Dutch Monkey Doughnuts

There’s an old saying about baking: Go by the directions. In cooking, follow your taste. It’s true that bakers and pastry chefs have to consciously be true to form; throwing a little more yeast, sugar or baking soda into a recipe isn’t the same as adding a little more seasoning to your saute. In fact, baking must be so precise that professional kitchens refer to recipes as formulas, a specific decree of how to make something from what amounts to flour and water most of the time.

Two of the city's most talented pastry chefs have opened their own shops. From doughnuts to dollars, if it's a bakery you're after, Dutch Monkey Doughnuts and Bakeshop (reviewed here ) are well worth the dough.

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I first fell in love with pastry chef Arpana Satyu’s way with sugar and dough when she was whipping up goodies like sweet paneer, which she pressed into delicate patties and served in milk laced with cardamom and dotted with pistachios with grapefruit-and-rosewater sorbet, at Buckhead’s Aja.

Her efforts are not as finespun as at her and husband Martin Burge’s doughnut shop in Cumming, but the results are just as satisfying. And fun. Peering over a pristine pastry case brimming with doughnuts, it dawned on me that she has made this as much fun as ice cream. And like a popular ice cream parlor, Dutch Monkey Doughnuts has become a place where the community comes in droves — to stay and sip coffee while wolfing down one of her pudgy raised glazed, or to take home by the dozens.

The couple could have chosen to do just about anything. She’s a French Culinary Institute grad; he’s a graduate of CIA, and both have experience at some of New York’s most prestigious joints — Gotham Bar & Grill, Craft, Mesa Grill.

But it’s doughnuts, made from a yeasty sponge dough that creates a high, raised circle of toothsome, sugary goodness, where Satyu is making her mark. Bismarcks filled with passion fruit cream and iced with a citrus fondant glaze; chocolate twists made with chocolate dough and crowned with shiny chocolate fondant — her doughnuts are a little like a sponge cake and savarin mixed into one. The result is oddly light, yet dense, and not too sweet — until a glaze-like lemon, pomegranate or strawberry hits so hard it makes your teeth hurt.

Go early. It’s hard to keep pace with doughnut demand, and Dutch Monkey might not have your favorite — like a cinnamon-laced caramel apple fritter — if you wait.

Dutch Monkey Doughnuts

Overall rating:

Food: Bakery

Price range: $

Credit cards: Visa, Mastercard, American Express.

Hours of operation: Open Tues.- Fri. from 5:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. (drive-through open from 5:30 to 9:30 a.m.); Sat.' Sun. from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Address, telephone: 3075 Ronald Reagan Blvd., Cumming, 404-432-5130

Web site: www.dutchmonkeydoughnuts.com

Pricing code: $$$$$ means more than $75; $$$$ means $75 and less; $$$ means $50 and less; $$ means $25 and less; $ means $15 and less. The price code represents a typical full-course meal for one excluding drinks.

Key to AJC ratings