The manager immediately produced a foot-long plastic stick from a pocket on his uniform apron after I gladly accepted the treat. This, he told me, was the “doughnut wand.”

I stifled my smirks, but watching Norman reach over the conveyor belt, I realized how useful such a wand could be. He handles hundreds of doughnuts an hour – thousands a day – and cannot repeatedly stop to wash their sticky residue from his fingertips as he goes about his paces. Plastic gloves would likewise be inadequate for him, since he must shift from serving customers to exchanging their money to working the production line several times over the course of only a few minutes. Sanitation laws require that a worker don new gloves every time he or she changes duties, which Norman would obviously find impractical, so an alternative is needed.

Fortunately, the wand gives him the manipulative ability he needs with none of the muss and fuss. Put simply, the wand works.

Norman skewered an anonymous doughnut through its center with his wand, raising this chosen pastry high above its identical siblings. Small wisps of still-cooling sugar dangled from the far edges and, as the manager pivoted to deposit the doughnut in my hands, the ghostly threads of crystallized glaze drifted in the slight breeze.

I was unprepared for the almost crispy surface of the doughnut when I tenderly bit into it. This texture vanishes within hours, Norman informs me, since any trace of moisture from surrounding air will soon breach the glaze seal and begin turning the dough stale.

Popular culinary science geek Alton Brown would quickly tell me that’s because the sugar in the glaze is hygroscopic – water molecules have an almost magnetic attraction to sugar molecules. The crispy coat created during the doughnut’s frying phase swiftly becomes waterlogged on a microscopic level, ruining the uniquely satisfying crunch. Only if Krispy Kreme hermetically sealed its fresh doughnuts in vacuum packs could this experience be preserved and mass-marketed.

Once the crisp surface gave way, vanilla’s trademark pungency smothered my palate. This was no elementary cakey sweetness, though, but a mature flavor shaded with the cultured ripeness of bread yeast.

I chewed. I swallowed. I relished the way the morsel left a thick parting kiss of glaze on my tongue as it bade farewell. Hurried repetition of this torrid affair doomed the remaining doughnut to a meager thirty seconds of existence.

Veni, vidi, vescor: Caesar himself could never have conquered a pastry more decisively.

Hundreds more like that single, succulent sample would leave the production line that day. Some would leave toted proudly in wax-paper baggies while others would exit the store in boxes marshaled as platoons of a dozen, trucked to supermarkets and gas stations dotting the region. Watching over them all, Norman the manager would be responsible for each and every one of their births and their upbringings, sending the most mature out into the great wide world only when they were ready.

He was the omniscient, paternalistic doughnut master; the triumph sealed beneath their golden glaze was his to savor.

As I left the store licking the last traces of sugar from my lips, for just a moment, I was sharing in Norman’s triumph. They say sweet is the smell of success, but after my morning at Raleigh’s Krispy Kreme store, I’d have to say it tastes pretty darned sweet, too.

The entire trip from infant dough ring to mature, ready-to-eat doughnut takes about three minutes. Plastic gloved employees pluck the finished product from the conveyor belt – after it has briefly swept through a chilled-air box for glaze hardening – and stack the doughnuts, twelve at a time, in the trademark green polka-dot cartons for sale.

This is, of course, assuming Original Glazed are the order of the day.

One tub like this can fill 1,100 doughnuts.

Krispy Kreme’s other doughnut varieties can require several additional steps of manufacture before they can be boxed. Powdered doughnuts have to be rolled in confectioner’s sugar, jelly doughnuts must be injected with their fruity goo, chocolate-iced doughnuts need further coatings of flavored glazes, and so on. Norman tells me he harbors a niggling resentment for these other varieties because they can be so complicated to make.

For a man whose job depends on meeting hourly quotas, perhaps it’s no surprise the plain old doughnut is his favorite.

I spotted three clear plastic tubs looming behind Norman against one of the factory walls, each four-foot-tall tub apparently filled with some brightly colored substance. One was a fluorescent yellow, one was a deep burgundy red, and the third was a strange greenish-beige. On first glance, the tubs looked more like props from a 1950s mad scientist flick than foodservice equipment, a conclusion compounded by the contents’ unnaturally vivid coloring. Tangled tentacles of narrow hoses sprouted from the bottom of the tubs and ended with a pistol-like attachment. I couldn’t contain my natural newshound curiosity about the potential extraterrestrial experiments Norman might be conducting, so I asked him to explain their purpose.

“Them? Those’r the fillins.”

Lemon, raspberry, apple! It made sense now; I had simply never seen the innards of a jelly doughnut in this kind of setting before. I’m used to getting a glimpse of lemon custard peeping out from what I call the “doughnut navel,” not brimming from a tall tub suspended on a wall. The pistol hoses’ job was now obvious, too – workers shoot the fillings into the doughnut shells with pulls of an air-powered trigger.

I only wish Krispy Kreme’s food technicians didn’t choose to dye the goo with such vivid colorants. The lemon alone probably would get me arrested at an airport on nuclear terrorism charges, while the apple seemed better suited to fill a flu sufferer’s used tissues than doughnuts. Only the raspberry goo – which company marketers term “thick and zesty” – appears fairly normal and could plausibly derived from an actual fruit growing in an actual garden somewhere.

