Love is in the air
Appearances can be deliciously deceptive, as Katie Devenish proves with her popular line of doughnuts
KATIE Devenish likes to make people happy, and she has found doughnuts a good way of accomplishing this.
In Tasmania, Lady Hester sisters Loren and Erin Clarke sparked the revival of sourdough doughnuts halfway through 2014. Since then the field has become crowded.
Small Fry, Sweet Envy and Pigeon Whole Bakers are just a few bringing the oil to the boil now that doughnuts are a thing.
But Katie’s doughnuts have a point of difference. When you go to her Yeastie Beastie stall at a market or festival, there is no array of sugar-dusted temptations. Instead there is a line-up of not-so-attractive splodges of a rather wet dough that often leave passers-by mystified as to what she is selling.
Katie cooks the doughnuts only as they are ordered, which, she says, makes all the difference.
It makes the sale of doughnuts slower and more complicated, but, she says: “Cooking them on site and serving them warm and fresh takes them to another level.”
And it means customers get to see “the magic happen”. “It’s amazing,” Katie says. “You drop it and it sinks and then it comes to the surface and the magic starts to happen. As the heat increases it pushes the air in the dough and it sort of stretches. It’s like a crackling lava surface where the dough is expanding.”
Although each one is the same weight within one gram, every doughnut is different.
“They come out all different shapes and sizes according to how they are dropped into the fat [rice bran oil],’’ Katie says.
It’s these irregularities that prompted a friend, Tania Brookes, to come up with the name Yeastie Beasties for the business. Friends hated or loved it in equal proportions, so Katie went for a safer name — but not for long.
“It was so boring,” she says. “And I thought ‘No, I just love the name Yeastie Beasties’.”
Before her debut at last summer’s Cygnet Folk Festival, Katie thoroughly researched doughnuts by “following a little path through different blogs and articles” on the internet.
Just about every culture has a doughnut. Spain has churros, India balushahi, Germany berliners, Turkey and Greece loukoumades, and the Netherlands olliebollen.
Katie suspects the Dutch introduced the doughnut far and wide through the Dutch East India Company.
“I think they took their doughnuts to many places and they have become part of the culture there,” she says.
“I think my recipe originally was Dutch-American, but it has become my recipe.”
The modifications she has made include the fermentation time, the level of hydration, and the handling of the sourdough.
“People often tell me this is just like the doughnut from their country — and that happens with many different countries,” Katie says.
She makes only three flavours. There is a glazed lemon drizzle (a crackly surface over a pull-apart springy interior), a cinnamon sugar, and a jam doughnut — which might be raspberry, strawberry or Huon Valley berry jam. Why so few flavours? “I don’t think people need more,” Katie says, adding that her space is limited, and that if she had more than one glazed doughnut “it would get very messy”.
Katie met her husband Chris, who comes from Perth, WA, when she was travelling here. They returned to her native Cornwall, where she taught printmaking at university.
She says it’s not such a complete change going from print to doughnuts.
“They are both very much a process,” Katie says. “I find I am very satisfied by doughnutmaking, and it produces less waste than printmaking.”
Katie and Chris were seeking a lifestyle change when, “in the outback of Cornwall”, a woman in a shop told her to “look at Cygnet, you will love Cygnet”. Six months later they, and their then one-year-old son Jack, were on the plane.
In fact they settled at Geeveston five years ago, and they now have a second son, two-year-old Ben.
Apart from the sugar, Katie sources all the ingredients for “what is essentially a rich bread dough” locally. She uses Callington Mill flour, Tasman Sea Salt, eggs from her own chooks, and duck eggs from Quackalot at Geeveston.
You will find Yeastie Beasties at the Hobart Twilight, the Cygnet, Franklin and Geeveston markets, the Taste of the Huon, Cygnet Folk Festival, Huon Show, Huon Small Farm Expo, and the Falls and Circus festivals.