRABER: And actually sprinkles themselves go back even earlier than 1915. Stella Parks was on our cookie episode, and she wrote a great cookbook called Brave Tart. In it she has a bit of the history of sprinkles in general.

TWILLEY: So, like white chocolate, sprinkles started out as a vehicle for medicine. These early sprinkles were not little strings but instead the tiny round ball type of sprinkles—we call them hundreds and thousands in England.

GRABER: And the reason you call them that is apparently pharmacists liked little sugar balls, and they said they wanted ones so tiny that an ounce would contain hundreds and even thousands of them. And that became the pharmacists term for sprinkle balls, hundreds and thousands.

TWILLEY: At the time, these tiny little sprinkle balls would have been the coating on a super potent drug, like opium. But by the end of the 1800s, medicine was moving on from its sugar pellet phase, and sprinkle ball makers had to focus on a new market.

GRABER: They marketed the sprinkle balls as decorations for cakes and cookies and the like, and they made them in different shapes and sizes. They were called things like pellets, mites, and rifle balls and shots. Like chocolate shots.

TWILLEY: As Richard discovered. At the time, in the early 20th century, it seems like a lot of different people were coming up with their own version of tiny sugar decorations, some were multicolored, some were chocolate flavored. They were the trend. In part because ice cream was the trend.

AUFFREY: During the early 1900s, ice cream and soda fountains were extremely popular. Women could go to ice cream parlors without any problems. They did have some issues sometimes going to different restaurants and such on their own. But ice cream parlors were a place that women were permitted to go, so they did a lot of social activities there. And of course, children love ice cream and such.

GRABER: And soda fountain owners were looking for fun new exciting flavors and treats.

AUFFREY: And so adding chocolate sprinkles to something was something new and exciting.

GRABER: There originally were lots of different names for these decorations, but everyone knows you sprinkle them on, and so somehow sprinkle just became the generic term for them.

TWILLEY: So where did the name jimmies come from?

AUFFREY: There’s no actual person I can identify who created it. But a couple of different sources in Pennsylvania had mentioned it. And what’s kind of key is that in 1932, Just Born moved their plant down to Pennsylvania. So they would have heard the term jimmies being used down there. And I think they probably just adopted it at that point, and then created this myth later on.

TWILLEY: Richard hasn’t stopped searching for the true origin of jimmies, and recently he made a new discovery from 1925 in Chicago.

AUFFREY: There’s a reference to ice cream, jimmies, and cake. But they don’t exactly describe what that is. And if it’s actually jimmies on top of the ice cream or a combination. Which, they did have combinations at a time where they would combine jimmies with ice cream, chocolate sprinkles with ice cream. So. Jimmies could go as far back as 1925 in Chicago.

GRABER: Maybe this is why there are some communities in the midwest that call them jimmies, too. But Richard hasn’t solved this question definitively, nobody knows where the term jimmy actually started and why.

TWILLEY: Some sources suggest that it comes from a British expression, jim jams, which these days actually means pajamas, like oh I’m just watching TV in my jimjams. But apparently used to mean the jitters, like he’s got a bad case of the jimjams. Which maybe? Who knows. The quest continues.

GRABER: In New England, jimmies has long been basically THE term for chocolate sprinkles, and Richard thinks it’s because of a popular local ice cream company named Brigham’s, it’s been around for more than a century.

AUFFREY: Brigham’s, you know, they’ve—at one point they also claimed to have invented jimmies.

GRABER: They claim they named it after the charity the Jimmy Fund which raises money for a very well respected research center at a local hospital. But that only started in 1948, Brigham’s definitely did not create the name.

AUFFREY: But they did use it a lot. I mean, when I was growing up as a child, anytime I’d go to Brigham’s, they’re always talking about jimmies and such. And every little kind of ice cream shop that you stopped at had jimmies.

TWILLEY: All of this is important information but it doesn’t help our poor listener Chris who is worried that she’s accidentally saying something racist. Should she be worried?

AUFFREY: There’s nothing I found in my research that would indicate it had a racist origin, but the term itself, jimmies, does have racist connotations.

GRABER: It has that association because of the similarity to Jim, like Jim Crow laws. These laws mandated racial segregation in the south after the Civil War. And they lasted until the 1960s.

TWILLEY: And those Jim Crow laws were apparently named after a song in a minstrel show from the 1830s where a performer in blackface had a whole song and dance routine that made fun of a not very bright black man. Because of that the term Jim or Jimmy became a slur for black men in the 1800s.

GRABER: But the term jimmy doesn’t seem to have had any negative connotation about Black men as a term to call them, like calling someone a jimmy, for well over a century. So as far as we can tell, chocolate jimmies are not racist.

TWILLEY: So when we order our soft serve with the little chocolate bits in Boston or Philly, should we call them jimmies or sprinkles?

AUFFREY: [LAUGHS] I probably use both terms only because I’ve been doing it so long and you know, I don’t think about it as much. I don’t think of it as a racist term, but I do understand, you know, the concern.

GRABER: I can say that around Boston these days, you’re less likely to see chocolate sprinkles called jimmies in a local ice cream shop than you used to be. There’s definitely been a change—I wonder if the term might end up dying out entirely.

TWILLEY: Listen, hundreds and thousands works for me! Although I think you’d get a blank stare if you tried that in most of the US. I like the Dutch term too, hagelslag, very satisfying to mispronounce.

GRABER: Now that we’ve satisfyingly answered Chris’s question about sprinkles, we have one more question this episode—asparagus pee is coming up, after the break.

[BREAK]

ANGELA HESTER: Okay, this is Angela. I’m in Greenville, South Carolina area. And my question was about asparagus pee. My sisters and I all get it. It’s just like this really, really rancid smelling urine you get after eating asparagus. And I always thought it was just kind of a small percentage of the population that it affected, but… the more I talk to people the more I found out that other people experience it too. So. [LAUGHS] I just wonder what causes asparagus pee.

TWILLEY: First of all, my mind is already blown because I thought everyone got asparagus pee. I mean, I do.

GRABER: I do, too. And I never quite believe it when people say they don’t.

TWILLEY: And Cynthia, you and I are not alone. The people of Tiktok are shocked, too!

MAN: Here’s something I didn’t know until I was in my 30s. Not everyone can smell asparagus pee. …Honey, can you smell asparagus pee?

WIFE: No.

MAN: What?!

WOMAN: Okay. So, I just found out something nuts and I can’t… I’m not okay. I thought it was a universal experience that when you eat asparagus, like, half hour later when you pee, you smell the asparagus pee. And THEN I found out that this is not a universal experience. That there are people who do not smell asparagus pee.

GRABER: So we called up an expert.

DANIEL WHITEHEAD: My name is Dan Whitehead. I’m an associate professor and associate department chair of chemistry at Clemson university.

