Beyond the Luther Burger: Doughnut Sandwiches

We’ve done a few of these sweet/savory mashup sandwiches here at the Tribunal. It’s not all that uncommon a pairing to put savory fillings into a sweet bread. There’s the Luther Burger of course, usually interpreted as a bacon cheeseburger with donut bun. The pineapple bun that we tried earlier this year would qualify as well, and so would the Mallorca de Jamon y Queso. Even the Cuban Medianoche and the Chinese ham and egg bun use a sweetish bread, though neither is overtly desserty.

So we’ve done this. I’ve served my time. I’ve eaten the forbidden sandwiches. I shouldn’t have to do it again, right?

Early this month, I found myself in need of a couple of quick breakfast sandwiches for myself and my 13 year old son. And by quick I mean quick–I had less than 15 minutes before my shift at work started and no time to shop around. The drive-thru that is geographically closest to my house and open for breakfast is the Dunkin Donuts location at 147th and Pulaski, so I drove there and was at the speaker ready to order before I remembered that the doughnut sandwich was one of my topics this month. “Do you… have a sandwich that uses a donut as a bun?” I asked tentatively.

There was a long, audible sigh, and the speaker replied in a monotone: “Not any more.”

That no-longer-available donut sandwich would have been Beyond-D-O-Double-G sandwich, a Snoop Dogg-approved patty of plant-based sausage with egg and cheese in a cut-open glazed donut that was only available for one week in January of this year. Apparently, not even the Snoop Dogg-licensed Dunkin merch is still available at their online store. A pity.

KFC got into the donut sandwich action in recent memory as well with a fried chicken breast between two glazed donuts–hey, at least this one has bread!–that went national for a brief time earlier this year but is, once again, no longer available. With the pandemic that has all but shut down the US and much of the world this year, fast food chains are simplifying their menus, their in-store procedures, and their supply chains. Many of the more complicated items have been taken off-menu, possibly never to return.

Old-School Doughnuts

For the most part though, donut shops don’t seem to want anything to do with the donut sandwich trend. Recipe bloggers and bad boy chefs are the ones driving this craze as far as I can tell. Just to test the water, I stopped by several well-loved mom-and-pop type donut shops in the area to confirm whether donut sandwiches were available on their menus and to, ahem, QA their wares.

I arrived at Munster Donuts, just over the border in Munster Indiana, to find the windows entirely covered with signs detailing the menu and a procedure for socially distant ordering–STAY IN YOUR CAR, they instructed, and call the shop with your order. They’ll bring it out to you. No sandwiches to be found on the menu. I asked the young man how long they’d had this procedure in place. According to him, Munster Donuts shut down early in the global pandemic–February he says, though according to their Facebook it was more like mid-March. Regardless, they responsibly stayed closed until July, when they reopened with their current safety procedures in place. When someone connected with the business was potentially exposed to the virus in November, they closed for a week again just in case.

Seems like when it comes to Covid-19, Munster Donuts has been doing it right. Their donuts aren’t bad either, though they are not my favorites of this group. They have some inventive cake donut flavors like the Red Velvet and the German Chocolate, pictured above. The pumpkin and butter crunch donuts were also quite good. The bear claw was a denser type of pastry but tasty with its icing and slivers of almond. Munster clearly cares both about the quality of their product and the well-being of their staff and patrons, and I’m glad they have found a way to weather this year.

The common wisdom among foodies in Chicago is, if you want the best donuts, you go to Old-Fashioned Donuts at 113th & Michigan in the Roseland neighborhood of the far south side. While it’s conceivable that this many food-obsessed camera-toting gluttons (myself included!) could conceivably be wrong, we aren’t. OFD stands alone. At one point Old-Fashioned Donuts also sold hamburgers, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, etc., but the signs offering those are gone for now. As many places have, they appear to have simplified their menu for now. We contented ourselves with some of their classic donuts instead.

The famous apple fritter was as good as ever, crisp edges just softened by glaze, plentiful soft sweet apple chunks strewn liberally throughout. The sweet roll was terrific as well, though no substitute for my favorite the glazed croissant, which had sold out that day. What is maybe most telling about Old-Fashioned’s quality is that the simplest donuts they do–the buttermilk donut and the plain glazed–are as good as or better than the fancier flavored donuts you can get elsewhere. The buttermilk is a cake donut, soft and somewhat dense, with a rich and very slightly sour flavor. The glazed donuts are so light they’re barely there, kissed by a thin coating of glaze, as perfect as a donut can be.

