Only In Your State

North Dakota’s best donut shop exists because a man in his early fifties lost his job and a friend made an unusual suggestion. Open a donut shop. It sounds like bad advice until you know the rest: as a child, his mother had taught him to fry buttermilk donuts in a cast iron pan on a coal-burning stove, and he had spent his adult life making them for friends and neighbors anyw...

There is no menu at North Carolina’s best donut shop because there is nothing to decide. You get a glazed donut. That is the entire product line and has been since 1939, and people still stand in a line that wraps the boardwalk for an hour in July to get one. The glaze is a family secret so closely guarded that the staff will not disclose the ingredients, even when a customer...

The best donut in New York City costs somewhere between a dollar and two dollars, which, in a city where a bakery cookie runs five dollars, is close to a public service. The shop that makes it opens at 4:30 in the morning on weekdays, takes cash only, and has a curved diner counter with about eighteen stools where strangers get pulled into each other’s conversations. Nobody h...

New Mexico’s best donut is built on blue corn, and the people who have eaten it keep reaching for the same comparison: it tastes less like a donut than like hot cornbread that somebody decided to improve with blueberry and lavender. That is either the strangest sentence in this series or the most New Mexican one, and it is both.

Whoo’s Donuts has been making that Bl...

A town of about 5,000 people in central Iowa has now placed in the national top 10 for donuts three years in a row, and twice at No. 3. Not top 10 in Iowa. Top 10 in the United States, against bakeries in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and every city with a food scene worth arguing about. The line on Saturday mornings stretches out the door for a reason.

The bakery is The B...