TWILLEY: Dan is obviously not a professor of asparagus pee, but he is kind of a bad smell expert—a big part of his research focuses on how to capture and mitigate noxious odors. And asparagus pee qualifies.

WHITEHEAD: Well, the smell is pretty putrid. I mean, it smells sort of like a rotten egg, sulfury, smell. Typical of small sulfur-containing molecules.

GRABER: And sulfur is relevant because it’s the culprit. Asparagus contains a compound called asparagusic acid, and it’s made up of sulfur and carbon.

WHITEHEAD: And then when we consume asparagus, those materials get trafficked to our kidneys and they get metabolized into small molecules that are much more volatile and smelly.

TWILLEY: Basically, your kidneys chew up this bigger molecule and unlock the sulfur, so that it’s now in much smaller molecules that, importantly, are also much lighter.

WHITEHEAD: They take to the air very easily and they smell… pretty bad. They all have this rotten egg kind of putrid smell.

GRABER: And it happens fast. These chemicals go straight from your stomach into your bloodstream and from there straight to your kidneys, so if you had asparagus in your salad course, you might even notice it in the bathroom by dessert time. Daniel says that funky pee smell can last up to about 24 hours.

TWILLEY: You can’t smell the sulfur while it’s still in the asparagus because it’s in that larger asparagusic acid format. And that acid is also bound up with other chemicals in the plant.

WHITEHEAD: And so they’re sort of incorporated in the plant fibers themselves. And so they don’t tend to, don’t tend to get out into the air until you start to break the material down in your stomach.

GRABER: But so why does the plant make asparagusic acid in the first place?

WHITEHEAD: So, people have studied asparagusic acid that has been isolated from asparagus. And it does tend to have some mild biological activity. So it can actually prevent fungal growth. It can help and inhibit the growth of parasites, like nematodes, which are flatworms. And they seem to think it may also repel insect attack on the plant.

TWILLEY: Sounds great, and it’s kind of asparagus’s exclusive super power. No other plant that we know of makes asparagusic acid.

GRABER: But other foods like brussels sprouts and cabbage and even garlic and coffee also have sulfur compounds in them, why don’t they make our pee smell?

WHITEHEAD: So, you know. The way I think about this is that, you know, anything that we eat, it has two primary exit routes and depending on the nature of the compounds that are in that food, they get processed in one direction or the other. And so, for whatever reason, asparagusic acid tends to go the route of the kidneys and whereas the other sulfur based compounds and other foods may, take the other route.

TWILLEY: And the material that takes exit route number 2 tends to end up with its own whole bouquet of odors anyway, so we don’t notice the sulfur as much.

GRABER: But now the question that has stumped all of us who experience asparagus pee—what, some of you out there don’t? What is going on?

WHITEHEAD: So, there are two things there. So, there is a subset of people that do not produce odor when they eat asparagus. There is also a subset of people who have a genetic mutation that prevents them from smelling these compounds.

TWILLEY: That first subset, the people who don’t make the smelly compounds when they eat asparagus, they are a pretty niche group. It seems based on the small amount of research on this topic that about 8 percent of people don’t have smelly pee post-asparagus consumption.

GRABER: When it comes to people who don’t smell it, both the DNA testing company 23andMe and Harvard University have looked into that recently. And that’s more like maybe 30-50 percent of all people.

WHITEHEAD: And so if you say that you don’t produce these odors, it may be possible that you don’t produce them, but it also may be possible that you just can’t tell that you’re producing them.

TWILLEY: Check with a bathroom buddy I guess.

GRABER: Please, any friend out there, don’t ever ask me to come in and smell your pee. That might be a step too far.

TWILLEY: I’m not offering it as a service either. But we were curious, given Dan’s expertise in designing materials that can capture odorous molecules: could he design an anti asparagus pee toilet?

WHITEHEAD: We can capture that material with the, with the nanoparticles that we make. So, it is possible to design things like that. It just depends on, you know, the cost of doing something like that versus… just putting up with asparagus pee every now and then.

GRABER: I’m guessing it’d be kind of expensive, so you know, I can live with asparagus pee. It’s surprising sometimes, I go to the bathroom and I’m like, wait, I ate asparagus last night? Oh yeah I did! But it’s also not a big deal.

TWILLEY: Maybe I’m weird but, I don’t even think it’s that gross. But hey, toilet entrepreneurs looking for new features to add to your high end models? Dan’s your man.

[MUSIC]

GRABER: And that is it for our Ask Gastropod quickfire round. Keep the questions coming, we had a lot of fun making this, and we’ll definitely do it again some time in the future!

TWILLEY: We also need you to keep the support coming. Like we said at the start, we actually rely on listener support to be able to keep making the show, so if you enjoy what you hear, please go to gastropod dot com slash support and help us keep making the show you love. Any amount helps, truly.

GRABER: Thanks this episode to all our listeners for their questions, and especially to our donors at the supreme fan level: Jim Webb, Anna Mogavero, Robert Fenerty, Joan Hessidence & Rick Wall, Aspen Carner, Gemma Ross, Jeff Mosqueda, Jackie Winston, and Ann and Hugh Bynum.

TWILLEY: You are legends, and we are so grateful. Thanks also to my true chocolate love, Willie Harcourt-Cooze, as well as to Sarah Wassberg Johnson, Pam Dalton, Richard Auffrey and Dan Whitehead for jumping on the phone with us to answer your questions.

GRABER: Thanks also, as always, to our superstar producer Claudia Geib. Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the US who are celebrating, and we’ll be back in a couple of weeks, ‘til then!

TRANSCRIPT Raised and Glazed

This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Raised and Glazed: Don’t Doubt the Doughnut, first released on October 10, 2023. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.

PHING YAMAMOTO: So we have doughnut holes that are glazed. And then we have the chocolate raised, chocolate coconut raised. Raised crumb, raised sugar, raised glazed. Then we have our old fashioned, and that comes in a maple flavored, a chocolate flavor, a glazed flavor, and plain. Then we’ve also got the honey wheat, cinnamon sugar cake, chocolate cake. And then above that showcase is the tray with the Oreo raised and the raised sprinkles.

NICOLA TWILLEY: This is a lot of doughnuts.

YAMAMOTO: Oh, did I forget the jelly doughnuts? Yes, jelly, raspberry jelly, we do that in raspberry or strawberry.

CYNTHIA GRABER: And this wasn’t even all the doughnuts on offer that morning when Nicky and I visited Colonial Doughnuts in Oakland, California. As Nicky said, they make a lot of doughnuts.

TWILLEY: Oh my god, I feel like a kid in a candy store.

GRABER: You are a kid in a doughnut shop, is what you are.

TWILLEY: This entire episode, we are kids in a doughnut shop. We’re also Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I’m Nicola Twilley.

