Sweet temptation

The Krispy Kreme doughnut has become an American obsession, with even diet-conscious celebrities seen scoffing them. As Britain's first franchise gets ready to open, Andrew Buncombe takes a bite (in the interests of science)

We have opted for a dozen, and they are sitting in the cardboard box in front of us, three lines of four, each an individual and each with its own enticing name. There is the "chocolate-iced creme-filled", a yeast-raised doughnut shell, hand-filled with a gooey white substance and covered with a chocolate glaze. There is the "glazed devil's food", a chocolate doughnut covered with a simple, light glaze, and then alongside that there is the doughnut of the month: the "caramel kreme crunch", a outlandish-looking creation of dough, caramel, toffee and chocolate. Sitting beside that beast, the two "original glazed" doughnuts look positively humble.

"You should eat those two while they're hot," says a man at the next table, as though he is passing on information as valuable as the location of a haul of buried treasure. "That's how they're meant to be eaten. Then you'll see what it is all the fuss is about."

We have entered the world of Krispy Kreme, an American doughnut manufacturer whose devotees at times appear more like cult members than casual snackers in search of some deep-fried dough. I should point out, however, that while they are just one K away, the fans of KK are nothing like the supporters of the obnoxious KKK: the doughnut aficionados make the fools in white sheets look like rank amateurs when it comes to devotion to a cause. In the US, 7.5m are eaten every day.

From this autumn Krispy Kremes will be available in London, when one of the first stores outside the US opens in the Harrods food hall, luring customers with a red neon sign that promises "Hot Doughnuts Now". "I think we have something that will become an everyday habit," says Don Henshall, managing director of Krispy Kreme UK, which hopes to open 25 stores in the UK over the next five years. The doughnuts will be sold alongside KK's own coffee; should Starbucks be worried, or is the idea of any of us actually buying 12 doughnuts at a time ridiculous? "I agree the British consumer doesn't buy doughnuts, but we have a very superior product."

Come off it, a doughnut's a doughnut, surely? A ball of flour and fat that has been thrown into boiling oil, allowed to cool just a little and then doused in sugar: one's much the same as any other, yes? Well, no, actually, according to the fans of KKs. Apparently there is nothing to match them, nothing to compare to their exquisite taste, their still-warm lightness. "It's more like eating cotton candy [candy floss] than eating a doughnut," brags Mr Henshall.

To test these wild claims I have come to a KK emporium, a retro-styled doughnut store in Alexandria, northern Virginia, that sits alongside a three-lane highway on which the traffic pours relentlessly through a landscape of neon signs, fast-food stops and anonymous motels offering clean sheets and cable TV for $49.99 (£30) a night. It is just a few miles outside of Washington DC, but it could be the edge of any American city.

I have come with my friend Christian, a government scientist, who claims something of an expertise in things culinary, and who has forsaken his wife and baby son for the evening to help sample and quantify. When I suggest that he really just wants to stuff his face, he looks hurt.

But that is what we are being urged to do right now in regard to the two glazed doughnuts in our box. Eat them while they are still hot, says Robert Burroughs, a 40-year-old meeting planner, who boasts that he once ate a dozen glazed doughnuts in one sitting. "Sometimes you have people queuing up right out of the door here when the doughnuts are cooking," he says proudly. "When the red light goes on to tell people that they're cooking, there are accidents out on the highway with people trying to get in here."

It has been put off long enough. I pick up the still-warm doughnut and take a bite. It is sensational.

Eating a warm KK glazed doughnut is hard to describe. It is soft and light and airy, buttery and sweet. It has the taste of a fresh croissant or a beignet, but mixed with something sweeter and more syrupy. It is gone in two bites and I start to wonder whether eating a dozen of these things is such a big deal after all.

It is this simple glazed doughnut, of course, on which KK has built its name and its myth. The company was founded in 1933 by Vernon Rudolph, who claimed to have bought the doughnut recipe from a French pastry chef from New Orleans. From his shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he sold to local stores, but soon people started coming directly to him, demanding the doughnuts hot from the fryer.

The hot doughnut remains at the heart of the KK experience. In their red, green and white stores, one can watch the entire process from behind a glass screen as the small balls of dough are first raised, plunged into boiling oil, flipped over and then finally placed on to a conveyor belt, on which they pass though a waterfall of white liquid sugar. It mesmerisingto watch.

