doughnut days

Ken Hoffman celebrates Houston favorite Shipley on National Doughnut Day

Shipley has more than 300 locations across the South.

Courtesy of Shipley Do-Nuts

If this morning's air smelled a little sweeter, there's a good reason why. It's National Doughnut Day, which should be a federal holiday with businesses, schools, banks, government buildings, everything closed ... except doughnut shops. We could use a break from politics; we can't do without glazed doughnuts to start the day.

I love doughnuts, they're my favorite baked good even if they're fried. The funny thing about doughnuts, though, it's hard to find a restaurant that has doughnuts on their dessert menu. I would order a couple of glazed doughnuts to polish off a fine meal but good luck with that. Doughnuts are the perfect junk food — enriched flour, hot grease, and a ton of sugar. There's nothing good about them except they taste unbelievably, lip-smacking delicious. And long after you eat them, they're still with you, if you know what I mean.

You want to be a hero at the office? Bring a couple dozen glazed to that 9 am meeting and see how fast they disappear. The board room will look like feeding time at the zoo.

Of course, the No. 1 doughnut king in Houston is Shipley Do-Nuts. Lawrence Shipley Sr. started selling wholesale doughnut in 1936. Price back then: 5 cents. Not each. Per dozen! About 10 years later, he opened his first retail store at 1417 Crockett St. in Houston. Now, seven-plus decades later, still headquartered in Houston, there are 325 Shipley Do-Nut stores throughout the southern U.S.

His mantra was, "When they bite into that hot do-nut, it will bring them back every time."

Lawrence Shipley III gave me a backstage tour of how Shipley Do-Nuts makes those sweet treats. I didn't mind meeting him at 5 am. In fact, I helped create their Chocolate Iced Cinnamon Twist cruller. They already had a plain Cinnamon Twist, plus several chocolate iced donuts. I said why not combine those two flavors? It's a natural winner. Have you never had a chocolate-cinnamon milkshake at Goode Company Taqueria? If only someone could make a chocolate-cinnamon babka, we'd be onto something.

Loyal to Local

Here's the thing about Houstonians. We're loyal to our local brands. I remember when Krispy Kreme was a national obsession with people lining up for hours for their small, over-sugared glazed doughnut. Krispy Kreme opened in Houston and ... pffft. Gone in a year or two, all of them. They put the hole in doughnut holes. Shipley crushed them. It was the same thing with ice cream. Ben and Jerry's and other national ice cream chains invaded Houston, only to be warded off by Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla in the supermarket. A few Ben & Jerry's scoop shops still hang in there, but nothing like their original war plan.

Several national bagel chains thought that Houston was under-bageled and opened stores here, with plans to open many more. They were gone fast. Still standing: the little New York Deli and Coffee Shop on Hillcroft. Their bagels are boiled and baked the old-fashioned way. But what I like even more — they make bialys, the unsung hero of the Jewish baked goods industry.

Best supermarket doughnut: Entenmann's Classic Chocolate Frosted Donuts. Eight to a box. Or one serving.

All the news that's fit to print

Here's the one time that doughnut bit me back. Several years ago, I got a call from a reporter with the New York Times. She asked if I was the guy who writes the fast food column in the Houston Chronicle. Yes, that's me. The reporter was working on a feature about the dangers of eating doughnuts in the morning instead of a more healthful, less fattening breakfast. She wanted to interview me. I said no thanks, but I have a friend who seems to know his way around the back wall at Shipley Do-Nuts. Here's a phone number for Reg "Third Degree" Burns.

A week later, I picked up a New York Times. The headline of the main story on the front page of the Health section:

"Kick the Doughnut Habit, and Make Your Nutritionist Smile"

And the lead paragraph:

"No matter which route Reginald Burns takes when he drives to work each morning in Houston, he knows every doughnut shop along the way. Almost every day, he stops for a fix: a Diet Coke and six doughnuts — any kind as long as they have just emerged from the fryer.

Six doughnuts? Almost every day? Don't get me wrong, Third Degree has horrible eating habits, but he's not searching for a "Hot Donuts" sign and eating six hot greasy doughnut almost every morning. Nobody could believe that. The newspaper article even quoted him making up nonsense.

