Donuts

Bismarks, Long Johns, Persians and Buttermilk Bars: The Specialty Board Explained

11 September 2026 · 5 min read

The specialty board has names on it that a lot of people read, quietly decide they are not sure about, and then order a glazed instead. Fair enough — nobody explains them. So here is the board, in plain English.

Bismark

A filled donut with no hole. That is the whole definition. The dough is fried as a solid round, then the filling goes in afterwards through a small hole in the side. There is no ring because there was never anywhere for one.

Ours come lemon and raspberry. Lemon is sharper than people expect and cuts through the sweetness of the dough; raspberry is the safer, rounder one.

Worth knowing: filled donuts are consistently among the first things to go in the morning. If a Bismark is what you came for, come early or ring ahead.

Bavarian cream

Same shape as a Bismark, different filling. Bavarian cream is a custard — thick, pale, vanilla-ish — rather than a fruit preserve. If you have ever ordered a "cream filled" donut somewhere and liked it, this is the one you were after.

The useful way to choose: fruit filling tastes lighter and sharper, custard tastes richer and heavier. Neither is the fancier option, they are just different mornings.

Long John

The rectangular one. Same raised dough as a glazed ring, shaped into a bar and topped along its length. The shape is not decoration — a bar gives you a much better ratio of topping to dough than a ring does, which is the entire reason the shape exists.

Ours come maple and chocolate. Maple is the traditional one and the one people tend to have a childhood opinion about.

Persian

This is the one nobody can ever quite describe, and the one we get asked about most.

A Persian is a large, soft, cinnamon-laced donut — closer in spirit to a cinnamon roll than to a ring donut, with a heavier crumb and a generous topping. It is a regional item rather than a national one, which is why plenty of people have never seen one and why the name means nothing on first read.

If you like cinnamon rolls and you like donuts, order this before anything else on the board. It is the single most "why does nobody else make this" thing in our case.

Buttermilk bar

Here is the one people get wrong most often. A buttermilk bar is a cake donut, not a raised one.

Raised donuts are yeasted — light, airy, with that pull. Cake donuts are batter-based and chemically leavened — dense, tender, closer to a pound cake. Buttermilk in the dough adds a faint tang and produces those split, craggy edges that catch and hold the glaze.

So if you already know you like our old fashioned, you will like a buttermilk bar — they are the same family, in a different shape. And if you have only ever had raised donuts and found them a bit insubstantial, this is the one to try.

Cinnamon twist

Raised dough, rolled in cinnamon sugar and twisted before frying. Less sweet than almost everything else on the board because there is no glaze or icing doing the work — just the cinnamon sugar on the outside.

It is the one to order alongside coffee if you do not want the donut to be the sweetest thing in the room.

Fritter

Folded rather than cut, with fruit and cinnamon through the dough, so it comes out craggy and heavy with crisp edges. We wrote about fritters properly the other day — the short version is that they are denser than they look and they go early.

Daily specialty

Whatever the kitchen decided to make that morning. It changes, and we are not going to publish a schedule for it because there genuinely is not one. Ask at the counter — the answer is always the freshest thing we can tell you.

How to order if you cannot decide

Say "whatever looks best today" and mean it. The person behind the counter has been looking at those trays since before five in the morning and knows exactly which one came out right. That is not a cop-out order, it is the best-informed order in the shop.

The practical bits

• Price — specialty is $27.50 a dozen, and a dozen is buy ten, get two free. Singles, ask at the counter.
• Timing — doors at 5:00am, Monday to Saturday. Closed Sundays. Filled donuts go first.
• Afternoons — donuts are half price after 2:00pm Monday to Thursday at Spanish Fork and St. George. Ogden does not run that one. Less choice by then, but the specialty board is exactly where the bargains are.
• Ordering ahead — for anything specific, call the shop. Same-day is usually fine.

Common questions

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