(Ironically, raspberry flavor is among the oldest synthetic tastes known to food chemists, I have since learned. Named isobutyl formate, artificial raspberry was invented in the late nineteenth century not long after the first fake flavoring, artificial vanilla.)

Norman concluded the tour with an offer to pluck a newly glazed doughnut straight off the conveyor belt.

How relieved I was that he finally gave me the chance! A doughnut off the production line is the hottest, freshest doughnut known to nature. Few would decline such an offer, but I had not dared take the initiative for fear of appearing gauche. It seemed sort of like touching a pregnant mother’s belly – you know you really want to, but you restrain yourself lest you literally be restrained with a court order.

And no matter how strong my impulse just to cop a doughnut (pun intended) straight from the conveyor, stronger still that morning was my aversion to being “escorted” from the factory under the watch of the linebacker-esque batter mixer operator.

Tomorrow: Betcha can’t eat just one.

I noticed the customers reacting to my sudden ascension from their ranks. Some gave me a suspicious look, as if to accuse me of cutting the line. Others threw me worried glances, perhaps wondering what the microphone-toting guy not wearing the uniform (white smock, plastic gloves, and retro white paper Krispy Kreme hat) was about to do to their food.

Norman pushed us further into the inner workings of the factory, raising his voice steadily louder over the noisy machinery. Workers rolled past us tall racks of trays and rotund tanks of batter, while mouth-watering scents wafted up from the conveyor belts.

I must pause here for a moment to explain: when that smell hits one’s nostrils, it is no delicate encounter. It hammers.

There is almost no similar fragrance to which I can relate the experience. Everyone who has opened a box of doughnuts or pried open one of those glass cases in the supermarket knows what Krispy Kreme smells like, but imagine amplifying the intensity by a factor of twelve. “Sweet” in this environment steps out of the conceptual world and becomes an entity with which one can practically shake hands. I am fortunately not diabetic, for this sudden onslaught of aromas surely can trigger sugar comas.

The manager pointed out the various stages to the doughnut manufacturing process as I watched, entranced.

The classic Krispy Kreme Original Glazed doughnut begins life as a pale yellow batter the consistency of mousse. Yeasted like bread dough, the batter gets kneaded by the fearsome-looking dough hooks of an industrial mixer before it is piped into an extruder.

This machine is driven with jets of compressed air that force out the squishy batter into uniform rings eight at a time. When the rings come out, though, they are still far from resembling the final product. They are only about as thick a finger and scarcely two inches in diameter, and their color is the same milky yellow as its pre-kneaded progenitor.

A short trip through the proofer solves this matter. The proofer is a mysterious-looking metal tower which devours the ringlets at one end and spits out full-sized doughnuts at the other. Inside, moist air warmed to slightly above 80 degrees encourages the yeast to live its life to the fullest, greedily wolfing down the batter’s sugars and heartily belching out carbon dioxide. The gas, of course, fluffs up the dense ringlet into the sponge-like texture characteristic of a doughnut, readying the pastry for its adventure in the fryer.

Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal… I couldn’t help humming the first few bars of this old folk tune when Norman led me past the yards-long river of hot oil forming the fryer. After tumbling out of the proofer, doughnuts float their way down the oil like so many logs down a backcountry canal. A persistent crackle of frying dough propels each ring down the long oil tray, a bubbling wake trailing. The bottom halves of the doughnuts turn progressively richer golden-brown with each yard traveled, and the vanilla aroma of the frying batter blankets the factory floor.

About halfway down the length of the tray, a device perched over the canal flips the doughnuts onto their backs. The remaining raw, risen dough fries until a rotating mesh screen tugs the doughnuts from the river onto another conveyor belt.

Picture how dozens of tanks landing on the Normandy beaches in 1944 must have looked to the Germans. Scores of immense tank treads rising from the surf, rolling onto the dry sand, progressing up the coastline with hulking precision – minus the dread, death, and destruction, that scene couldn’t have been too distant from what I saw at this phase in the factory.

By now, the doughnuts look practically finished. They are fully sized and fully cooked, but they still lack the essential quality that sets them apart from their pastry cousins: glaze. The satin suit of sugar each Krispy Kreme wears is added by quickly passing each ring beneath a waterfall of liquid glaze. An open vat so large that Oscar the Grouch would have proudly called it home sits to the right of the conveyor belt, holding gallons of milky white glaze heated to the lukewarm temperature necessary to maintain its fluid state. Workers thrust a flexible hose deep into the vat with two hands and attach the free end to a nozzle protruding from a brass tube arced over the conveyor belt. This arch is perforated along its length with small spigots from which the pumped glaze gushes to form a solid-looking white curtain. The doughnuts pass behind this curtain four or five at a time, emerging on the other side proudly enrobed in a soft, sweet sheen.

I have never visited New York’s renowned Niagara Falls. Though I am told the sight of 30 million gallons of water per minute tumbling over its cliffs are a grandeur unparalleled, I seriously doubt the famed tourist trap can rival the Krispy Kreme glaze waterfall in sirenic power. Sunlight streaming through the factory windows lights up each ripple in the glaze with a relentlessly seductive dance of sparkles and glimmers; each doughnut, having just traveled through the sugar shower, catches my eye and tempts me with molten opalescence.

This is where the majesty and the legend of the Original Glazed doughnut are born.

Tomorrow: …Plus shipping and handling.