GRABER: And I’m Cynthia Graber. And in case you’ve gotten lost dreaming about chocolate glaze, this episode is of course about doughnuts! What are doughnuts, and why doesn’t the dough come with nuts?

TWILLEY: How did the doughnut get its hole? Who first punched that one out? And more importantly, which bright spark figured out how to sell the holes as well as the doughnuts?

GRABER: This episode we answer all those pressing questions, plus we have the story of the rise of Dunkin, and the doughnut king of California who held the Dunkin invasion at bay. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater.

[MUSIC]

MICHAEL KRONDL: So people have been frying dough basically ever since they figured out that they could take some sort of a bread product and drop it into boiling fat.

TWILLEY: This is Michael Krondl. He wrote a book about doughnuts called The Donut: History, Recipes and Lore from Boston to Berlin.

KRONDL: We have recipes that go back to the Greeks, where they made kind of what you find today called lukumadis. They had different names for them. There are records of various kinds of treats in the Middle East and also in India.

GRABER: And everywhere else too. Everyone had them, but frying dough in oil is pretty expensive, and it creates something that’s pretty rich tasting, and so it’s a treat.

TWILLEY: Also doughnuts are by nature kind of a communal activity.

KRONDL: Because doughnuts aren’t difficult to make, but you can’t make one doughnut, you can’t make two doughnuts, or there’s no point, right? So you make dozens of doughnuts. When you make dozens of doughnuts… you’ve got to get rid of them because they’re only good fresh.

GRABER: And so since they’re expensive and special, and because you need to have a community around to enjoy them – makes sense that doughnuts also became associated with holidays. They’re really popular for with Jews around Chanukah, because we’re supposed to be celebrating the festival of oil, and so we eat fried treats like jelly doughnuts called sufganiyot. But we’re certainly not alone in this, other religions have doughnut festivals too.

KRONDL: So in the Muslim world, there is a tradition of making various kinds of doughnuts for Ramadan, specifically for when the fast ends. And they’re most famous in central Europe and basically all Catholic parts of Europe for Fat Tuesday.

TWILLEY: This is the day before the start of Lent, which is a 40 day countdown to Easter and traditionally Christians had to abstain from animal products for all 40 days. So they used it all up—all the butter and lard and pork fat, all used up in one big go the day before.

KRONDL: What do you do with it? Well, you fry stuff in it. And so one of the things that you would do is you would fry doughnuts. And there are these traditions of making doughnuts in Germany, in France, in Italy.

GRABER: But these fried treats weren’t always sweet, because sugar was rare and expensive. Michael told us about what seems to be one of the earliest written recipes for what in Germany was called krapfen.

KRONDL: Those were the very, very early doughnuts. And we don’t actually know how they were made. They just tell you to make a krapfen, the name for doughnuts in those days, krapfen dough, and fill it with X. So they assumed that it would be more or less just an enriched bread dough. And so what you put into it, oh, is spinach, apples and fish and spices. Perhaps some innards and spices.

TWILLEY: I mean, kind of weird but probably good. It’s fried, what’s not to love?

GRABER: In any case, many of these fried treats from all sorts of communities around the world ended up, along with their immigrant owners, in America, the eventual home of the doughnut.

BONNIE MILLER: So most likely the doughnut is kind of a combination of all of these different multi-ethnic roots from different immigrants that came in in the 17th and 18th centuries.

TWILLEY: Bonnie Miller is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

MILLER: The one that I think gets the most attention for the history of the doughnut is the Dutch. They had something called the oliekoek, which is, oliekoek is translated as oil cakes.

TWILLEY: The Dutch had settled in New York or New Amsterdam as it briefly was in the 1600s. And in their dialect olie was oil and koek was cake, forgive my not great pronunciation. These days, the Dutch call doughnuts oliebollen, or oily balls. Which is super cute.

GRABER: The oliekoek looked like balls back in New Amsterdam, too—they were small round balls of fried dough that often had almonds, dried fruit, and apples in them.

MILLER: And they are kind of most well known for being the, the origins of the doughnut for the American colonies.

TWILLEY: Doughnut is definitely more appealing of a name than oilycake, just from a branding perspective, but I have to imagine this wasn’t focus grouped back in the day. So where did the name doughnut come from?

MILLER: I don’t know if there’s a definitive answer, but there are a couple of theories out there. One is that in the, the 17th and 18th centuries, they sometimes put a nut in the middle. So some believe that that’s where it got that nut part of the name, because obviously it’s, it’s made of soft dough, so the dough plus the nut.

GRABER: That’s one theory, the other one has to do with the size. These balls of dough were often about the size of a walnut in a shell, which is about the size of a ping pong ball, maybe a little bigger.

KRONDL: And there are recipes that describe how to make these, and sometimes they would describe them as, dough nuts. Sometimes they describe them as, pin cushions because they might be cut square.

TWILLEY: Yes indeed, the square doughnut is not a hipster invention. But so who coined this magical word doughnut. What’s the first use in print?

MILLER: A lot of people attribute the name to Washington Irving. He published a book in 1809, the History of New York.

GRABER: You may know him better as the guy who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

MILLER: In the history of New York, he claims that early New Yorkers, would feast on doughnuts that were made from hog fat.

TWILLEY: These were served at tea parties, which Washington Irving calls “delectable orgies” held by the upper classes aka “such as kept their own cows, and drove their own wagons.” There might be pie, there might be fried pork, but according to Irving, the table was always sure to boast of an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts or oliekoek.

GRABER: This feast sounds like a pretty good time, but it turns out that Washington Irving wasn’t the first to use the word doughnut in print, it had already appeared a couple of years earlier.

MILLER: It was published in an 1803 edition of Susanna Carter’s The Frugal Housewife or Complete Woman Cook, which was a recipe book. It had multiple editions, but the 1803 edition was the first one that actually had a doughnut recipe.

GRABER: Whatever their origin, the fried doughnut things came in all kinds of shapes, they came in squares, they came in round blobs, they came in twists, but it seems like among the most popular were these little balls, and they were kind of like an early cliff bar.

KRONDL: And they seem to be popular. They’re very much homemade. They shoved them into their pockets and kind of like, go on hikes. And if you need a, some quick energy, you pop a few of these into your mouth. There’s a Henry David Thoreau, in one of his books where he fills his pockets with these doughnuts and starts walking through New England.

TWILLEY: Just the ticket to fuel some meditations on landscape and nature and getting away from frivolous things. And that kind of philosophical thinking is all very well but really, the important question is, how did the doughnut get its hole?

GRABER: The story goes that it’s all due to a guy who worked on a boat as a teenager in the mid 1800s, his name was Hansen Gregory. Michael says Hansen told this tale in the early 1900s. According to his story, his job on the ship was to make the doughnuts.