"A hot doughnut literally melts in your mouth," said Mr. Burns, a finance director for a nonprofit organization.

My reaction when I saw Third Degree pranking the New York Times? There goes my .0001 percent chance of ever working at the Times.

news-you-can-eat doughnuts breakfast

Winter weather warning

Arctic air will bring hard freeze to Houston this weekend

Photo by Uliana Sova on Unsplash

This weekend could bring ice to Dallas-Fort Worth and beyond.

With many Americans still recovering from multiple blasts of snow and unrelenting freezing temperatures in the nation’s northern tier, a new storm is set to emerge this weekend that could coat roads, trees and power lines with devastating ice across a wide expanse of the South, including Texas.

The storm arriving late this week and into the weekend is shaping up to be a “widespread potentially catastrophic event from Texas to the Carolinas,” said Ryan Maue, a former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“I don’t know how people are going to deal with it,” he said.

Forecasters on Tuesday, January 20 warned that the ice could weigh down trees and power lines, triggering widespread outages.

“If you get a half of an inch of ice — or heaven forbid an inch of ice — that could be catastrophic,” said Keith Avery, CEO of the Newberry Electric Cooperative in South Carolina.

The National Weather Service warned of "great swaths of heavy snow, sleet, and treacherous freezing rain” starting Friday in much of the nation’s midsection and then shifting toward the East Coast through Sunday.

Temperatures will be slow to warm in many areas, meaning ice that forms on roads and sidewalks might stick around, forecasters say.

The exact timing of the approaching storm — and where it is headed — remained uncertain on Tuesday. Forecasters say it can be challenging to predict precisely which areas could see rain and which ones could be punished with ice.

Meteorologists at WFAA say it's too early for an exact forecast across Dallas-Fort Worth. But it's good to start being weather aware.

Here’s what to know:

Cold air clashing with rain to fuel a 'major winter storm’
An extremely cold arctic air mass is set to dive south from Canada, setting up a clash with the cold temperatures and rain that will be streaming eastward across the southern U.S.

“This is extreme, even for this being the peak of winter,” National Weather Service meteorologist Bryan Jackson said of the cold temperatures.

When the cold air meets the rain, the likely result will be “a major winter storm with very impactful weather, with all the moisture coming up from the Gulf and encountering all this particularly cold air that’s spilling in,” Jackson said.

Texas could be a harbinger for other parts of the South
Some of the storm’s earliest impacts could be in Texas on Friday, as the arctic air mass slides south through much of the state, National Weather Service forecaster Sam Shamburger said in a briefing on the storm.

“At the same time, we’re expecting rain to move into much of the state,” Shamburger said.

Low temperatures could fall into the 20s or even the teens in parts of Texas by Saturday, with the potential for a wintery mix of weather in the northern part of the state.

Forecasters cautioned that significant uncertainty remains, particularly over how much ice or snow could fall across north and central Texas.

“It’s going to be a very difficult forecast,” Shamburger said.

An atmospheric river could set up across the Southern U.S.
An atmospheric river of moisture could be in place by the weekend, pulling precipitation across Texas and other states along the Gulf Coast and continuing across Georgia and the Carolinas, forecasters said.

“Global models are painting a concerning picture of what this weekend could look like, with an increasingly strong signal for ice storm potential across North Georgia and portions of central Georgia,” according to the National Weather Service's Atlanta office.

Highway and air travel could be tangled by the storm
Travel is a major concern, as Southern states have less equipment to remove snow and ice from roads, and extremely cold temperatures expected after the storm could prevent ice from melting for several days.

The storm is also expected to impact many of the nation’s major hub airports, including those in Dallas-Fort Worth; Atlanta; Memphis, Tennessee; and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Polar air from Canada to keep northern states in a deep freeze
Unusually cold temperatures are already in place across much of the northern tier of the U.S., but the blast of arctic air expected later this week is “will be the coldest yet,” Jackson said.

“There’s a large sprawling vortex of low pressure centered over Hudson Bay,” Jackson said of the sea in northern Canada that’s connected to the Arctic Ocean. “And this is dominating the weather over all of North America.”

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