The Right Way To Reheat Olive Garden's Doughnuts Back To Perfection

What's the best way to cap off a visit to Olive Garden? If your answer is "squabbling over the bill," you're not only wrong but might also need a priority check-up. The correct response is a plate of Warm Italian Doughnuts, one of the Italian restaurant chain's signature desserts. Analogous to the fritter-like zeppole —  a real Italian doughnut (and New Jersey tradition) — Olive Garden's pillow-shaped fried desserts have a toasty-warm exterior dusted with vanilla sugar and come with raspberry or chocolate sauce for dipping. They top many a list of favorite Olive Garden desserts, but that experience often doesn't translate when they're taken to go and eaten later. Thankfully, there are several ways to revive Olive Garden's Warm Italian Doughnuts.

Standard-issue doughnuts, the Olive Garden variety, and zeppole alike should be enjoyed warm and, ideally, fresh from the fryer. You can certainly eat them cold a day after purchase, but they'll lack that just-made flavor. Reheating them is a tricky proposition: Frying stale doughnuts in oil is a delicious way to revive them, but that won't work with a more delicate item like zeppole. As one Facebook poster observed, "[You can] fry them up only one time ... they would become like golfballs." 

One of the easiest ways to reheat Olive Garden's Warm Italian Doughnuts is with an air fryer. There are dozens of TikTok videos devoted to the subject, almost all of which are a variation on the following method. Simply preheat your air fryer to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, arrange the doughnuts in a single layer, and heat for three to five minutes, then consume the finished desserts with minimal restraint and great enjoyment.

You're not consigned to eating gummy, overcooked Warm Italian Doughnuts if you don't own an air fryer. Two kitchen bedrocks can also be allies here. Your oven is, of course, your first line of defense, and it's doubly useful if you have a large number of Warm Italian Doughnuts to reheat. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and individually wrap the doughnuts in aluminum foil. Place the wrapped doughnuts on a baking sheet and heat for five minutes. Unwrap the heated doughnuts to allow them to cool for a moment before consuming; understanding, of course, that this waiting period may be the greatest challenge of the oven method.

You can also microwave your Warm Italian Doughnuts, though this requires a bit more prep than the oven or air fryer. Here, though, less is more: You'll only heat the doughnuts for 8 to 10 seconds. Anything more and you risk drying them out or even burning them. Draping a wet paper towel over the doughnuts produces steam, which pulls double duty by keeping them warm and moist (it's the same principle behind the microwave trick that gives reheated food a first-day taste). All of these techniques won't deliver an exact replica of Warm Italian Doughnuts fresh from an Olive Garden oven, but they also won't taste like golf balls, so consider it a win.