This Silver Lake doughnut shop is making all vegan doughnuts. And they’ve got fritters too
Donut Farm looks like your typical Los Angeles doughnut shop: It’s in the middle of a weathered shopping center on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, and the guy behind the counter is putting doughnut after doughnut into a pink box. Only these doughnuts are all vegan.
Donut Farm, which opened its first Los Angeles location late last year — there are outlets in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley — is making more than 15 kinds of vegan doughnuts. The company started as a hobby for San Francisco resident Josh Levine in 2007. He eventually started a vegan doughnut wholesale business, then opened his first vegan doughnut shop in Oakland in 2010.
All of his doughnuts are vegan and 100% organic, which is an important thing to keep in mind when you take a bite of the plain glazed. Because if someone hands you this doughnut and doesn’t tell you it’s vegan, good luck figuring it out.
The doughnut may not have the eggs, milk and butter that give a typical yeast doughnut its light, airy texture, but the glazed doughnut at Donut Farm is a dead ringer for the original. Chewy and almost weightless, the doughnuts get a full coating of the familiar sugary glaze.
The fritters, both apple and banana, are equally deceptive. As is the jelly doughnut, covered in powdered sugar and full of raspberry jam.
The cake doughnuts are on the heavier side, with a dense, stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth texture. And each is served under a blanket of flavored glaze, including salted caramel (tastes more like butterscotch), coffee (made with Philz coffee), Meyer lemon, chocolate or blueberry, just to name a few.
It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that the doughnuts are also priced three times as much as the regular ones they so closely resemble. Both vegans and nonvegans may be skeptical, as the price of a banana fritter is $4.25.They’re pretty good, though.
2609 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, pepplesdonuts.com.
A good doughnut cures everything. Follow me on Twitter & Instagram @Jenn_Harris_
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