"The American Donut" with Kelly Brewer of Big Mouth Donuts!

Dave reviews the history of the American Donut, its origins, evolution, and today's artisanal development with Mr. Kelly Brewer, Founder and Chief Donut Developer at Big Mouth Donuts of Rocky River, Ohio.

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Transcript

Greetings everyone. This is Dave with Mighty Line Minute, and we've got a special podcast today. For October, and for this season, we bring to you, what the Dutch brought to us back in the 1700's. Otherwise known as oily cakes today, we know them as .. "Donuts!" Stay tuned. You'll soon meet Big Mouth Donuts of Rocky River, Ohio.

So, what about the invention of the hole that went into the donut? The story of the donut hole is often attributed to a New England ship captain named Hanson Gregory. In the 19th Century, he is said to have invented this hole by using the ship's pepper box, to punch out the center of the dough. This innovation helped the donuts cook more evenly. 

So, to learn more about donuts, we'll now speak with Kelly Brewer, of Big Mouth Donut Company, here in Rocky River, Ohio. 

Kelly, glad to have you on the Show! 

It's my pleasure, Dave. I'm really excited. Thank you for having me. 

So, tell us about donut making. I think a lot of our viewers love donuts. We're in the month of October. So, we know it's a special time for donuts and cider. But what is it that's so special about donuts, and how did you end up in this business? And where'd you get your passion from? 

Dave, my passion comes from growing up around my mother and father, who would take me to the donut shop. And we have a saying here at the donut shop that everybody pokes the glass. And you remember as a kid when you're just standing there and look at all the wonderful donuts in front of you. Donuts have an emotional connect from childhood, but I don't think any other pastry breakfast, dessert type of thing has. And, it really relates to family. It really relates to just that sense of what you remember as a kid. 

Speaking of the Fall season, it certainly is a great season for donuts, and we certainly do a lot of wonderful Fall flavors. We obviously do an apple cider donut. We do pumpkin. Pumpkin is everywhere in our shop. And we do that both in our regular donuts and our gluten-free. But my passion really comes from the fact that I, when we started, before we started this business, I would get very frustrated at the fact that everywhere I went to get donuts, they just weren't that good. And it's not that they weren't good. It's like when you eat a hamburger from a fast food place, it tastes great for a minute, and then 20 minutes later, you feel terrible. We were buying donuts and they were either over-sugared, over-frosted, or they left an after-effect that just made me feel kind of lousy (yeah). And I would get very frustrated with that. 

So, once we got our kids into college. And once we had kind of stuck our neck out and said we want to do this, we did some research around the country and found some donut shops that we really wanted to emulate. And one of the things that we wanted to do most was make sure we were making what's called a "real donut." A donut that is made with eggs, butter, sugar, milk, flour, yeast. And real ingredients that go on top of it, like a real fruit from locally sourced fruit. The best vanilla bean you can buy, the best chocolate powder you can buy, and things like that (wow). And we noticed that Cleveland didn't really have that. 

Yeah. "Elevating the donut!" 

I think so, but elevating the donut, but also keeping it very simple. We don't over-sugar our donuts. We like to say our process is kind of unprocessed in the sense that obviously we don't use any preservatives or other things that go in the donuts, but that's kinda how it started. 

I had turned 50, and I wanted to try something new, and it just seemed like the right time to do it. And it's a great city that I love. 

It's a wonderful story. And I loved hearing about the family connection. I have to tell you that my folks ran a motel business in nearby Fairview Park for many years. We provided donuts every day for all of those 26 years. Now that began by walking over to Amy Joy Donuts, who you'd remember. But my father got adventurous and decided he'd make his own donuts. And what a challenge that was. He had the, whatever boiling, creating donuts and the smoke in the front lobby was terrible! A guest would come in and want to run out. And we were very quick back to buying donuts locally again. 

But I have to tell you, the donuts that you have here are nothing what I found at the chain shops. Of course, I'm gluten-free. So, you've got my heart with your shop. Sure. But, there's something special about what you do and the way you make them. And I'm interested in how you characterize the healthy donut these days. 

Yeah. 

We have a lot of people that come in and ask us about allergy-related things, people are allergic to nuts, or they have a milk allergy or dairy allergy. Or whether it's eggs. We wanted to stay true to making really good, fresh real donuts, with real gluten. But we started to play around with a gluten-free donut. 

A lot of the reason was because people were bringing their children in and saying, "My son or daughter can't have a donut because they have an allergy to gluten." And so, we put a small amount out. We played around with it and we have a saying that, "We won't sell it if it doesn't taste good!" If you can go buy gluten-free things at the grocery, you can buy gluten-free bread or whatever, but, you know, mainly people find that it's not nearly what you would, if you were buying something that was real. So, we played and we played and we played. Until we got something that we thought was a pretty good tasting donut. And it's really turned into an organic effort where we didn't really promote it. And we did a dozen a day, five years ago, and now we probably do over a hundred gluten-free donuts a day. 

