a donutBismarck
also: bismark · jelly donut · filled donut · Berliner
Upper Midwest word. Elsewhere you ask for a jelly.
A round raised donut with no hole, fried, then injected with fruit preserve, custard or cream and finished in sugar or icing.
The story Cited · wp-jelly-doughnut
The filled fried dough is older than the ring by centuries. A recipe for Gefüllte Krapfen — stuffed fried dough cakes — is in Küchenmeisterei, printed in Nuremberg in 1485, and the form spread across Europe: the German Berliner, the Polish pączki, the Jewish sufganiyah, the Italian bombolone. In parts of Germany the same pastry is a Pfannkuchen, which means pancake everywhere else in the country and causes exactly the trouble you would expect.
Bismarcks and Berlin doughnuts turn up in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and the United States. In the Upper Midwest the name stuck hard enough that a case label will say Bismarck and nothing else.
How it is done Cited · wp-jelly-doughnut
No hole: round the dough, proof it, fry it so a pale belt runs around the middle where it floated, then fill from the side and dust or ice.
Today Cited · wp-jelly-doughnut
A jelly donut is the one most likely to be filled to order in a shop that cares, and filled the night before everywhere else.
The particulars
| dough | yeast |
|---|---|
| finish | filled |
| region | The Upper Midwest, The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
On the label
| what was read | usda |
|---|---|
| pepper or chile | ? |
| vinegar | ? |
| butter or oil | ? |
| tomato | ? |
| sugar | ? |
| soy donut | ? |
| mustard | ? |
| Scoville | nobody publishes one for this donut |
Read from this page, 2026-09-17. USDA SR Legacy 172759, "Doughnuts, yeast-leavened, with jelly filling", published per 100 g and scaled here to the portion USDA itself lists as "doughnut oval (3-1/2" x 2-1/2")" — 85 g. No ingredient list is published for these generic rows, so the ingredient ranks are null. A shop's own donut is not this donut; this is the closest published measurement of the kind. Every donut measured is on the donut page.
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
- Jelly doughnut — Wikipedia · link
- Berliner (doughnut) — Wikipedia · link
- Doughnut — Wikipedia · link
- FoodData Central, SR Legacy — doughnut foods · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.