Get Donut-Induced Diabetes in Anacortes

Photos by Matthew Piel

That ain't no mini-powered sugar donut.

The Place: Donut House, 2719 Commercial Ave., 360-293-4053; ANACORTES.

The Hole: For the first time since I started writing about donuts, bagels, and all foods featuring a hole in the middle, I walked into a bakery and promptly uttered the words "holy shit."

Sitting next to the cash register at Donut House were the biggest apple fritters I have ever seen.

This being a column about donuts with holes, I asked the cashier to recommend her favorite non-fritter, and she pulled out a powdered sugar-covered cake donut. I added the fritter to my order as well as a buttermilk bar, made with yeast. The whole mess of fried, sugary goodness came to $4.14.

The Shit: My soon-to-be-diabetic better half and I found ourselves at Donut House, a purple shack of a shop on the main road through Anacortes, at the recommendation of a woman on Orcas Island.

Christina Orchid owns Red Rabbit Farm, where she hosts dinners using local meat and produce raised by herself or other island-dwelling growers. In the market to host a party of the nuptial kind ourselves, we were talking over food ideas with Orchid when talk turned to donuts.

Apparently there are no rings of fried dough to be found on Orcas. So Orchid has to take a ferry across to Anacortes to get her fix. She's rectifying that by installing a deep fryer in the kitchen attached to the barn at Red Rabbit. But in the meantime, she sent us to Donut House.

Orchid has a deep love for the buttermilk bars--which have a very distinct flavor from the cake you'll find in most donuts. But then we saw the giant fritters. And of course I needed something with a hole in it. And that's how we came to be sitting at one of the few tables inside Donut House with a bag filled with fried carbohydrates covered in sugar.

The buttermilk, true to Orchid's recommendation, had such a distinct and sweet flavor, it needed no help from a cinnamon-sugar or chocolate coating. The powdered-sugar cake donut was perfectly tender and left our clothes covered in white specks. The fritter (finished the next morning) was surprisingly well-cooked for such an enormous fried pastry.

Any day now, my heart will stop racing from the unbelievable sugar intake. But it was worth it.

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