But we are not here to watch, we are here to eat. Christian breaks off a piece from the chocolate-glazed doughnut in our box and I follow suit. It is really quite unpleasant. Unlike the hot, airy morsel that we have just consumed, this is heavy and cold. The supposedly chocolate coating has a thin and unpleasant taste. It is like licking a dirty old 2p coin.

We push on. The glazed lemon-filled doughnut has a rich lemon-curd filling and is nice enough, if unexceptional. The glazed devil's food is dry and unpleasant. The chocolate-iced creme-filled is sweet, artificial and quite nasty. The glazed creme-filled is preposterously sweet. Christian says his stomach has started to hurt. I tell him this is no time for such cowardice and push towards him the chocolate-iced doughnut with sprinkles.

To be fair to KK, it is not these fancy-titled creations that have got the company where it is. For generations the company survived by word of mouth and by people recommending the simple, glazed doughnut to friends and colleagues. KK obsessives pass on tips, such as how to refresh original glazed if you can't get them hot from the oven (pop them in the microwave for three seconds, apparently).

In a world ripe both with obesity and with ways to tackle such fatness, it did not hurt that along the way KK got trendy. It did not hurt that President Clinton let it be known that a KK was his favourite doughnut. Madonna, Jim Carrey and Nicole Kidman are fans. Nora Ephron wrote an essay in praise of the Krispy Kreme for the New Yorker. And it doesn't hurt that the company now gets free product placement on popular US TV shows such as NYPD Blue and Sex in the City. (Just what bedroom acrobatics Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte might be capable of after scoffing a box of 400-calorie chocolate-iced custard-filled doughnuts is not clear, however.)

The Krispy Kreme doughnut has be- come a byword for "Hey, I'm just a regular Joe" among the movie-star set. In an age when celebrities wear truckers' baseball caps and scraggy heavy-metal T-shirts, chomping on a fat-laden bun is the ultimate in cool cuisine. Of course, most of them are assiduously following the Atkins diet the rest of the time, but they do make an exception for the little pillows of sweetness from KK.

Word has got around. Since April 2000 when KK went public, the company's stock has soared by a staggering 625 per cent, and KK memorabilia is even displayed in the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington. It sits next to the Fonz's leather jacket from the faux-Fifties sit-com Happy Days.

Indeed, there is something of Fifties innocence about KK. It is not simply the retro-styling of the stores or its company merchandise (mugs, shirts, sweatshirts, baby clothes and such clutter). Somehow, it appears that many people associate KK with the sort of doughnuts they ate when they were young, when they could walk to the local store for a treat or celebration.

"For many people it is the association of good time and warm memories," KK's vice president of marketing, Stan Parker, had told me. "It could be that KK was where they went with their parents before church on a Sunday, or else where they went to celebrate a good school report."

Karen Brummett, the assistant manager here at the Alexandria store, goes along with that. Before she got her own shop - she recently finished a management course with the Brits who are going to run the KK store in London - she worked for the KK mobile store, a doughnut shop on wheels that travels the country, visiting state fairs and other such events.

"The most I ever saw anyone eat was 36," she says. "We were at the Oklahoma state fair last year. There was a queue that was taking two and a half hours. One man came up, ordered 36 - that was the limit per person - and then went and sat down leaning against a pole and ate them all, just folding in one after the other. He then got a bottle of milk and drank that straight down. Then he said, 'I hope I did not look like a pig. I grew up in Winston-Salem, and I have not had one of those in 30 years.' "

People continue to come into the store, young and old, black, white, Asian and African. There is a young boy with a pizza in a box who sits and eats four doughnuts, one after the other. An attractive young woman in a figure-hugging dress walks out with a box in one hand, while a grey-haired man in shorts with a paperback copy of Nick Hornby's How to Be Good sits at his table alternately taking bites from his doughnuts and gobbling down morsels from Hornby's modern-day morality tale set on London's Holloway Road.

We are almost done. There is just the powdered strawberry-filled variety left to try. We each break off a piece. It is OK, quite nice though not exceptional, like something you might buy in Tesco. It leaves you with the same sticky hands. Christian starts to complain again.

We lurch outside into the evening air, get into the car and turn into the north-bound traffic. As we gather speed our stomachs start to churn.