Potato Donuts

Potato Donuts

While in Portland, Maine on business today I had a thought bubble creep above my head: Potato donuts!  I know, your Portland area thought bubble might have been lobster or blueberries or beer, and generally I might have thought the same thing.  But today it was potato donuts.

This didn’t just come to me out of nowhere.  I remember watching an episode of Chronicle where they visited a potato donut shop in Portland and I thought at the time that I’d have to remember that next time I visited Portland.  Well, today was that day.  The mind surely works in mysterious ways, but there’s nothing mysterious about donuts.  They’re a guilty pleasure for sure.  Donuts are trendy right now, taking over where cupcakes left off.  Yeast donuts are tasty…  at least if they aren’t from the pink and orange place.  Apple cider donuts are heavenly.  But potato donuts?  New to me.

A quick Google search yielded three potato donut shops nearby.  They were all The Holy Donut, which is the place featured on Chronicle.  I chose the closest one, which was the original on Park Street.  I got there around 1 PM, which is relatively late in the day for donuts, but they still looked great and I still had to wait in a line to get them.  The things I do for research.

Not wanting to be a glutton, or at least not wanting to appear that I was a glutton, I ordered a half dozen in flavors ranging from dark chocolate sea salt to fresh lemon to triple berry glaze.  I gazed at the maple bacon donut but talked myself out of it.  These flavors were provoking!  Indeed, they provoked me into buying a seventh donut, a toasted coconut with coconut milk glazed delight that was taunting me from the rack.

First impression; very moist, not as sweet as I would have expected, and chewier than a yeast donut.  But tasty.  On second thought, I haven’t had a big enough sample to really know for sure.  I need to try another one for desert tonight to really get a better handle on these things.