Dat Donut does serve breakfast sandwiches, but by the time I arrived it was past the 1pm cutoff time for ordering one. They appear to come on either toast or croissant only, though. I asked the girl working the counter whether anyone ever asked them to make a sandwich using donuts. “Oh yeah, all the time!” she said. But do they actually do it? “Haha, no,” she admitted. Dat gets mentioned alongside Old-Fashioned frequently as one of the better old-school donut shops in town, and every donut I tried from there was quite good, but also not particularly special, not effortlessly perfect the way that OFD’s donuts are.

Interlude: Goblin Sandwiches

Unfortunately, this image, taken from a 1946 cookbook intended as promotional material for “Tested Quality Donuts,” started making the rounds again this month as I explored “doughnut sandwiches.”

First of all, let me say this: I hate you, 1946.

Second, let me add: Brazil nuts are the worst nuts. Why did they use those when pistachios are green and would fit the theme better? (The answer is that at that time, the pistachios available in the US would have been dyed red)

So, yes, I made these. But Brazil nuts can go straight to hell.

As for what “Tested Quality Donuts” may be, there are some sources on the internet explaining the term, but not necessarily what the actual donuts were like. My best guess is that they are like the plain cake donuts that come in some boxes of prepackaged donuts you can buy in grocery stores. I decided to hedge my bets by making them with those, with glazed donuts from the grocery store bakery, and with some plain cake donuts I’d picked up at Munster Donut, which to be fair were day-olds at that point.

That’s the Munster Donut plain cake on the left, a bit worse for wear after sitting for a day. The Entenmann’s plain cake donut is in the middle, and the grocery store glazed is on the right.

I suppose the green-ness of the filling is what makes it a goblin sandwich. I suppose I could have made it timelier by figuring out a way to give it pointy ears and making it a Grogu sandwich instead, but I’ll leave that for the bloggers who are looking to have their recipes plastered all over Pinterest.

This sandwich was not particularly good in any of these incarnations, but it wasn’t terrible. The phrase “surprisingly unrevolting” is what came to my mind eating it. I’m sure that is largely due to my decision to use pistachios instead of Brazil nuts. Of the three, the best rendition was the one using Entenmann’s donuts, and not only because it was the smallest. The plain cake donut just seemed to work best here.

I can’t say this is a worthwhile experiment, and you should avoid making these yourself, but if you do make them, be sure that they will all be eaten the same day. The avocado in the filling gets gross quickly.

The Stanwich

LA-based donut chain Stan’s has been in the Chicago area for a number of years now, but it’s only been in the past month or so that they’ve started offering breakfast sandwiches–that is, Stanwiches–at a few select locations. These sandwiches are not offered on donuts, but I took this opportunity to get a look at them anyway.

Stan’s calls the bread they use a Parker House roll, and though it doesn’t appear to have the folded-over shape described in the classic recipe, it is a good, soft but nicely browned, yeast-risen dinner roll type of bun. The plant-based sausage version may even be a little better than the bacon version; the bacon was not great, cooked to a crisp and beyond, and the plant-based sausage had a convincing sausagey texture, though the flavor was a little thin. While neither of them is a significant improvement over other fast-food breakfast sandwiches, they are an improvement. Not worth driving to Oakbrook Terrace for, but perhaps one day they’ll be available a bit closer to me. Until then, White Castle will continue to be my go-to breakfast sandwich.

Interlude 2: Weird like Al

“Weird Al” Yankovic is a gift. Yes, obviously he also has many gifts; for wordplay, for musical parody, for growing fantastic hair. But he also is a gift to the world. It is as if the universe looked into the future back in the mid-to-late 70s, saw how dark the next few decades would get, and decided that at least we should be able to laugh our way through it.

One of the topics that Al returns to over and over again–in Eat It, in My Bologna, in I Love Rocky Road, in Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch, to name just a few early examples–is the food song. He seems to have an affinity for the subject. In his underappreciated movie UHF, he made this sandwich as a throwaway gag

Binging With Babish has made his own version. Emmymade has made her version. Youtube abounds with takes on this sandwich. I am not adding anything to the discourse by making my own. In fact, a Twinkie isn’t even a donut, so it doesn’t really count toward my theme. Why am I even bringing it up?

