Some doughnuts are just better than others. Elle Cowan’s passionfruit donut proves my point. I tried more than one of her SoDo Donuts for the first time at the Gilman Wine Block’s First Friday party. That was on a rainy winter night more than a year ago. But I still remember biting into it and tasting the tart burst of passionfruit inside. That cream-filled doughnut also increased my interest in passionfruit desserts generally.
When I spoke with Cowan on her day off from bringing donut batches to the people, she told me that the passionfruit donut quickly became one of her pop-up’s signature flavors. “My friend gives me passionfruit from his backyard,” she noted. Cowan supplements it with a purée but refrains from making it too sweet, saying, “My palate leans either sour and acidic or I’m leaning salty.” She uses salt or acidic flavors in all of her glazes.
Trained as a pastry chef, Cowan uses a sourdough starter as the base of her batches. Long before she started SoDo, the chef was working in Thailand. She and her pastry team were in charge of making donuts for a café and restaurant. When she started there, the kitchen was making bombelini. “One of my first missions was to change the donut because we were shaping it in the morning,” she recalled. The staff would start making them around 7am, and the café would open at 8am, but the donuts wouldn’t be ready until 11am.
Cowan’s practical solution was to use sourdough the day before. “We could rest it, and we were already doing a pre-ferment in the bombelini,” she explained. “We could actually develop the flavor and the complexity more, and the strength of the dough.” But sourdough is tricky to work with because it’s changeable. “We could mix the same dough every single day, but it depends on the temperature of the flour and when you add the milk,” she said. “It depends on the temperature of the room and the humidity. That’s why people don’t make sourdough donuts, because it is a really big challenge.”
It took Cowan four to five months to perfect the recipe. She thought about using whole eggs versus only yolks and eventually arrived at the right fat ratio and the right amount of starter. Her time in Thailand also influenced the flavors she incorporates into the dough. Every summer, she makes a green mango fritter. In a recent post, she wrote, “Green mangoes are perfect for frying. They’re starchy, tart and hold their shape beautifully, creating little pockets of bright, tangy fruit throughout the donut.”
“I had this concept in my brain of, green mango could be like green apple,” she said. First, the chef made it as a hand pie, serving it with mascarpone ice cream and an olive oil caramel. “It was like a caramel apple, so doing it as a fritter makes so much sense,” Cowan pointed out.
Since day one, SoDo has been making a kaya jam and coffee donut. It’s filled with a caramelized coconut pandan custard and coated with a coffee glaze. “We’re caramelizing sugar, and adding it to the base,” Cowan said. “It’s basically eggs, coconut milk and pandan.” When the chef first learned how to make kaya in Thailand, she cut the amount of sugar by half. “There’s one brand out there that makes kaya, but it’s always a little too sweet for me,” she noted.
After operating as a pop-up for four years, SoDo opened this past spring as a weekend cafe at Hammerling Wines. Customers who’ve been asking Cowan for coffee with their donuts have had their prayers answered. “Being able to do drinks is allowing me to meet my margins better,” she observed. It’s also a test run to see if a SoDo will work as its own brick and mortar. As a solo business owner, Cowan felt that she needed to create a more sustainable model, noting, “And I’m still working on that.”
SoDo Donuts at Hammerling Wines, 1350 Fifth St., Berkeley. IG: @sododonuts.
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