Art of Cookery · National Donut Day · June 5, 2026
The Wonderful, Weird, Wildly Global World of Donuts
Hi, I’m Valerie — chef, culinary school owner, and today, your official National Donut Day guide. Every June 5th, the country collectively gives itself permission to eat fried dough
before noon and call it a holiday. I am completely here for it. Today we’re celebrating with a hands-on beignet class here at Art of Cookery, and since my brain rarely switches off food-history mode, I figured I’d share some of the fun, strange, and genuinely fascinating things I’ve learned about donuts over the years. Grab a coffee. You’re going to want something to dunk.
Doughnut or donut — is one of them wrong?
I get this question more than you’d think. The short answer: neither is wrong. The longer answer is more interesting.
Doughnut still dominates in the UK, Canada, and anywhere people write with a certain formality. Donut is the everyday American standard. The AP Stylebook accepts both. My personal stance: spell it however you like, just make sure the oil is at 375°F.
Every culture has one — and they’re all wonderful
Here’s something I love to tell my students: the donut is not an American invention. Humans have been frying dough since ancient times, and virtually every culture figured out independently that dough + hot fat = something worth eating. The ring shape with the hole is actually a fairly recent development in a very long story.
Beignet
Pillowy fried squares buried in powdered sugar. Today’s class specialty — in two different styles. More below.
Berliner
A round filled yeasted donut, no hole, packed with jelly or custard. Allegedly the source of JFK’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” mix-up — though historians say that story is mostly myth.
Zeppole
Fried choux puffs, often piped into rosettes and dusted with powdered sugar or filled with custard. A Feast of St. Joseph classic and a very close cousin to what we’re making today.
Pon de Ring
Made from tapioca starch, these mochi-style donuts are chewy, bouncy, and shaped like connected pearls. Once you try one, regular donuts feel a little boring.
Gulab Jamun
Fried milk-solid dough balls soaked in rose-scented sugar syrup. Technically the original glazed donut, and honestly, the competition isn’t close.
Churro
Choux-based dough piped and fried, rolled in cinnamon sugar. A direct relative of today’s pâte à choux beignets — same dough family, different shape, equally addictive.
The easiest and hardest donuts to make
I’ll be honest with you, because I think you deserve honesty more than encouragement.
Cake donuts are the most forgiving thing in the fried-dough universe. Baking powder does the work, the batter comes together like a quick bread, and there’s no yeast, no proofing, no anxiety. Baked cake donuts in a pan are even more forgiving — practically impossible to ruin, and genuinely delicious. Start here if you’re new to this.
Croissant donuts — the laminated, layered kind made famous by Dominique Ansel’s Cronut — require butter-laminated dough, precise temperature control at every stage, and careful frying so the layers puff without disintegrating. Professional pastry kitchens find them demanding. Home cooks find them humbling. I find them a perfectly good reason to just go get a croissant and a donut separately and call it a day.
Classic yeasted donuts are also trickier than they look. The dough must be properly developed and proofed, the oil must hold a steady temperature, and timing is everything. Over-proofed: collapses in the oil. Under-proofed: dense and doughy. There’s a reason good donut shops open at 4 a.m. — experience is doing a lot of work.
“Pâte à choux beignets land in a beautiful sweet spot — learnable technique, spectacular results, and a hollow interior that is practically begging to be filled with crème pâtissière.”
Please, for the love of all things fried — don’t throw away a stale donut
Donuts go stale faster than most baked goods. The high sugar content and the oil work together to lock in moisture briefly, then let it escape. What you have 24 hours later isn’t trash — it’s an ingredient.
- Quick refresh: 10 seconds in the microwave with a damp paper towel alongside it. The steam revives the crumb noticeably. Don’t skip the paper towel — that’s the whole trick.
- Donut bread pudding: Cube them, soak in a custard base, bake. The sweetness is already built in. It’s extraordinary and slightly embarrassing how good it is.
- French toast: Slice a glazed donut in half horizontally and treat it exactly like bread. Ridiculous in the best possible way.
- Ice cream topping: Crumble stale cake donuts over vanilla ice cream. Better than anything you’d buy in a cone.
- Donut grilled cheese: Use glazed donuts as the bread. Not traditional. Not even slightly sensible. Absolutely worth it at least once.
A few things worth knowing
The hole in the center isn’t decorative — it ensures the donut cooks through evenly without burning the outside before the center sets. Practical and iconic, which is a rare combination.
The first American patent for a donut-cutting machine was issued in 1872. During World War I, Salvation Army volunteers fried donuts in soldiers’ helmets on the front lines in France — those women, the “Donut Lassies,” are the reason National Donut Day exists. The world’s largest donut ever made weighed 1.7 tons and measured nearly 5 feet across. And Boston holds the distinction of having more donut shops per capita than any other American city, which tells you something about either the winters or the people. Probably both.
Beignets Two Ways + Crème Pâtissière
Today’s class is full — which means a great group of people is about to have a very good afternoon — but this is far from the only thing happening at Art of Cookery. There’s a wide variety of hands-on classes coming up, covering everything from weeknight dinners to classical technique, and I’d love to have you in one of them.
Head to artcookery.com, scroll toward the bottom of the page, and you’ll find the button to click on for the full calendar of classes right there. If something catches your eye, grab a spot before it fills up.
In the meantime: happy National Donut Day. Go eat something fried. You’ve earned it.
— Chef Valerie, Art of Cookery
