At 5:30 a.m. on a recent Wednesday, Emma Slater was almost two hours into her workday. The baker had left her Charlotte home around 3:15 a.m. headed for Champion Comics and Coffee in Williston, where she rents the shop's kitchen for her Twisted Halo doughnut business.
By the time this reporter dragged herself out of bed, it was way past "time to make the doughnuts," and Slater, 27, had already checked several items off her to-do list.
Unlike the bleary-eyed Dunkin' Donuts baker in the 1980s commercials that coined that phrase, Slater was bright-eyed as she stirred a pot of batter on the stove for the style of doughnuts she calls churros. Soft mounds of rich brioche dough waited to be shaped into featherlight yeasted doughnuts.
Slater's predawn energy might be credited to the multiple espresso shots she consumes daily — up to 10 during the busy summer season, she said.
The winter is relatively slow for Slater, whose freshly fried doughnuts have become a favorite at Burlington's South End Get Down and the Shelburne and Winooski farmers markets since she launched in September 2021. Currently, she stocks the bakery case at Champion — where customers can also pick up Friday and weekend preorders — and makes Sunday deliveries to Charlotte's Old Brick Store.
Slater raises the bar for freshness. All of her doughnuts are made with Nitty Gritty Grain flour grown in Charlotte. "You can see the mill date on the bag," she said. "It smells like fresh wheat." At events, every doughnut is piped or hand-shaped and fried on-site, then handed to customers, usually within minutes.
"I'm kind of a snob about doughnuts," Slater said, as she deftly piped rings of churro dough. "I think they should always be eaten hot, fresh out of the fryer."
During the summer, fans wait in line to pay $5 a piece for Twisted Halo's ethereally light and crisp yet custardy churros (actually egg-rich, French-style crullers), which Slater dusts with cinnamon sugar or glazes with dark chocolate. She also makes pillowy raised doughnuts filled with scratch-made lemon curd or strawberry jelly and exceptionally tender sour cream cake doughnuts glossy with maple or local berry icing.
Frying on-site is no small feat. Slater quipped that her side hustle is rewiring after frequent equipment meltdowns. The team once made 350 doughnuts in an improvised setup with two lobster pots on a flattop grill.
Last May through October, Slater and her small team spent frenetic weekends bouncing between venues to produce a total of 8,000 doughnuts. She went to bed at 6 p.m. and woke at midnight, obsessively checking forecasts to adjust dough prep time for temperature and humidity. This year, she won't sell at Winooski's market — a decision she said she made reluctantly.
Slater never planned a culinary career, although she enjoyed baking at home and as a teen employee of the Old Brick Store. In college, she studied linguistics with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. A speaker of French, Farsi and Arabic, she taught in Algeria in 2019 with the promise of a Fulbright Program English teaching assistantship for the following year.
When the pandemic hit, Slater came home, followed eventually by her Algerian husband. Her "command of a really niche dialect of Arabic" was not suited to local employment, she said, so she cobbled together jobs baking and as a barista.
Making doughnuts for a party inspired her to launch Twisted Halo. She hasn't yet achieved her goal of financial stability but said she's having fun along the way.
"If I had known how difficult doughnuts were, I would have picked something else," she said, only half-joking.
At about 7:30 a.m., Al Senecal of Essex Junction popped into the still-closed Champion Comics. Slater hadn't yet started frying the day's doughnuts, but she pulled him an Americano and hesitantly agreed to give him a warmed, day-old churro for free.
Senecal returned about 20 minutes later to tell the baker how "amazing" the doughnut was. "If that's day-old," he said, "I'm coming back for some fresh ones."