Welcome to AmsterDonuts Your Donuts in Amsterdam

doughnut, a small ring of sweet leavened dough that has been fried or sometimes baked. 

All over the world have been consuming fried dough for centuries.  The history of the doughnut itself is generally traced to Dutch immigrants in 17th- and 18th-century New York, then New Netherland, who prepared fried dough balls called olie koeken or olykoeks, which means “oil cakes.” They were similar to modern doughnuts, although they did not yet have the ring shape. 

At that time, instead, the dough balls were stuffed with fruits and nuts in the middle, to work around the problem of the dough that otherwise would be at the centre of the ball cooking more slowly than the rest of the treat. These olykoeks were later described by writer Washington Irving, in his 1809 book A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty as “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks.”

Regardless of how and where they started, doughnuts had been fully claimed by the United States by the turn of the 20th century. About 1850 an American sailor named Hanson Gregory is said to have innovated the iconic doughnut shape by piercing or cutting a hole through the centre of the treat. In one tale,  he cut out the hole using the lid of a tin pepper container. However the hole came to be, it was an important innovation; with the hole, doughnuts could be larger in size and still cook fully without leaving a doughy centre or requiring the addition of nuts or other fillings.