You can make the best doughnuts you’ll ever eat... and here’s how
It's easy to wax poetic about doughnuts. Whether they're light as air and melt in your mouth or caky and sugarcoated, ready to dunk, who can pass up a fresh one? The best are made by hand with wholesome ingredients. Even the ones that start with a mix – and those include your Krispy Kremes and Dunkin' Donuts – still taste pretty good, to be honest. It's fried dough.
For me, the perfect yeasted doughnut has been freshly fried, its brioche crumb offering the gentlest chew. It is completely coated with a glaze that is just set, and flecked with vanilla bean. The problem is getting to the bakery at exactly the right moment to snag it. So, here's the plan: DIY doughnuts.
As Tiffany MacIsaac, chefowner of Buttercream Bakeshop in Washington, says of tackling DIY doughnuts, "If a freshly fried, hot doughnut isn't something you consider a bonus, I don't even know what to say."
All right then. Let's make doughnuts. We think we've cracked the code to make it achievable for home cooks.
A yeasted or raised doughnut requires a properly rested dough, hot oil and patience. The dough itself needs enough fat, typically from eggs and butter, to help it expand in the hot oil, while the oil has to be hot enough – but not too hot – to achieve that golden-brown exterior. Patience is the glue that holds it all together, letting the dough properly rise to ensure the best texture and allowing the oil to heat up or cool down to the right temperature.
Even though making the dough is obviously the place to start, getting over the Fear/Hassle of Frying is often the first hurdle. Luckily, the executive pastry chef for the Neighborhood Restaurant Group has a plan for that.
"Clear everything off the counter before you start frying," says Naomi Gallego. "Dale Earnhardt doesn't have stuff on his dashboard."
Being accustomed to working in a professional kitchen, Gallego knows that preparation is key. When she recommends having a fire extinguisher handy, it is because she likes to avoid potential problems. Bottom line: Don't be afraid to fry doughnuts. It's less trouble than frying chicken, and it doesn't require a vat of oil or even an electric fryer. A couple of quarts of canola in a pot you have on hand – a wok works particularly well – and a thermometer is all that's standing between you and doughnut heaven. Moving on, or really, back to the beginning of the process: The day before you want to fry the doughnuts you'll need to make the dough, so it can ferment slowly in the refrigerator. Can it take as little as six hours? Yes. But longer is better.
The dough itself, based on a classic brioche recipe of mostly flour, eggs and butter, will come together in just 30 minutes – and that includes 15 minutes for the yeast to proof in warm milk. Your first brush with patience, and a twinge of concern, will come in this step, as the butter is added in three parts to the flour, yeast, vanilla bean scrapings and eggs already in the bowl of a sturdy stand mixer. The mixture will seem too wet, almost like a cake batter. Do not lose heart. Let the machine, fitted with a dough hook, do its magic.
After 10 minutes, aided by scraping the bowl a few times, that soggy mass will meld into a supple, slightly sticky ball.
"When that dough comes together, it's a thing of beauty," Gallego says.
Patience will again be a virtue when it's time to proof, or ferment, the dough. There are a lot of variables, she says: "Humidity, the type of flour, the temperature in your kitchen – you may not always get exactly the same result every time, but sometimes it's the variables that make the most delicious doughnut. I want my doughnuts to look handmade, not like they came out of a machine."
Fermenting yeasted dough requires little supervision. The just-mixed dough rests for about 30 minutes in an oiled bowl at room temperature – covered with plastic wrap to keep a skin from forming – and refrigerated overnight, up to 15 hours. That slow, chilled fermentation is crucial to the process for doughnuts that will puff up and have an evenly tender interior.
The next morning, allow the chilled dough to rest for a few minutes before rolling and cutting. For home cooks, Gallego recommends rolling the dough into a rectangle and then using a square cutter. This will yield fewer scraps (rerolling is not optimal for this doughnut dough) – although some mighty tasty spinoffs can be created with them, as you'll see in the accompanying recipe.
The final proof can, alas, take an hour or two – and that's sad only because you're so close to having fresh doughnuts, you can almost taste them. Your commitment to patience will pay off because a properly proofed doughnut – it should hold a slight indentation when gently pressed and just about double its height – yields a light result when fried. So get up early, cut the doughnuts and then go have some coffee and check your news feed.
Both Gallego and MacIsaac offer a trick or two for home cooks that can help get those yeasty darlings fried just right:
Let the doughnuts rise on individual squares of greased parchment paper. Once it's time to fry, you can slide both the doughnut and its parchment into the hot oil, and then remove the paper with a pair of tongs. That way the doughnut will hold its shape; otherwise, trying to move it with a spatula might deflate it before it hits the oil. And the reason a wok works so well is that its wide expanse gives the frying doughnuts room to expand, yet its belly is shallow enough for doughnuts to slip in and be easily retrieved.
You'll need a thermometer – preferably one that clips to the side of the pot – so that you can keep an eye on the oil temperature. While Gallego typically fries doughnuts at 350 degrees, MacIsaac prefers to heat her oil to a maximum of 340, which will drop about 10 degrees after she adds a batch of doughnuts; this keeps her frying oil temperature in the 320to 330-degree range.