Every day we have someone at our shop making up our fresh dough. We don’t have any of those fancy walk-in coolers to store the dough in, and even if we did we’d stick to the family tradition of preparing it fresh daily. Below we walk you through our process of making the dough, cutting out our donuts, letting them raise, cooking them, and then finishing them to sell to our wonderful customers.
Mixing.step.one
Over 50% of our dough is hand mixed, and the other is mixed by a automated mixer. Our dough mixture is the secret to our success. It’s a family tradition in the way we prepare our dough. Once we’ve made the dough, we move it over to our flour coated, wooden tables to stretch, roll, stretch, roll and flatten until it’s the right consistency for our cutters.
Cutting.step.two
We have 5 different types of tools, each customized for an individual type of donut we make, and all made to be used with our hands. We don’t have an automated conveyor belt which does the cutting for us because we believe that method effects the quality of the finished product. Once we’re prepared to cut out our donuts and rolls we proceed to go through all the dough we made for that day. After we get through a sheet of dough we take the leftover dough and reroll it out, and use it for more donuts. The donut holes get turned into finished donut holes.
Pinning.step.three
We then move each cutout onto a sheet, which is then placed into a proof box where it is slightly heated with warm, moist air to let rise.
Rising.step.four
Rising is a very delicate process. We make sure to give each donut and roll the proper amount of time to rise so they don’t come out to short or dense.
Frying.step.five
After the rising process has been completed we move a sheet at a time over to the fryer, where each donut and roll is individually dipped in the oil for a set period of time to cook. They are then lightly shaken and placed on a rack to remove the excess oil. Once an adequate amount of the excess oil has been removed they are ready to be finished.
Finishing.step.six
We then take the very warm donut and finish it with one of our 20 toppings, and finally fill our cases with the warm fresh donuts & rolls.
Tools
Our trade tools include: a donut cutter, bar cutter, raised donut cutter, a jelly cutter and a rolling pin.
Recipes
A couple of our doughs have been passed down to us as a family recipe.
Traditions
Our family has been making donuts since the early nineties. We own 3 stores, two of which are under the name Sunrise Donuts and located in the Omaha metro area.
Legacy
We owe our success to the founders of Sunrise Donuts. We have been granted their secret recipes because of our family ties.
As we expand into the future we’ll be opening new stores and looking for more opportunities to improve the way we serve our customers.
