Healthier doughnuts? We know how to make them, this innovative Almonte shop says

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Ed Atwell says he gets along just fine with the health inspector.

“She’s great. She’s awesome. We chat away,” says Atwell, whose Almonte-based shop sells uniquely made doughnuts that live up to his company’s name, Healthy Food Technologies (HFT).

Once, though, the inspector did a double-take and grew serious after she spied what appeared to be hamburgers in a showcase.

‘How are you making your hamburgers?” she asked.

“The same way we do doughnuts — right through the fryer,” Atwell replied.

“She looked at me, so puzzled and perplexed,” he recalls.

To be fair, HFT’s “hamburger” is indeed a doughnut. You could call it a culinary optical illusion, made with a halved yeast doughnut “bun” and a chocolate cake doughnut “patty,” with whipped cream as its “condiment.”

If you think that’s ingenious, you should see the contraption that Atwell built to make all of his doughnuts.

In the HFT kitchen, there’s a one-of-a-kind machine that deep-fries doughnuts just long enough, and then moves them along on a conveyor belt to be baked in a 375 F oven. What results are doughnuts that have 50 per cent less fat, says Atwell, who opened HFT in an Almonte industrial park 14 years ago, initially for research and development and soon after as a store. At first, the company was all about the technology, and the doughnuts were just a proof of concept.

Now, HFT sells 10,000 doughnuts a week, with regulars driving from points as far as two hours away for their fix, says Atwell. The company consists of Atwell, his wife Doris, his son James, and four other employees.

While the initial appeal for the doughnuts was their lower-fat, lower-calorie virtues, Atwell says customers return because his doughnuts are delicious.

“It’s nothing to do with being low fat, you buy the doughnuts for the taste,” he says.

A long-time inventor on the side who worked for doughnut companies, including Tim Hortons, before he launched HFT, Atwell contends that his low-fat creations taste better than regular doughnuts.

“It goes against everything we’ve been trained,” says Atwell.

“I had to debunk that, which I did. I debunked it by understanding that our doughnuts actually taste better because they’re lower in fat,” he says.

He says that shortening used in deep-frying doesn’t taste good intrinsically, and that deep-frying is only needed to “toast” its exterior before the baking process completes the cooking.

“You compromise doughnuts by frying them the regular way,” he says.

Atwell says that after eating enough HFT doughnuts, he thought something was wrong with a regular doughnut that he tried.

“It didn’t go great,” he says. “That’s when it occurred to me, I had adjusted my palate to what doughnuts taste like with less fat in them.”

At HFT, that hamburger doughnut, inspired by former Ottawa Senators goalie Andrew Hammond (aka “the Hamburglar”), is a popular novelty purchase that customers might order in bulk in advance to bring to a barbecue for a clever dessert.

But the most popular HFT creation, Atwell says, is its blueberry pancake doughnut, which is maple-dipped and has a blueberry filling. Also a strong seller is the “Sunrise” doughnut that’s modeled after an iconic made-in-Ottawa doughy snack. It has a lemon-custard interior and is dusted with cinnamon sugar.

Atwell says HFT sells up to 10,000 doughnuts in a week and has almost 50 kinds of doughnuts that it can make each day.

While HFT has proven that lower-fat doughnuts can be popular, Atwell still says his fryer-baker machine could have much wider applications.

“We’ve shown that it works. We’ve done all the work to prove this technology is the future of cooking — French fries, chicken nuggets, you name it.

“Whether it’s in 10 years, it’s 20 years, I know that it’s the future of frying,” says Atwell. “No doubt in my mind.”

phum@postmedia.com

Healthy Food Technologies

25 Industrial Dr, Almonte, 613-256-9900, facebook.com/HFTinc

Open: Wednesday to Friday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, Sunday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Mondays, Tuesdays

Prices: $2.50 for a regular doughnut, $15 for a half-dozen regular doughnuts, $24 for a dozen regular doughnuts, $3.50 for a specialty doughnut

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