KRONDL: And he thought, well, I can just knock out that center. And voila, he was, as he described himself, “the Columbus of the doughnut.” And so Columbus comes home to his mom in Maine and explains to mom how to make a doughnut. This spreads throughout New England, and the holey doughnut is born. Now, there’s so many problems with this.

TWILLEY: Starting with problem number one from my perspective which is a hole means there’s less doughnut. So why’s that a good thing? Why would you even want to do it?

GRABER: Well it turns out that the original doughnuts were leavened with yeast, but in the 1800s, baking powder was invented. That meant the doughnuts rose much more quickly, which is great—

KRONDL: But here’s the problem. If you drop a little, you know, like a doughnut hole equivalent, right, into the fat. It’ll cook up fine. But if you do anything a little bit bigger, because there’s so much sugar in the dough. The outside will burn before the inside cooks through. And so somebody along the way discovered that, Hey, we got this big thing. The inside isn’t cooking through. What do we do? We knock out the middle.

TWILLEY: So by putting a hole in his doughnuts, Hansen Gregory was really onto something, but the other problem is that he wasn’t the first. Other people had put a hole in a doughnut before young Hansen.

KRONDL: And just exactly when this happens is a little bit unclear. Because there are versions of hole-y doughnuts, for example, in North Africa that go way, way, way back.

GRABER: But in America, recipes for doughnuts with holes in the middle show up a couple of years before Hansen’s claimed seafaring Columbus doughnut discovery. So while maybe he did knock out the doughnut centers while he was on the boat, there’s basically almost a zero percent chance that he actually invented the ring-shaped doughnut.

TWILLEY: Hansen or no, these newfangled baking powder-leavened cakey rings caught on, for one because they’re super quick to make.

GRABER: And weirdly they seem to have been particularly popular around New England, and also New York. Other places in America did make them, but often the treats were referred to in cookbooks as New England doughnuts, though frankly nobody really knows why. Maybe we just had the nation’s most intense sweet tooth at the time.

TWILLEY: So by the end of the 1800s, doughnuts have a hole, they’re like the doughnuts we know and love today, but they were still sort of seen as a regional treat—they’re kind of niche.

KRONDL: And then the first World War comes around. And one of the things that happens in the first World War is that of course you’ve got the military, but then you need support staff. And it wasn’t professionalized at that point. So for example, the medical issues were dealt with by the Red Cross. And another group that came in for reasons of… morale, I guess you could say, was the Salvation Army.

GRABER: The people who worked for the Salvation Army in World War I were mostly women, and they were sent over to Europe to help keep up the spirits of the boys from back home.

MILLER: And the, the funny part is that they were called doughboys, though it had nothing to do with the fact that they were consuming doughnuts. It actually had to do with the fact that they were eating dumplings back in the Civil War, that they were called doughboys. But the doughboys were eating lots of doughnuts.

TWILLEY: Because doughnuts, specifically doughnuts made by young ladies, was how the Salvation Army ended up trying to boost morale. Which really needed to be boosted because conditions on the Western Front were horrific

KRONDL: They’re waist deep in mud. They’re being shelled and killed and maimed left, right, and center. So something to remind them of home. And so the first thing that the Salvation Army young women did was they tried to make pies. The problem with a pie is you need apples. You need an oven. And you need the sugar and the dough and all that sort of thing. Of course. And you’re trying to do this with the bombs falling on you and the rain pouring down and you name it. It turned out it was just incredibly difficult to do.

GRABER: One of the women with the Salvation Army named Helen Perviance, she came up with the idea that instead of focusing on pies, they’d branch out into doughnuts.

KRONDL: Beause all you need for doughnuts is a little bit of dough. You need some fat. That’s a bit of sugar. That’s about it. And you can make them quickly when they’re freshly made, even the worst possible doughnuts actually taste pretty good.

TWILLEY: And the doughnuts did the trick in terms of comfort and morale. In fact, soldiers got really attached to and emotional about the Salvation Army doughnuts.

SINGER: Don’t forget the Salvation Army, always remember my doughnut girl! She brought them doughnuts and coffee…

TWILLEY: When a doughnut truck got stuck in mud in no-mans land, it was national news back home.

KRONDL: And these are supposed to be the doughnuts that were be going to be delivered for Easter. And, it was so notable that the New York Times, which in those days came out with several editions, would have in the morning edition: okay, this is what’s going on with the doughnut truck. Evening Edition, this is what’s going on at the doughnut truck. Morning Edition, this is what’s going on with the doughnut truck.

GRABER: The Germans bombed for days. The Americans sent out a mission to try to rescue their doughnut truck, but they couldn’t get there in time. The truck and its delicious contents were blown to bits, to the great dismay of American soldiers and the American public.

TWILLEY: Frankly, it’s a miracle we ended up winning the war after a blow like that. But the point is, doughnuts had become beloved by Americans from all across the country. They were a symbol of all things good and American.

GRABER: At around the same time as doughnuts were claiming their place in American hearts, an immigrant from Bulgaria named Adolf Levitt put his mind to solving the problem of how to get more doughnuts more quickly into American stomachs.

MILLER: So what Adolf Levitt did is he hired an engineer and he created an automated doughnut machine. And this was the inflection point. I mean, he started to hawk this machine to every bakery he could. And as a result, he vastly increased the consumption of doughnuts across New York City originally, and then it started to spread to other cities as well.

KRONDL: So he eventually founds a corporation called the Donut Corporation of America. And very much like today, inkjet printers are more or or less given away, but where they get you is with the ink, right? So that you buy the inkjet printer for a few bucks and then the ink costs you thousands of dollars over the life of the inkjet printer. So he does somewhat the same thing. He makes these gadgets for making doughnuts, but you have to use his mix. And it’s with this mix that he makes huge amounts of money.

TWILLEY: Levitt was not a modest mouse and he called his contraption the Quote Wonderful Almost Human Doughnut Machine. He rented a storefront on Times Square and set up the Wonderful Almost Human Doughnut Machine in the window so he could stop traffic with the spectacle.

GRABER: Levitt was also the one who made our current lives more complicated by trying to change the spelling of the treat. He put out a press release in 1920 that promoted doughnut spelled d-o-n-u-t instead of d-o-u-g-h-n-u-t so that it could be easily spelled and pronounced everywhere in the world. He wanted there to be no obstacle to doughnut’s world dominance.

TWILLEY: And he also did all sorts of fun things to promote doughnuts, including doughnut queen beauty pageants which you have to see the photos to believe—we’re putting those in our supporters newsletter which you can get by supporting the show, gastropod dot com slash support.

GRABER: And Levitt was savvy enough to provide his shmancy doughnut-making machines to the Red Cross during World War II to make sure the boys always had their doughnuts. Of course he didn’t provide the mix for free, he made some bucks off the US Army for that.

TWILLEY: All of this means that by the end of World War II, the doughnut was poised to take over the universe. Starting with Quincy, Massachusetts. The story of Dunkin’, coming up after the break.

