Dynamo Donuts

2760 24th Street (at Hampshire)
San Francisco, CA

I have been away from my blog for quite some time. I am making a commitment to keep track of my culinary travels. So here are my latest food adventures:

I am always on the lookout for some new and interesting food in the Bay area and every now and then I will do an Internet search on a food to see what the SF area has to offer. I had heard about Voodoo Donuts in Portland and the outlandish flavors they had to offer so I looked into what was available here. At the time I did the search I heard the rumor that Dynamo Donuts was in the works with some crazy flavors but not yet open. I tucked it away to a little food corner of my mind and forgot about it. Well recently I needed a food adventure and someone brought up Portland which reminded me about Dynamo. I googled it, found it and the adventure began. It is in a part of the Mission I don't often get too. You turn on a quiet, small street with trees, kind of shady, not much to speak of going on. A counter juts out on the street, the menu consists of Polaroids with the beverages and beverage pricing and then glass domes with a variety of doughnuts on display.

I cannot vouch for the coffee. I don't drink coffee. they had a nice shiny coffee machine. It looked like it could make good coffee. But I am here to talk about the donuts. We ended up buying 7 donuts for $19 a little step for donuts so i expected great things. I don't actually know the price of the donuts because I wasn't paying attention to that. I was too busy staring at the donuts in their pretty glass domes. We bought one of everything they had to offer. He began gathering them up. The young guy asked if I wanted some donut bread pudding as well but I declined, saving that for another adventure. He put a Saffron with Chocolate Glaze in the box, then a Lemon Glazed Ginger, a Caramel Banana (against my better judgement) a vanilla glazed, a Pistachio encrusted something and then said "Oh we have some Maple Glazed with Bacon - do you want one of those?" OMG - The sign said they were only available on Fridays and Saturdays. This was Thursday. You are damn right I want one of those - I want TWO of those! John would never forgive me if I was at a place that had Maple Bacon Donuts and did not bring one home to share! The food gods were smiling on me. Grace and I got two glasses of water from a pitcher (no coffee for me remember?) and settled down in the Scion to eat our donuts. No tables, no chairs at Dynamo and we were headed on a two hour drive to Santa Cruz so what could we do but sit in the car and eat. Unfortunately, we started with the Banana donut. I do not like fresh banana. I like banana taffy, banana bread, banana Popsicle but not real banana. Well this donut had to be filled with real banana. It was the only filled donut that day. I handed it to Grace to finish. You will have to ask her opinion. I hated it. I don't like banana. I was hoping it might be banana flavored cake -no such luck. We moved on to the Chocolate Saffron. It was a saffron yellow donut with a nice semisweet chocolate ganache glaze.

The saffron did not do anything for me but the glaze was enough to erase the banana donut from memory. The lemon/ginger donut was great - a little too much zest in the glaze so it left a little bit of a zesty bitterness but in general quite tasty. We had been stalling up till now. It was the moment of truth. Time for the Maple Glazed donut with bacon. Okay - a nice fried donut with a maple glaze, sprinkled with real bacon. I broke it in half and gave Grace her half. I paused. I bit into Sunday morning. The syrup taste of the glaze, the fried donut, like a giant pancake, and the bacon drenched in mapley goodness. It did not disappoint. It was worth the trip. I will go back to Dynamo Donuts. I will go back to see what new and fun flavors I haven't tried and I will always ask for a Maple Bacon.