THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603130048
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
OUTSIDE, the street is black and wet, the air rainy and cold. In here, it smells like mother. All cinnamon and honey, warm yeast and strawberry jam.
There's a racket coming from the corner, a thumping and bumping, made by a rotating dough hook as big as some boat anchors. It's slamming around a ball of yeast dough in a bowl nearly large enough to bathe in.
Evelyn Bain Bryant stands beside it, hands on her aproned hips, a white dab of flour on the end of her nose.
Bryant, a baker on the night shift at the Holland Road Dunkin' Donut in Virginia Beach, has been on the job a couple of hours already. Long enough to have baked a load of chocolate munchkins and rows of chocolate and blueberry honey-dipped cake doughnuts drip drying on rods.
``The french crullers come next,'' she says, a faint Scottish burr creep ing around the edges of her words and giving away her homeland. ``They're my fav'rite,'' she adds. ``They're so soft and airy.''
She'll mix up and deep fry about 80 dozen doughnuts before midnight with a great love of the job. She's found her niche, she says.
``It's fun watching the doughnuts from the beginning to how they turn out at the end. I've always been fascinated with it,'' she says, rolling the finished bowl of yeast dough away from the mixer and filling a second with flour for the crullers.
Out front, a steady trickle of people comes in for coffee and sweet treats. The cash register rings out and punctuates Bryant's chit chat as she watches over the cruller dough.
Thirteen years ago she emigrated here from Aberdeenshire in cold, northeast Scotland. She grew up in a tiny fishing village where her dad was a safety inspector for a fish factory and her mother a nurse. She married (her husband is a Navy yeoman on the Mount Whitney), moved to Boston and started working for the doughnut company.
She's been baking for 18 months. It isn't a hobby turned to profit, not with five kids at home, two of them 6-year-old twins.
``I don't bake at home. I don't have time at home. There, it's put the roast in the roasting bag and shove it in the oven,'' she says, laughing.
When the cruller dough is whipped smooth, she fills it into the hob that hangs above a big vat of hot oil. Turning the hand crank, she forces the dough through the bottom. One by one, crullers shaped like little tractor wheels plop into the golden oil, sizzle and puff up to twice the size. She cranks out about 40 in just a minute or two. She waits, then, using two long wooden sticks, expertly flips each of them over to fry on the other side.
Even though crullers are her favorite, the 36-year-old Bryant says she doesn't eat many doughnuts. Looking at all this sugary food, something spicy is more her fancy. But she does drink the coffee.
``I drink it all night,'' she says. Could account for her energy. She's on her feet the entire shift, trotting from sink to mixer to deep fryer to baker's table in her jogging shoes.
When the crullers are done, Bryant lifts them out of the oil on a rack and then threads the hot rings onto a metal rod with her bare hands.
``I don't have any feeling in these fingers,'' she says, holding up her thumb and forefinger. ``Most bakers don't.''
Behind her the yeast dough has started to rise in its bowl.
``A good yeast dough is all in the mixing,'' she says, dipping the crullers into honey. A recipe is one thing, but a baker has to take into consideration the weather and temperature to know how to get dough to rise.
She prides herself on making dough so fluffy the doughnuts still taste fresh 24 hours later.
Bryant is a small woman, just five feet tall, and left-handed to boot. So she bakes ``backwards,'' she says, and cuts her doughnuts from right to left while standing on a platform made just for her. She has strong arm muscles from the weight of the dough and the workout from a 3-foot-long rolling pin.
Once the crullers are done and Bryant has rested for a moment with a cup of coffee, she checks the yeast dough, which has oozed over the top of the bowl.
``Telling when the dough is risen enough is a feeling more than anything else,'' she says. This batch is ready.
She flours the baker's table, claps the excess off her hands then bends to cut the dough out of the bowl into a manageable lump. She kneads each mass with her knuckles and fists into a big, fluffy pillow.
Eight pillows are all lined up on the table in front of her like sleeping seal pups, when Bryant looks up and down the row, smiles and says, ``I always call them my babies.''
A few moments later, the ``pups'' have swelled up again. Bryant rolls the first one flat, then cuts out doughnut rings, catching them on her thumb.
The middles pop out.
``See,'' she says, ``Those are my munchkins.''
She goes on cutting until the piece of dough left looks like a lacy slice of swiss cheese. That'll be rerolled to make her youngest son's favorites - Boston creme-filled. She brings doughnuts home every other night or so.
When Bryant's parents visited last summer she brought them to the shop.
``My mother had never tasted an American doughnut,'' she says, recalling them sampling her handiwork. ``They both have a sweet tooth.''
Bryant's parents have visited twice since she's lived in this country. Could be the next time they come, their daughter will have her own Dunkin' to run.
``I'd like to have my own store,'' she says. ``It'd be something for my kids.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by RICHARD L. DUNSTON, The Virginian-Pilot
Evelyn Bain Bryant bakes doughnuts, chocolate munchkins and french
crullers at Dunkin' Donuts on Holland Road in Virginia Beach.
by CNB