[BREAK]

BOB ROSENBERG: My name is Bob Rosenberg. For 35 years, I was the CEO of Dunkin’ Donuts, now renamed Dunkin’ Brands.

GRABER: Yes, that is in fact the former head of Dunkin’ Donuts, he’s also the son of the original founder, Bill Rosenberg, and he recently wrote a book called Around the Corner to Around the World, a dozen lessons I learned running Dunkin’ Donuts. If you haven’t heard of Dunkin before, I’m kind of shocked, because even if you don’t live in the US, it’s a thing. Chances are, there’s at least one in your country somewhere.

ROSENBERG: It’s, it’s big. It has grown to something over 13,000 locations in 40 countries around the world. Basically it services about 3 million customers a day. Sells 2 million cups of coffee a day, and about 3 million doughnuts a day.

TWILLEY: And all of this from humble beginnings. Bob’s dad Bill was born in 1916, his parents were immigrants.

MILLER: He grew up from a working class, Jewish family, didn’t have a lot of money.

ROSENBERG: He dropped out of school in the eighth grade. He was a child of the Depression. And his father had seen his father fail in the supermarket business and had to go to work to help support his family when he was a kid.

GRABER: After World War II, Bill did a bunch of jobs, and he ended up in a business in Connecticut that owned trucks that provided food at factories and on construction sites.

ROSENBERG: You know, coffee, doughnuts and sandwiches. And he brought that business back to Boston and started a similar business in Boston. And grew that business from 1945 and 46 to about 1948, 49, very successfully.

TWILLEY: Doughnuts were certainly more popular than ever after World War II. But although business was good, it soon faced an existential threat.

ROSENBERG: In the years after the war, there was the invention of vending machines. They started to be populated in all of these small locations, small offices and small factory sites. Where it’s more convenient for the workers, rather than go outside and stand in the rain or in the snow, they get their coffee and they could get it inside.

GRABER: At this point, Bill had a partner in the business. The two of them heard that a brick and mortar store selling doughnuts nearby was doing pretty well. In fact, it was doing better in that one store than Bill’s twenty or so trucks.

ROSENBERG: And so in 1948, they opened something called the Open Kettle. For 25 a month rent on the Southern Artery in Quincy, Massachusetts, they opened a doughnut shop serving fresh hot doughnuts and delicious coffee.

MILLER: They named it Open Kettle because you fry doughnuts in a large open kettle of oil. And that became their first storefront. Interestingly enough, they had seating in Open Kettle, which was very different from other doughnut places before. It may even have been the first to actually have place where people could sit and linger and have their coffee and doughnuts.

TWILLEY: Which sounds like a recipe for success, and it totally wasn’t. That first Open Kettle storefront didn’t lose money but it didn’t really make much more than a truck.

ROSENBERG: And it certainly wasn’t the answer they were looking for.

GRABER: Bill and his partner heard that someone else was going to open a doughnut store nearby, and they poached that guy’s architect.

ROSENBERG: He came in, he said, you know, this sort of stucco hut with no windows isn’t a good place to showcase your business. Really what you got to do is rip it down, and put it in a California style store, change the name. Open Kettle, no one knows what you’re selling inside. And so that’s exactly what the partners did in an attempt to salvage their dream of a bigger business. And they ripped it down in the 1950s. The $1,000 a week Open Kettle closed and it was reopened with a $5,500 a week Dunkin Donut shop. That had a California style see through fishbowl kind of effect, all glass, you could look into the kitchen and watch the doughnuts being made.

TWILLEY: California style is very cool of course and seeing doughnuts get made does tend to make you want to eat one, but the other big boost was the new name.

ROSENBERG: They were sitting around deciding, Open Kettle wasn’t a particularly good name. What could they select? And they were doing a sort of a brainstorming and someone said, you know, you pick a chicken. You dunk a doughnut. And my dad said, well, that’s the name.

GRABER: At the time, dunking a doughnut in a cup of coffee was actually super common. Adolf Levitt had popularized it back in the 20s and 30s, there were doughnut dunking competitions, there was a doughnut dunking stand at the World’s Fair in the 1930s. He hired Shirley Temple to make a movie called Dora’s Dunking Doughnuts.

SINGERS: Dora’s Dunking Doughnuts! Dora’s Dunking Doughnuts! They are the rage of the land!

TWILLEY: One of the most bananas stunts Levitt pulled was hiring a guy called Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly who was apparently a famous flagpole sitter which is a thing people used to do in the 1920s as a test of endurance. Alvin dunked and ate thirteen doughnuts while doing a headstand on a plank that was hanging over the edge of the 54th story of a building in New York City. Rather him than me.

GRABER: There were comedy bits about dunking doughnuts, and even the movie star Clark Gable got in on the act. In the movie It Happened One Night, Clark Gable’s character, a reporter, teaches an heiress how to appropriately dunk a doughnut.

HEIRESS: Oh now, don’t you start telling me I shouldn’t dunk.

CLARK GABLE: Of course you shouldn’t, you don’t know how to do it. Dunking’s an art. Don’t let it soak so long. Dip and… [MOUTH FULL] pop, in your mouth. Let it hang there too long and it’ll get soft and fall off. It’s all a manner of timing. Oh, I’ll write a book about it.

HEIRESS: [LAUGHING] Thanks, professor.

CLARK GABLE: Mmm. Just goes to show you. Twenty millions and you don’t know how to dunk.

TWILLEY: Dunking was such a big deal in those days that the brand new Dunkin Donuts even made a special doughnut with a handle to help dunkers dunk more elegantly.

GRABER: That wasn’t the only special aspect of their doughnuts, the other was the shocking amount of variety that you could find in this new, light-filled, modern doughnut shop. At the time, most of their competitors only had a few options, you know, glazed, chocolate, cake, whatever.

MILLER: Howard Johnson was an important inspiration for Bill Rosenberg. And Bill Rosenberg saw that Howard Johnson’s offered 28 flavors of ice cream. And that kind of inspired him towards having as big a variety as possible. And Bill Rosenberg was a visionary. I mean, he always took everything to the extreme. So he decided that he wanted to have 52 flavors of doughnuts. Initially, his thought was they would have one new one per week. And for the first couple decades they offered 52 varieties of doughnuts.

TWILLEY: All these good ideas added up to a magic formula. Dunkin’ Donuts took off. But Bob says it was also a little bit of being in the right place at the right time.

ROSENBERG: I would call it trends aligned. There were massive changes. The highway system came into existence then under the Eisenhower administration. People started to take to the suburbs, women because of the second World War had entered the workforce. And out of economic necessity or out of desire to be able to add additional income, the growth in women away from home, working away from home and food away from home, started to take effect. And this was sort of the tailwind, the trailing wind that built this whole industry.

