Christian Hansen for The New York Times
Sprinkled donuts at Nord's Bakery.
A ROAD trip is always nice. But a quest is even better. Set a goal, and the miles become meaningful. And what goal could be more meaningful than the great American doughnut?
It ranks high in the pantheon of national classics. But a good one can be hard to find. High real estate prices and the onward march of Dunkin' Donuts have wiped out thousands of traditional family bakeries. The loss cannot be measured.
Still, in the vast American heartland, where Germans and Scandinavian immigrants brought their baking skills with them, doughnut culture survives.
Anyone curious to test the thesis can follow the horseshoe-shaped route that I have charted in my frequent wanderings along the byways of central Kentucky in recent years, driven by the love of sweet fried dough.
Kentucky does not really belong to the Midwest. But the power of the doughnut has created a lucky overlap. Think of the state, despite its Southern accent and Southern ways, as the paunch hanging over the Midwestern bakery belt, the last calorie-filled province in an enormous swath of territory where the glazed twist, the apple fritter, the chocolate-iced Long John and the vanilla-cream Bismarck hold sway.
There is no maple bacon doughnut on that list. But you can find one at Nord's Bakery in Louisville, the first stop on the route.
Nord's is a venerable — and venerated — bakery that a local deli owner, Mike Nord, bought from the founding Klein family about a decade ago. It's located on the edge of Germantown, near the University of Louisville, a studenty, slackerish neighborhood where you would expect to find a head shop, not an old-style bakery. But there it is.
A decrepit-looking vintage bread slicer stands near one of the front windows, reposing on a black-and-white tiled floor. There's a small cafe area in the rear, but the action swirls around the plain glass display cases up front. The straight-ahead glazed yeast doughnuts, in toroidal and twist forms, are dark, fragrant and honeyed, a quality that should not be confused with cloying sweetness. They set the tone for a procession of all-stars, led by the toasted-coconut Long Johns.
The maple bacon doughnut, a local favorite that sells out fast, is alarmingly literal. It is not a doughnut with a few flavorings added, or crumbled bacon on top.
No. This is a long, rectangular yeast doughnut smeared thickly with maple icing and then topped with a hefty strip of fried bacon — one of those what-the-hell taste experiences not for the faint of heart.
For the doughnut hound, the next point of interest is Danville, where Joe Biden and Paul Ryan took the stage at Centre College for the vice-presidential debate in October. It is a town of about 18,000 that regularly pops up on lists of America's most livable places, although it is invisible to the majority of motorists, who circle Danville on the Route 127 bypass.
That timesaver is a huge mistake. Route 127 proper leads straight into town along a broad thoroughfare lined with imposing, architecturally distinguished homes. Sweeping past the picture-postcard campus of Centre College, a small liberal arts institution, Route 127 becomes Main Street, which is as all-American and appealing as the name suggests. A cool cafe, the Hub, serves up-to-the-minute sandwiches and complicated coffees. The Main Street payoff is Burke's Bakery and Delicatessen, located a couple of blocks past the Hub and run by the same family for four generations.
"Delicatessen" obviously has a different meaning in Kentucky than it does in New York, something like "an establishment that sells chicken salad."
It's a safe bet that most of the customers are not going for the chicken. The baked goods are the draw, a wide variety of coffee cakes and pies, with a first-class lineup of chubby cake doughnuts iced in chocolate, vanilla and maple. Some are rolled in toasted coconut, others in cake crumbs. Still others are dusted with cinnamon sugar. All have a fresh, fluffy interior. Do not overlook the sugary cinnamon-pecan pinwheels, flat swirls of dough with nut bits embedded in hidden creases.
South of Danville, the landscape changes. Gentle swelling fields becoming rolling hills, which become limestone uplands with hills huddling close together. The look is very English. Meandering local roads twist and turn, dip and swoop, as they pass by patches of corn, soybeans or tobacco. Wildflowers line the route, contributing tiny bursts of color: white Queen Anne's lace, yellow-petaled black-eyed Susans, sky-blue chicory, purplish Joe Pye weed, magenta meadow phlox, blazing-red trumpet vines. Sudden dips in the road lead to cool, forested nooks, canopied with yellow poplars, red maples and hickory trees.
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