As Wall Street has recently been discovering, most of the hype about Krispy Kreme doughnuts was just that – hype. I could have told you that years ago. Krispy Kreme is a decent product, but it’s never been the life-altering experience that its most ardent partisans have claimed it to be. I realize them’s fightin’ words for some people, but the vociferousness of their response just proves my point: Like all cult brands, Krispy Kreme is overrated by its cult.

But Krispy Kreme does have one great thing going for it: the “Hot Doughnuts Now” neon sign hanging in the front window of each store, which lights up when a fresh batch has just emerged from the kitchen. It’s not only a clever and charming sales ploy, but it also reminds us that doughnuts are best when fresh and hot.

This point was driven home recently when I visited a new local venue, Sammy’s Donut Corner (461 Sixth Ave., 212-924-2056), an annex of Sammy’s Chinese Noodle Shop. Granted, doughnuts and Chinese food seem like an odd pairing, but that just heightened my curiosity.

Alas, I found that Sammy’s is serving the same oversweetened gut bombs as every other corner doughnut shop in town (70 cents each, or $7.85 a dozen) – which makes sense, because it turns out they’re getting them from the same place as every other corner doughnut shop in town.

“They’re trucked in every morning from a company way uptown called Nightingale,” explained Sammy’s very friendly counter clerk. “They make doughnuts for shops all over the city. I used to work for them, and I’d always ask the cooks, ‘Where’s the doughnuts that just got made? I want the freshest one!’ Because they’re never quite as good as they are right then.”

Truer words were never spoken. But you don’t need to resort to Krispy Kreme, because the best way to get fresh doughnuts is the same as with most other foods: Make your own.

I probably wouldn’t have known how easy and fun homemade doughnuts can be if not for Irene Pasternack, a very cool high-school student who babysat for me when I was 7 years old. “Maybe we should cook something together,” she said one evening, flipping through my mom’s copy of “Joy of Cooking.” I saw she had just reached the doughnut section, so I said, “Let’s make doughnuts!”

Given the potential for disaster that comes when putting a 7-year-old in close proximity to a pot of hot oil, most babysitters would have told me to forget it. But Irene, on whom I’d already developed a sizable crush, cemented her lofty status in my heart by saying, “Okay – that sounds like fun.”

And it was. I can still remember how exciting it was to see the doughnuts frying in the oil, how satisfying it was to dust just the right amount of powdered sugar onto them afterward, and how delicious the final results turned out to be. I can also remember hearing my parents saying, “You did what?” when they got home, but they calmed down when they saw we hadn’t burned down the kitchen or even made a mess. And after taking a bite, they had to admit that our doughnuts were really good.

Irene and I didn’t know it, but we were participating in a culinary tradition that dates back about 400 years. According to John F. Mariani’s “Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink,” the Pilgrims learned about doughnuts during their stay in Holland in the early 1600s and then brought them to the New World, just as they did with waffles.

These early doughnuts, however, didn’t have holes. As described in Washington Irving’s “History of New York,” published in 1809, they were “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts or olykoeks [oily cakes] – a delicious kind of cake.”

So how did the holes come about? One particularly lyrical bit of folklore posits that they were created by a Maine seaman named Hanson Crockett Gregory, who supposedly impaled his wife’s doughnuts on the spokes of his ship’s steering wheel, so he could eat and steer at the same time. It’s a great story, but scholarly accounts say the hole was more likely the innovation of the Pennsylvania Dutch, who found the ring shape ideal for dunking in their coffee.

Broadly speaking, there are two doughnut categories: yeast and cake. Yeast doughnuts are richer and chewier, but cake doughnuts, which are leavened with baking powder, are the best place to start for the home cook (see accompanying recipe), because you don’t need a stand mixer with special attachments or have to wait for the dough to rise. And they’re still plenty delicious.

Whichever kind of doughnuts you choose to make, here are some tips to keep in mind: If possible, have all the ingredients at room temperature before mixing the dough. If the dough turns out too flimsy to handle, firm it up by chilling it briefly in the fridge before cutting it. You can find doughnut cutters at any decent housewares store, or use two biscuit cutters (a large one for the outer shape, a smaller one for the hole), or just break the dough into smallish blobs to create something akin to Dunkin’ Munchkins. Basic vegetable or corn oil is fine for the frying. And of course, eat them while they’re still hot.

The Doughnut’s Extended Family

As “The Oxford Companion to Food” rather prosaically puts it, “The frontier between doughnut and fritter is often indistinct, so it is difficult to give any list of doughnuts without wandering into disputed territory.”

And indeed, the list of doughnut-like confections goes way beyond fritters. There are also crullers, zeppoles, elephant ears, funnel cakes, hush puppies, beignets, doughboys (fried pizza dough, popular in Rhode Island), calas (fried rice dough, native to New Orleans), andagis and malasadas (Hawaiian doughnuts), rosquillas and churros (Spanish doughnuts), and sufganiyot (Israeli Chanukah doughnuts), among many others.

And there are all the slang terms for doughnuts. Depending on which part of America you’re in, for example, a jelly or cream-filled doughnut may be called a Bismarck, a Berlin (or Berliner), a long john, or a Chicago. And a particularly large, heavy doughnut is sometimes called a sinker, because it was too heavy to float in the frying oil.

The obvious lesson: By any name, we all love fried dough.

Time To Make the Doughnuts

This basic recipe for cake doughnuts, adapted from “Joy of Cooking,” is the one that Irene Pasternack and I made back when I was 7 years old.

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
5 tablespoons butter melted
4 cups sifted flour (sifted before measuring)
4 teaspoons double-acting baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
Vegetable oil for frying

1 In a medium bowl, beat the eggs and slowly add the sugar while continuing to beat. Then stir in the milk and melted butter.

2 In a large bowl, sift all the remaining ingredients together into a large bowl (yes, this means the flour will have been sifted twice). Add the wet milk-egg mixture and mix with a wooden spoon until a shaggy dough forms. Chill for five to 10 minutes in the refrigerator.

3 Place the dough on a floured surface. Using your floured hands or a floured rolling pin, shape the dough until it’s about half an inch thick. Cut the doughnuts with a floured cutter, and then reshape the scraps and hole dough to cut more.

4 Pour 1 1/2 inches of vegetable oil into a heavy pot or deep skillet and place over high heat until the oil registers 365 degrees on a candy thermometer. Dip a spatula in the oil and then use it to transfer the doughnuts into the oil, one at a time, taking care not to crowd the pan. Fry, turning once, until golden brown, about 1 1/2 to 2 minutes per side. Drain on paper towels and continue cooking additional batches. Top or toss doughnuts with powdered sugar, cinnamon sugar, or whatever you prefer. Serve while still hot.

Yield: about 18 doughnuts.