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Knead Doughnuts
"It's extremely important for donuts to be handmade because you can't feel what's going on with the donut unless you're actually touching it and holding it and taking care of it from step 1 to the end. I think people like donuts because they are a cure-all. They're great if you're having a bad day, they're nice comfort food. You're celebrating, people want to bring donuts. They're fun. And they're just delicious.
My name is Wetherley Rouleau and welcome to Knead Doughnuts. Knead Doughnuts is a specialty donut shop in the heart of downtown Providence where we hand-cut and glaze our donuts every single day. What goes into making a Knead Doughnut is a lot. There's a lot of love, there's a lot of butter, there's a lot of sugar. And there's just a lot of teamwork really is the biggest thing. We are just on top of the donuts every morning. All day.
On any typical day we have roughly 12 varieties. We'll always have the vanilla brioche. We just a jelly filled, a peanut butter jelly filled, a Boston Cream, a raspberry fritter, our old fashioneds we have vanilla. And then for our cakes we have chocolate, and a vanilla. Fry up!
For our cake donuts, we make a pretty simple batter and we put it into our despositor which is the hand-crank machine. Because the batter is so loose and so moist, that's the way they have to get fried. You drop them in, they fry, glaze them, and they withhold a lot of the moisture and flavor that way.
The brioche should be light, airy, fluffy, sweet, our is a very buttery. And you can taste it in there, I think it's really nice. Basically, it gets mixed the day before. We cut it out of the bowl, we let it rest, and then we let it rise overnight. The next step is to roll it out. Cut it and put it in the proofer, allow it to proof. Then we fry them. Once the donuts are frying, you're basically just watching them and flipping them until they're done. So I'm going to do one more flip, and then we're going to pull one and test it. So yeah, that's pretty perfect. At the end of the fry, we just ring the bell as a sign there's no more donuts coming out. Heyyy!
All the glazing is done by hand. So these guys have a lot of work. They run over, they catch the donuts, they bring them back, and they are hand-glazing them all around the whole entire donut. So they take their time and they do a nice job. They put a bunch of donuts in a bin of glaze. And they're just kind of fold the glaze over to make sure it gets all the way around. Our chocolate ones get dipped and it's like a hanging process. They just kind of dunk the donut right in, hang it upside down, and wait for it to dry. Flip it over, and you get that nice even, beautiful sheen on there. Glazing the donuts is arguably the hardest part because your hand's on these hot, fresh donuts. So to not stop and eat every single one takes a lot of self-restraint.
I just enjoy working with my hands so I think being able to make something that you're really proud of and excited about and seeing other people enjoy it I think is a win-win. I just love what I do so I will always keep coming back. It is difficult yes, and it's a lot of hard work. But to be able to make donuts for a people is quite literally the dream come true. People should come to Knead to just enjoy a donut. To be able to sit down and enjoy a real brioche based donut is a real treat and to have it in your own backyard, I mean nothing could be better."
