Making doughnuts at home?

You need dough, hot oil and patience

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, D.C., 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.

6 steps to better doughnuts

Homemade doughnuts can become more than an occasional treat - once you know the tricks of the trade.

FRYING (AND OIL): Sometimes the amount of oil that is needed for frying doughnuts - or anything else - can seem intimidating, especially when you aren’t sure what to do with it when you’re finished frying. The simple answer is that you can reuse the oil for future frying, usually several times, if it’s properly stored.

First, be sure to keep the original container; if you don’t have it anymore, then you can use a large glass jar with a lid. After you’ve finished frying, remove any large bits of fried debris, cover the pot, and let the oil cool back down to room temperature. Place a funnel lined with cheesecloth or a coffee filter on top of the oil container and strain the oil into it. Seal and store in a cool, dark place or, in hot weather, in the refrigerator. To dispose of the cooking oil, chill it in the refrigerator so it solidifies, then discard with your garbage.

FREEZING: You can freeze both the dough and the fried, unglazed doughnuts. For the dough, cut out the doughnuts, let them proof (along with any scraps), place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and freeze until solid, then store in the freezer in plastic ziptop bags. Let them defrost completely at room temperature before frying. For the cooked doughnuts, follow the same freezing process, then defrost fully and microwave on LOW for 10 seconds before eating.

STORING: It’s not often you hear this, but glazed doughnuts are best kept in the open air to keep them from weeping or becoming soggy. Doughnuts can hang