You're quite modest by saying pretty good. It's far better than pretty good. 

Thank you. Well, we have a couple of secret ingredients. I don't know if I'll share those today. 

I didn't expect to get that out of you, but I'd love to see your kitchen if I had the opportunity (sure). You have to take a look at this shop, I'll show a few pictures here, through this podcast as well. But, people come from all around. Do you make these donuts available beyond just Rocky River? 

Oh sure, yeah. If we had to live on our retail store alone, unfortunately we couldn't do that in today's economy. So, we've diversified. We're in grocer on the east side of Cleveland called the Fairfax Market, which is actually a Meyer grocery store. We do donuts there seven days a week. 

And we also do wholesale donuts for several coffee shops. We go to, in the season, we go to four or five farmer's markets a week, which is where I was today at a farmer's market at one of our hospitals. And, we do a ton of events. Tomorrow we have two events that we're doing, including a wedding. 

And then on Sunday, we're going to be doing a homecoming for a college down the road where we're providing a lot of donuts. The events are what we enjoy. I love our retail store. In the past, we've had a couple of other retail stores. But we really have to make sure that we stay diversified, and we'd like to continue to scale and we'd like to continue to grow. 

We would like to take this to a level where we can do some more wholesale and groceries. And so, this is our first foray in that, we've been doing it for about a year and it's been going very well. Yeah. 

I notice when I mention, "Big Mouth Donuts," people get excited. They know who you are (yeah). I have to tell you, I met Kelly when I was walking by one time and they were closed. And I was looking through the window, and he opened up the door for me, invited me in to have a cup of coffee. And I just have to say, the fact that you make fresh coffee every time, every cup, is awesome, so I appreciate that. 

We also charge a lot less than some of these other places (yes you do). 

So, it's worth the journey to come over here and meet with Kelly and your staff, your team here is wonderful (thank you). I've had such a pleasure working with each person who seems to value donuts as much as you do. 

We take it very seriously. But we also have a lot of fun with it. And I think that's very important to remember that there's a certain whimsy to donuts that captures your imagination, with the many different ways that they can just come up with some beautiful, beautiful colors, beautiful textures and very tasty donuts. 

So, what are the top three donuts here that people come back and return for?

We do several different varieties. We do a raised yeast-risen donut, made with a brioche dough. And we do cake donuts. Probably our two most popular donuts would be our simple, vanilla bean glazed donut. It's the one thing that I remember as a kid that I loved. And it's the first thing that I wanted to be able to do right when we started. We won several trophies for that donut in particular as the best donut in this region. But also, there's a certain crowd that likes the filled donut. So, I would say our other most popular is probably our Boston cream (okay). And a Boston cream is a custard-filled donut. The difference between ours and others is, I would say we're one of the very few that makes the custard from scratch (wow). And it's something we do probably two or three times a week. And we hear a lot about people say, "I've never tasted a custard donut that tastes like this! And then from our cake varieties, we do a sour cream old-fashioned cake donut that we worked on for two years that, is just simple, and it's, I call it the "coffee donut" 'cause it's a great donut to have when you're having a cup of coffee. But it doesn't hit your heart, which is like, yeah, it just hits you along the way. And that's one of my favorites, and I get asked a lot, what are you, "What's your favorite?" I was asked five times today, "What's your favorite donut?" And it's a hard question for me to answer because, I love all of them, like, I wouldn't say my children, but I love all of our varieties, and they certainly wouldn't be on our shelf unless they weren't worthy of that. 

I've tried several of their gluten-free ones, of course, but I'm stuck on the glazed cake donut. Vanilla glaze. That's just, it's just so perfect, so tasty. So, just to wrap up here, what is the future evolution or are we, have we taken donuts to their highest level? You obviously elevated the donut here locally, and people love it. 

There's a social side to donuts. It really is, but I don't think it compares to anything else. I love watching families come in here. And I love watching children have a blast. 

And, and enjoy our donuts. Because I know that if they're four years old, that's the memory they're going to have the rest of their life. So, I would say that the future of donuts is strong. I think you're gonna see people continue to elevate the ingredients that go into it. Vegan donuts are very popular now. 

Well, I'm a dark chocolate lover, so my hope is that somewhere there's this ideal dark chocolate, gluten-free donut with the least amount of sugar, and tastes sugared. 

We had just missed it Dave, we had them two weeks ago. Yeah. Okay. We have a vendor friend that makes wonderful, wonderful peanut butter cups and they're dark chocolate peanut butter cups. So, we did the dark chocolate, peanut butter cheesecake donut that was out of this world (interesting). Yeah. 

Well, Kelly, hey, thank you for taking the time with us. I know our Mighty Line viewers are quite diverse. You'll get quite a reach with this. And I just want to thank you for all that you do to elevate the donut and be a great neighbor too! 

It's my absolute pleasure. We love having you guys back there, too. So, we'd like to continue to help our businesses moving forward. 

We'll do that. Thank you.  My pleasure, Dave. Yeah. 

Take care.  You bet.