Khmer-American Glazed Donut

The Cambodian donut shop is one of the great, unlikely chapters of the diaspora. When Ted Ngoy arrived in California as a refugee in 1975, fleeing the war that would consume his country, he found work at a donut shop, learned the trade, and within a few years was running his own — then many. What made him remarkable was what he did next: he sponsored and trained fellow Cambodian refugees, families who had lost everything, setting them up behind their own fryers. By the 1990s, Cambodian-Americans owned an outsized share of California's independent donut shops, a whole community rebuilt one pink box at a time. The story, told in the documentary "The Donut King," carries its shadows too — Ngoy's own later ruin — but the shops, and the families they lifted, are real and lasting.

The donut itself is unpretentious by design: a light, yeasted, raised ring under a thin glassy glaze, the workhorse of every one of those shops. Home cooking it honestly means respecting the dough — a proper knead, two patient proves, oil held steady at 175°C. Fry to that deep gold with the pale band around the middle, then dip while warm so the glaze sets to a crackle. It is a simple thing to make well and a hard thing to make great, which is exactly why those families' shops earned their reputation. Make a dozen, share them, and think about the road that brought this ring to a Long Beach counter.