I’ve only tried this place via delivery, but it sounds like a lot of people have done the same. In any case, I have nothing to tell you about the location, ambiance, ease of parking, service, etc. But the doughnuts are amazing.
I’ve been thinking the last few months that it seems like in every decade, I’ve had some realization about food—like, a big frame-altering thing, not just “zucchini is good, actually.” It’s always something that sounds obvious and that I would’ve agreed with when I was 25, but it took lived experience to actually get it. Anyway, in my 40s, that obvious but important thing was texture. Texture is why I love the hand-pulled noodles at Gene’s so much, or the knife-cut Korean noodles from H-Mart, or a jammy egg. It’s what makes a cannele or kouign amann so great, or the crullers at Lil’s in Kittery. It’s what makes a cronut good, when it’s good. And it’s what makes a doughnut really good; when the texture is unremarkable, a doughnut is just a hit of fat and sugar, satisfying in the moment and then forgotten.
And when it comes to doughnuts, it puts me in a frustrating position, because while I have had good or great doughnuts of every sort, the ones I love are yeast-raised and filled. There’s a place in New York … Doughnut Plant? Their coconut cream doughnuts, though at least 25% sweeter than I’d prefer, are the best doughnut I’ve ever had. We were there for like five mornings and I got them twice even though it meant paying to have them Ubered to the hotel.
The problem with this preference is that small artisanal fancy handmade doughnut places seem to usually focus on cake doughnuts, and rarely have more than a couple filled options among the yeast-raised. It’s easier to slather on a flavored glaze and say there you go, there’s a key lime doughnut, a smores doughnut, a Flaming Hot Cheetos bismarck, et cet. I’m not faulting them for this! I don’t know much, but what little I know makes me think that making filled doughnuts has to be a lot more labor-intensive, and that whatever equipment is specialized for it is expensive for a small joint.
Anyway again, this place What the Fluff in Manchester … their filled doughnuts are excellent.
And so are the regular yeast-raised doughnuts.
And the cake doughnuts.
What I want from a yeast-raised doughnut is that fluffiness, right? You don’t want it to be insubstantial, but you want it fluffy and airy. They’ve got that down. They’ve got—shit, let me go take a photo.
Well, guess what, you can’t see texture in a photo. Though you can see that they gave me a lot of extra munchkins in my order of 6.
Those are two of the Boston creams, Mrs C’s favorite; two cider doughnuts; and a Bismarck, which in their case is a raised yeast doughnut split and filled with jam and cream. I already ate the coconut cream—yes! They have a filled coconut cream doughnut! It has a little bit of coconut flake on the outside with the frosting, and then is filled with a coconut cream filling with more coconut flake. It’s not as good as the one in New York, no, but it’s terrific.
Mrs C had the Fruity Pebbles doughnut this morning, a glazed doughnut topped with Fruity Pebbles. When did this become a thing? I first saw it when Rocco’s was briefly in Burlington [MA], and then Crosby’s in Nashua started offering them shortly after, and it seems like it has become more common since then. Not complaining. It’s a flavor I always liked, but even as a kid I wasn’t much of a cereal eater. And on a good fluffy doughnut, the crispiness of the cereal gives you that textural contrast. They do a Lucky Charms one too, topped just with the marshmallows—also good, but I think the Fruity Pebbles one is better. Squish crunch.
The cider doughnuts are the best I’ve had from a doughnut place, which I think is a necessary distinction. They’re very good. I almost never get cake doughnuts for myself, except cider doughnuts. We’ll continue getting them in every order in season. But ultimately the very best cider doughnuts come from orchards and farm stands, right? I went to Hampshire, so Atkins Farms set the standard for me on that score (I don’t know if they’re as good as I remember, but I was a chain smoker, so they were flavorful enough to power through that mess), and in the greater Nashua area, Trombly Gardens in Brookline NH or Kimballs (farm stand, not ice cream park) in Pepperell make the best. But again: these are very good. If you had visitors who wanted to try a cider doughnut, this would not mislead them.
Not pictured: the apple fritter (very good, but honestly, I think my favorite apple fritter round here is … Market Basket’s) and the sour cream old-fashioned doughnut, which is extremely good, a cake doughnut that is crispy at the edges.
Yesterday was a fast day so I am uncomfortably sugar-rushed right now, but what’re you gonna do.
