The Original Krispy Kreme Recipe Included An Unexpected Ingredient

Yeast, flour, egg, butter, warm water, and sugar — these are the basic ingredients needed to make a donut recipe. However, if you wanted to make Krispy Kreme's original donut recipe, then you'd be missing a key ingredient: Mashed potatoes. Yes, this is actually one of the untold truths of Krispy Kreme, but you won't find any spuds in the international donut chain's recipe today.

Founder Vernon Rudolph bought the yeast-raised doughnut recipe from a New Orleans French chef named Joseph G. Loboeuf in the 1930s, who cooked on a barge and was known for his fluffy donuts, coconut cake, and pancakes. Duke Chronicle interviewed Carver Rudolph, Vernon's son, who worked with a historian to uncover Krispy Kreme's original recipe. It consisted of fluffed egg whites, sugar, shortening, skim milk, flour, mashed potatoes, and cream — which is part of where the company's name comes from.

Krispy Kreme was founded during the Great Depression, when staples like flour could be hard to come by. According to ChainBaker's Youtube video, potatoes were sometimes used as a supplement in baked goods when grain crops failed and flour was scarce. If you think of a pure mashed potato, minus added seasonings and toppings, it starts to make a lot of sense that it would function well in something sweet and fried like a donut. Potatoes contain more moisture than flour, and retain this when baked or fried — this results in a light, fluffy texture that we crave in donuts.

Krispy Kreme does not use mashed potatoes anymore and it's not exactly clear when the recipe was updated, but according to its website, in the 1940s and 1950s, Rudolph found that the donuts were coming out inconsistently. This led the company (a small chain at the time) to build its own factory for making and distributing dry donut mix to the stores; this is very well when the recipe could have been updated.

While the exact Krispy Kreme recipe is secret and rumored to be hidden in a vault in the company's corporate headquarters in North Carolina, its website at least reveals the ingredients present. The modern yeast-raised doughnuts are made with wheat flour, sugar, yeast, palm oil, and other additives that help maintain consistency for the 2 billion donuts made each year. Yet one thing that remains the same, and why Krispy Kreme donuts are so delicious, is that they're still made in-house and fresh.

Potato donuts, however, have not totally disappeared. One of the most famous potato donut shops was Spudnuts, which began in Utah. Although the potato donut has become more of a regional specialty since the nationwide chain became largely broken up in the late 1970s, you can still find small franchises that have branched off from the parent company, like Spudnuts in Washington state, Johnny O's Spudnuts in Utah, and Spudnuts and Bagels in California.