GRABER: There’s one other thing that made these new doughnut shops succeed, and it’s that they were open super early in the morning. They were kind of the only ones.

ROSENBERG: There were no real breakfast places open in those days other than McDonald’s, which I don’t think started to serve breakfast until the mid seventies. So if you were on the way to work and you needed, you know, a pick me up and a start to your day, there was few options.

TWILLEY: This also explains why cops became so associated with doughnuts. Cops are out on patrol at all hours, and if they wanted to stop for a quick coffee and a snack to go, they didn’t have a lot of other options.

GRABER: And so it’s not really surprising that Dunkin became a huge success. They started to grow and open new stores.

MILLER: But the reality is, it was their business model more than it was their menu that made them so successful. And their business model had to do with franchising.

GRABER: In case you haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it or heard our episode on McDonalds, just a quick reminder that franchising is when you basically sell the name and recipe for success to other folks who kind of independently run each store.

MILLER: And post-World War II was the era of these new fast food chains that were arising and the role of franchising being really key for that. Bill Rosenberg founds the International Franchising Association in 1959. So he was a leader in the industry

TWILLEY: By the 60s, everything was going great for Dunkin’. But remember, Bill was an eighth grade dropout. He’d obviously learned a ton on the job and had been super successful but he didn’t feel like he had what it took to keep that growth going. So even though he was only 47, he stepped down.

MILLER: In 1963, Bill Rosenberg passes the torch to his son Bob Rosenberg, who begins to be CEO. And Bob Rosenberg at the time. He’s fresh out of Harvard Business School.

ROSENBERG: And I was green. I was 25 years old.

GRABER: Bob was young, but he started off strong, he had a series of quick successes that grew the business. One of the secrets to his success was great advertising campaigns. And if you were in the US in the 70s and 80s, one of these campaigns will likely be stuck in your head forever.

FRED THE DONUT MAKER: Time to make the doughnuts.

ROSENBERG: We hired a guy by the name of Michael Vail to be Fred, the doughnut maker again to show the competitive advantage of our product being made fresh every four hours

FRED THE DONUT MAKER: Time to make the doughnuts. The doughnuts.

VOICEOVER: It isn’t easy owning a Dunkin Donuts. (FRED THE DONUT MAKER: time to make the doughnuts…) Because unlike most supermarkets, we make our doughnuts fresh day and night.

FRED THE DONUT MAKER: Bet the guys who make supermarket doughnuts are still in bed.

TWILLEY: Side note, Dunkin typically doesn’t make their doughnuts fresh in store anymore, they haven’t for several decades now. Streamlining doughnut production is part of how they continued to grow. They also don’t make that special doughnut with the handle for dunking anymore, sadly.

MILLER: It lasted up until 2003. It was finally discontinued because it was a tremendous hassle for the bakers. Because they couldn’t automate the making of the dunking doughnut because of the handle.

GRABER: But it wasn’t all streamlining. They added new things too. There’s one product in particular that helped them grow even bigger, and it’s probably the most common way I ate doughnuts as a kid: the Munchkin, the doughnut hole. At one point though, that was a special once-a-year treat.

ROSENBERG: We would pick up the centers at Halloween time, and we’d put them on the, on a sheet, a screen, and fry them, and put them in the little cellophane bags, and then hang them on little holders like you would get in most convenience stores where you would buy Potato chips or something like that. But it was only at halloween, and they were sold in only three varieties of cake product. There was plain, cinnamon, and sugar. And it was only a seasonal product.

TWILLEY: And then, in 1972, which was a tough time for Dunkin’ and for business generally, Bob got a call from one of his franchise owners in Connecticut. This guy was also called Bob.

ROSENBERG: He said, Edna, my wife, has found a way to sell these doughnut holes and we’re doing gangbuster business. So I said, no, no, you, you know, we used to sell these little things. They never work. He said, no, you have to understand. Edna has developed a different cutter. It’s much bigger. And she’s doing yeast doughnuts as well as cake. She’s filling them. She’s frosting them. She’s doing all kinds of things, piling them high in the front case. And our business is up something like 20%. Well! Heh, 20 percent increase in business, certainly my ears perked up.

GRABER: So of course Bob got himself down to Connecticut, and sure enough, those doughnut holes looked great and were selling like…hotcakes. Bob’s smart enough to steal a good idea when he sees one, so he made it a national thing, and they called the new invention Munchkins, after the Wizard of Oz.

MUNCHKIN KID: People kept telling my mother I look like a munchkin. Well. This is what a munchkin looks like. They have them down in Dunkin Donuts, in quite a few flavors, like…

KIDS: Jingly Jelly!

MUNCHKIN KID: And…

KIDS: Cheery Chocolate!

KIDS: Jingly crunch!

MUNCHKIN KID: And…

KIDS: Dunkin! The magic munchkin.

ROSENBERG: And it really was a real salvation, a real important impact in the 1972 life during the oil embargo and gas rationing time. Our sales again, were up about 12 or 15 percent with the introduction of munchkins.

TWILLEY: So at this point, it seems like there’s no stopping Dunkin. But that’s only if you don’t consider California, which was the personal fiefdom of the Donut King. We went to California to tell his story, that’s coming up after the break.

[BREAK]

YAMAMOTO: My name is Phing Yamamoto and we’re at Colonial Donuts here in Oakland on Lakeshore Avenue, 3318 Lakeshore Avenue.

GRABER: Phing’s parents owned this very doughnut store for nearly forty years. Nicky and I visited early one Friday morning, and it was of course time to make the doughnuts.

RATTA: The dough, we already mix it. Right now, we put over here, we going to drop it. You see that?

TWILLEY: How long are they in there?

RATTA: This one I put for three minutes.

TWILLEY: And what are you using to move them around?

RATTA: This one is like a chopstick. Just flip it.

[ALARM BEEPING]

RATTA: This one I put for three minutes. [TIMER BEEPS] And then wait. Three minutes.

TWILLEY: There is definitely an art to making doughnuts, shaping them, flipping them, keeping the oil at exactly the right temperature. But although you can make unlimited varieties by switching up the flavors and toppings, Bob told us basically there’s just three mixes—three different recipes that are used as the basis for all the different doughnuts.

ROSENBERG: There is a cake mix, which is leavened by baking soda, which is very cakey, made of soft wheat. There is a yeast product that’s leavened by yeast, and that makes the rings that you see, the fluffy rings, And, and then there’s a, a cruller mix, which is nothing more than a popover fried, which, which is what a French cruller is. It’s, it’s got eggs and flour.

GRABER: At Colonial, they riff off those basic recipes and make around fifty different varieties. Phing would have handed us as many as we wanted to try, but there’s only so many doughnuts a person can eat at any one time. We had to be a LITTLE choosy.

[BACKGROUND NOISE]

GRABER: We need to try a cruller. We need to try a raised. Maybe an ube cake? Yeah. I think we should try an ube cake.

