89 Years Ago, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Were Made With A Vegetable (Seriously)

Krispy Kreme was an hour's drive away from my childhood hometown, but it was always somehow on the route to games in our sports schedules. Often, we'd disembark from the bus after a volleyball match with a Krispy Kreme box in hand, sometimes with a few doughnuts still inside for breakfast the next morning. The standard glazed donuts were a hit with our school sports teams and families (we're part of a gigantic fanbase; Krispy Kreme sold 1.63 billion doughnuts in 2022), but they aren't made using the original recipe.

Krispy Kreme's first doughnuts were made with mashed potatoes, an ingredient that isn't anywhere near the Original Glazed doughnuts served at the modern day donut chain. The first batches Krispy Kreme made in 1937 were created with a chilled mixture of fluffed egg whites, sugar, shortening, skim milk, and mashed potatoes combined with flour. Today's Krispy Kreme Original Glazed doughnut recipe is a tight-lipped secret, but if you look at the ingredient list on the box you can see they're made with a yeast dough containing flour, water, sugar, yeast, palm oil, and soybean oil — plus a few natural and artificial flavors and stabilizers.

The story goes that Krispy Kreme's founder Vernon Rudolph made the first batch of doughnuts in 1937 in North Carolina with a secret recipe he bought off a French chef. An investigation conducted in the 1980s by Krispy Kreme itself called that origin story into question, instead finding the recipe was likely learned through conversation with a cook on an Ohio river barge (mashed potatoes and all) and then modified when Rudolph started mass producing doughnuts.

When Vernon Rudolph whipped up that first batch of Krispy Kreme doughnuts with a mashed potato mixture, he wasn't breaking new ground. The recipe was trendy in 1937. Known as "spud nuts," they were among the better depression-era desserts (or breakfast, depending on the time of day). Potato donuts are a logical choice for someone who needs to make a lot of doughnuts quickly simply because they bulk up the recipe and stretch the flour a little further. A few years later and a few thousand miles away, Spudnuts was founded on a similar mashed potato donut recipe and both donut chains remain popular today.

Creamy mashed potatoes improve the texture of donuts, making them tender, light, fluffy, and cake-like. They also add a slightly earthy vibe and help keep those just-baked donuts fresher for longer by holding onto moisture that would otherwise evaporate as the donuts sit out. In other words, mashed potatoes in donuts is a genius move that maximizes the shelf life, a great benefit for Vernon Rudolph's Krispy Kreme venture and for any home baker who decides to whip up a batch of Depression-era spud nuts for a cozy weekend morning treat.