Because it’s close enough? Because one day some joker out there might take it upon themself to add the Twinkie Wiener Sandwich to the Wikipedia List of Sandwiches, thus obligating me to cover it? Because I might as well just get it out of the way now? But mostly because Weird Al is awesome and why not?

I think you know the procedure here. Take: 1 Twinkie. Cut a slit down the length of the flat side using a plastic butterknife. Insert one (1) COLD hot dog. Cold? Sure looks that way to me. There are no grill marks on the dog Al puts in the Twinkie, no little wisps of steam, no drops of steam condensation or rendered fat beading on its surface. Also, he uses his fingers when putting the hot dog into the Twinkie rather than tongs, and handles it more extensively than you think he would want to touch a hot sausage. Finally, if it were hot, the Easy Cheese would start to melt and slide off it when applied. This is a cold hot dog, in a split Twinkie, with a bead of spray cheese added on top.

Despite wanting desperately to like this, if only to imagine for a moment that Al might approve of my blog; despite what Babish or Emmy might have told you about how this sandwich is good, mmmmm, so goooood–it is Not Good. At least, my version of it isn’t. The cold hot dog, with its smoky nitrites-and-fat flavor and stiff bologna texture, just doesn’t work with the Twinkie. Perhaps with a blander wiener than this Oscar Mayer version, or with a sausage that had at least been somewhat warmed, it might be palatable. I’m sorry though. I can’t bring myself to try it again any time soon. I didn’t even get around to dipping it in milk the way I should have. I am a great big failure.

Doing It Rite

Do-Rite Donuts has always been my favorite of what I call the “hipster” donut shops that have sprung up around Chicago over the past 12 years or so. Even before they started offering some very decent fried chicken sandwiches, they were the one I’d turn to for a downtown donut. More than Stan’s, more than Doughut Vault, more than Firecakes (who make donut ice cream sandwiches!) or Glazed and Infused (who have since closed) or the Beavers Donuts truck, Do-Rite’s were the donuts I wanted if I couldn’t get down to 113th and Michigan for an Old Fashioned fix.

As mentioned previously, they sell chicken sandwiches. They also sell breakfast sandwiches and a very decent (if small by BPT standards) breaded pork tenderloin sandwich. And for $1 extra, you can get any of these sandwiches served in a split-open donut rather than a bun.

While planning a trip downtown to try these, and assessing which Do-Rite location would be best for a quick and safe stop in Covid times, I noticed a location I never knew existed.

This site was just 2 offramps down the expressway from me, literally a 10-15 minute drive! How could I not know that it existed?

The answer is that this Do-Rite location is embedded in a gas station that had yet to open when I drove by in early December. However, Mindy and I were able to stop by on opening day, when they appeared to be doing steady but not overwhelming business, at least for the few minutes we was there. We ordered a few of the donut sandwiches at the drive-thru and brought them home for lunch. I’m not sure they had everything 100% working as intended on day one, but what we got was very good and we’ll be glad to have them nearby.

I don’t remember the bacon egg and cheese sandwich at Do-Rite featuring a tomato, but it wasn’t a bad addition here. The bun may look like a bun rather than a donut, but it was glazed and mildly sweet, just sweet enough to add an interesting element to the sandwich without overwhelming it. The “donut” bun is in fact so similar to a regular bun that I wonder if that’s what it is–just a regular hamburger bun drizzled with donut glaze. Regardless, it works better than expected.

Do-Rite’s Original chicken sandwich also fared decently in the donut bun, despite containing pickles that I thought for sure wouldn’t work in this context. Since the donut’s sweetness was quite restrained, it merely complemented the mayonnaise, pickle, tomato and lettuce condiments rather than fighting with them.

Best of all was the “Mr. Piggy,” Do-Rite’s take on the breaded pork tenderloin sandwich. In addition to the tomato and lettuce, this sandwich comes with mustard and a pungent, mildly spicy pepper relish. It is frankly astonishing how well this combination worked in the donut bun. It was Mindy’s favorite of the three as well.

When we go back–and we will, of course–I think we’ll get the sandwiches on regular buns though. As well as they may work as donut sandwiches–and I think it is likely that these are some of the better examples of the phenomenon to exist–the entire concept of the donut sandwich still feels like a stunt to me.If you absolutely must try a donut sandwich, you could do a lot worse than Do-Rite. For me, though: I may get the occasional sweet tooth for a chocolate or a pastry, but in general I prefer my sandwiches savory.