YAMAMOTO: I know, it’s… decisions.

TWILLEY: So many decisions, we basically kind of gave up and ended up with eight doughnuts which was really too many for two people but we suffer for our art.

GRABER: We started with the doughnut of my childhood and the one I always think of as my favorite, which was a yeasted doughnut with a chocolate glaze.

GRABER: Oh yeah, this is my, this is my typical doughnut. Mm! It’s still my favorite doughnut! So far. I like the chewiness, I like the airiness, I like the chocolate glaze on it.

TWILLEY: Listen, this is a very good version of a classic doughnut. I just… It’s too light and fluffy for me.

TWILLEY: Then we moved onto one that is apparently very traditional but was new to me—a buttermilk cake doughnut.

TWILLEY: This is a much more substantial and dense.

GRABER: Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

TWILLEY: It is cake like.

GRABER: Mm. Hmm! A little tangy. That’s really good. I’ve never had this before.

TWILLEY: This is delicious. Where’s it been my whole life?

GRABER: And then we moved onto an ube doughnut, ube is a dark purple and super sweet tuber, and the doughnut also had lots of crunchy bits all around it.

TWILLEY: Alright, this is a beautiful purple.

GRABER: It is.

TWILLEY: On the inside too.

GRABER: It has sweet potato and ube in it. Hmm! Mm. That was really good. I like the crunch of the like, extra crispy cake crumb bits around it.

TWILLEY: It’s so soft and so cakey and not too sweet at all and the flavor is incredible. This is a dream.

GRABER: It might be my new favorite.

TWILLEY: While we snarfed up Phing’s delicious doughnuts, she told us a little bit about her story. She’d only recently come back to work in the family business, previously she’d had a tech job in Silicon Valley. But she basically grew up in her parents’ doughnut stores.

YAMAMOTO: And growing up, you know, I was—at school, I was called the doughnut princess because everyone knew [LAUGHS] that my parents had owned the local store, you know, doughnut shop. And so it was. It was almost expected that for my birthday, I brought in doughnuts for everyone. So. [LAUGHS]

GRABER: She didn’t just eat the doughnuts, she started working in the shop, too.

YAMAMOTO: Absolutely. I started at nine, nine years old, and I still remember learning how my mom was trying to teach me to do the change, and I just, like, could not get it. [LAUGHS]

TWILLEY: Phing’s parents were refugees from Cambodia.

YAMAMOTO: My dad was in the war for four years. My mom five. An extra year because she was a refugee in Thailand.

GRABER: In the 1970s in Cambodia, there was a civil war. Here’s a very basic overview of a very complicated political situation that America was also involved in, but overall, the Khmer Rouge took over the country, and Pol Pot became the dictator. This is from an episode of the tv news show Dateline from 1975.

BROADCASTER: The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh. They evacuated the capital. Two million people, including thousands of hospital patients, were forced onto the road and marched into the countryside.

TWILLEY: Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, he had this idea that everyone should work the land. Intellectuals or people with Western connections were mostly executed, and families were sent out to the fields, where they were split up, with kids as young as six taken away from their parents.

GRABER: Estimates are that between one and a half and three million people died during this time. And those who could get out, got out—about 150,000 Cambodians came to the US.

YAMAMOTO: And my aunt who was already in the States, she ventured to California because she heard that there was a lot of, you know, doughnut businesses that are making money. And, you know, that’s the American dream, right? They want to own something and, you know, have some… something to do that. You know, it’s hard working, but something that they can do.

TWILLEY: Turns out, this is a story you can hear about doughnut shops all over California.

MICHELLE SOU: Yeah, so my family, both sides of my family are Cambodian refugees. They came escaping the genocide, the Khmer Rouge that happened. My dad, who was like in his teenage years, was forced to build trenches or like really rudimentary dams. Other people had to farm. So my mom was doing rice.

GRABER: Michelle Sou’s parents escaped the Khmer Rouge and ended up in California, in their case, LA, and like Phing’s parent they too ended up owning a doughnut shop.

SOU: At night time I would learn to fall asleep on the uh, benches that we had, because we would clean everything up. We, my brother and I would, you know, have our chores basically, like instead of chores at home, it was chores at the doughnut shop. We also had weddings, for family weddings when those ended, we still had to go back to the doughnut shop. And so instead of, you know, returning home, we would have to run in our like wedding dress, guest dressed attire to close up.

TWILLEY: Doughnuts were life for Michelle. Her uncles and her whole family—they pretty much all owned doughnut shops and were in the doughnut business.

SOU: And I had no idea. Like I knew the circle that I lived in in Southern California as family, and so I just thought it was like a funny coincidence that so many of my family members own these doughnut shops. But I had no idea that it was a true community of people. And that’s beyond just the family members that I know, but rather a whole community of immigrants that had found a way to, to start a life in a country like this. Where it’s undoubtedly difficult to… find a way through without a lot of education or opportunities to have education.

GRABER: One thing they could do was own a doughnut shop. Turns out that today, 90 percent of all the independent doughnut shops in California are owned by Cambodian refugees. And that’s because of one guy, Ted Ngoy, the doughnut king of California. He got out of Cambodia just before the Khmer Rouge took over, and he was a refugee in southern California where he was working at a gas station.

TED NGOY: I remember it was a slow night. About midnight. And there’s no traffic. I run real fast. Come to this window right here. I say, lady, I would like to buy some doughnut. Say okay, I sell you a dozen doughnuts. I fall in love with doughnut from the moment that I have a bite.

TWILLEY: This is Ted himself, the doughnut king, from a documentary about his life called, you guessed, The Donut King.

NGOY: So I asked, lady, if I can save up to 3000 dollar, do you think I can open a doughnut shop like this? And she said, no, don’t open your own doughnut shop. Just go to learn from Winchell.

TWILLEY: Winchell’s is still a big doughnut chain in California. And Ted took the lady’s advice. He completed their three month training program, he took over a Winchell’s shop in Orange County, and he and his wife Christy worked and worked and saved and saved. For one, they didn’t hire anybody—they just did everything themselves.

GRABER: Cutting down on payroll meant that soon they’d saved up enough money to buy their own doughnut shop, which they named Christy’s. They were still running the Winchell’s. And then they kept buying more and more doughnut shops until they owned 25 of them.

TWILLEY: Ted and Christy were some of the earliest refugees from Cambodia to arrive in the US. To get out of the camps you had to have a sponsor, and so Ted started to sponsor other families. And because he was so successful, lots of his fellow Cambodian immigrants came to him to figure out how to also be successful in America. And he showed them all the way of the doughnut.

NGOY: Me and Christy, we talk among ourselves, then we kind of, create leasing program. One store after overhead make 7000 on net. I lease that for 3000, let family make 4000. I only lease it to Cambodian American.

GRABER: One Cambodian family then taught another, and another, like how Phing’s aunt heard about it and then told her parents. All the Cambodian refugees learned they could make a living and a life in California by owning a doughnut shop.

SOU: And so you’ll see a lot of doughnut shops that are independently owned but are connected one way or another, either through, relatives or community, just, you know, family and friends.

YAMAMOTO: When you come to a country without an education and you can work hard and still make a living, I think it’s, it’s something that they’re like, hey. We can do this.

TWILLEY: And they did. And because there were so many of them and they worked so hard and kept payroll so low by putting their entire families to work, these Cambodian-American indie doughnut shops were able to hold even the mighty Dunkin Donuts at bay.

NGOY: Dunkin had to make at least 50,000 a month to survive. And Cambodian doughnut shop, make 10,000 they can survive.

ROSENBERG: And I didn’t have enough ad dollars at the time to have national advertising. So as a result of that, I pretty much stayed away. Tried a couple of abortive attempts. But, but basically I stayed away from the West coast and was not particularly successful in the few forays I had.

GRABER: While Cambodian Americans claimed the West Coast doughnut scene, Bob worked with plenty of immigrants in Dunkin’s markets. They mostly franchised to immigrants from the Azores on the east coast and from India and Pakistan in the midwest.

TWILLEY: And that’s been a big part of Dunkin’s success story, too. All of which meant that, just a few years ago, Dunkin got big enough to try its luck in California again.

ROSENBERG: Today, that’s a different story. Today Dunkin has tens of millions, maybe 50, 60, 70 million worth of ad weight. That they can use on TV. And, and the fact that they can do it under a brand, where the Cambodians had individual stores, didn’t have access to a central company to create new products, new marketing techniques. They’re now, I think, very successfully, embarking on developing the West Coast

TWILLEY: Since 2014, Los Angeles and San Francisco each have a handful of Dunkin’ stores and the brand has big expansion plans. But even still this is not a tale of Goliath crushing David. Dunkin’ has come to California, but the Cambodian independents have stayed, and now there’s just more doughnuts to go around. In the documentary about Ted, there’s an incredible stat that in the US there’s about one doughnut shop for every 30,000 people on average. In LA, we’ve got one shop for every 7,000!

GRABER: A similar kind of doughnut war played out when the chain Krispy Kreme started leaving its stronghold in the southeast and attempting to encroach on Dunkin’s territory, we’ll tell you about that in our special supporters’ newsletter. Needless to say, it ends with more doughnuts all around.

TWILLEY: Even the more recent hipster doughnut and cronut trends—all they’ve done is keep increasing the overall doughnut pie, so to speak.

GRABER: And to be honest, Dunkin’ Donuts doesn’t mind all this doughnut competition, because these days they’ve actually officially changed their name to Dunkin’. It’s honestly more about the coffee today than the doughnuts.

ROSENBERG: The business has migrated and changed over the years. When I first became CEO in 1963, it was 60 percent doughnuts and 40 percent beverages. And that’s all flipped, between beverages and snacks, including doughnuts.

VOICEOVER: America runs on Dunkin’.

MAN: America runs on Dunkin’.

WOMAN: America runs on Dunkin’.

TWILLEY: This is Dunkin’s current advertising slogan, no more time to make the doughnuts. Instead it’s all about America and where America goes to get caffeinated. I mean, you’re not running on a doughnut, are you?

GRABER: And this next bit isn’t about doughnuts exactly, but we couldn’t ignore it—we don’t get many excuses to get Hollywood A list celebrities on the show. In Boston, Dunkin’s home turf, the most all-American local boy who’s regularly seen with his large iced Dunkin coffee in hand is Ben Affleck. And earlier this year he…well, let’s just say he took on a bit of a side hustle.

BROADCASTER: Talk about wow. Some customers at a Dunkin drive-through near Boston got quite a surprise today.

LISA MCKAY: I pulled up, and there he was, handing me my iced coffee. He was actually really funny, super, super nice, really funny, and everything I expected him to be, he was.

BROADCASTER: Ben Affleck, workin’ the window.

TWILLEY: A little side hustle that ended up as a Super Bowl commercial.

BEN AFFLECK: Welcome to Dunkin’— a new special: Dunkin Run, medium or large coffee. Get a doughnut for an incremental dollar.

JENNIFER LOPEZ: What are you doing here? Is this what you’re doing when you say you’re going to work all day?

AFFLECK: I gotta go, guys.

LOPEZ: Grab me a glazed.

TWILLEY: J. Lo loves a glazed doughnut supposedly. Ben clearly loves his Dunkin’. But really, everyone loves doughnuts.

ROSENBERG: Everybody. All age groups, all socioeconomic.

GRABER: Everyone around the world, too. As we’ve said, almost every culture has some sort of fried doughnut-y type food. But really, the doughnuts we know and love were invented and perfected here. They’ve become kind of quintessentially American.

KRONDL: In Europe, doughnuts were a special occasion treat. You would have them on special holidays, a few times a year. Here, they became every day, and one of the things about American food is abundance and ubiquity. So that these special occasion foods are something that you can have day in and day out for in the case of doughnuts, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

TWILLEY: Everyday is special in America. But also doughnuts are part of the immigrant story that is so central to this country.

KRONDL: In that way they have brought different kinds of cultures to the United States. And these have melded and blended and turned into, you know, the melting pot of doughnut dough.

TWILLEY: Another way the doughnut story is all-American is that it’s really all about that small business, entrepreneurial spirit. Even though Dunkin’ is so huge, doughnuts are one of the strongholds of the indies in corporate America. And that’s kind of cool!

MILLER: Actually, in terms of profit, small operators, small doughnut shops and chains, are roughly equivalent in sales to the combination of Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme combined. So there’s been an amazing persistence to independent and small chain operators that I think allow for more innovation, and I think that’s where you see more of these specialty doughnuts and different flavors and, culinary innovation coming out, because they’re able to do that for their customers.

GRABER: And, maybe because of all of that, these shops are often about more than doughnuts. They’re about community, they’re a place where you can run into people you know and buy a box to take with you to share.

YAMAMOTO: It’s the nostalgic feeling of warmth and comfort and security. And I think—and I hope that’s what our doughnuts bring for people. And that’s why they keep coming.

[MUSIC]

TWILLEY: Thanks this episode to Phing Yamamoto of Colonial Donuts in Oakland, I can’t stop dreaming about their ube cake ring. And to Michelle Sou—she’s helped gather the stories of the second and third generation Cambodian-American kids who grew up in their families doughnut shops at Pink Box Stories, links to that online.

GRABER: Thanks also to Michael Krondl, Bonnie Miller, and Bob Rosenberg, we have links to their books and research on our website, gastropod.com. And thanks as always to our fabulous producer, Claudia Geib.

TWILLEY: We’ll be back in a couple of weeks, ‘til then!

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