Baking Bouchon - Recipe 34: Sugared Doughnuts

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I'm over here doing my happy dance because I overcame my fear of frying.  I made doughnuts and I didn't burn my house down.  Dance, dance, dance.

To be completely honest, doughnuts don't really do it for me.  I've never woken up in the morning and been like "somebody go get me a doughnut."  I've never been to a bakery and seen a doughnut sitting next to a muffin or a scone and said "I'll take that doughnut."  Don't get me wrong, I'll eat it but I'd rather have some pancakes or a waffle or french toast if I'm going to eat something sweet for breakfast.  Maybe because they come with syrup.  Maybe if doughnuts were accompanied by some sort of dipping sauce I'd be more tempted.

If I do eat a doughnut, it's not the glazed kind.  I've never understood the glazed doughnut thing.  It's just sticky and too sweet.  I like cake doughnuts - because it's like eating cake for breakfast.  If it's got cinnamon powdered sugar on it, that's even better.  I also like those doughnuts that are filled with pudding but under no circumstances do I want one filled with jelly.  I have enough issues with jelly.

These guys are made with brioche dough which we're all familiar with from making Sticky Buns and Hot Cross Buns.  It's a buttery yeasted dough which, apparently, isn't how all doughnuts are made.  This version of the brioche dough has less butter in it than the ones I made before because Thomas says that you don't need as much richness when you're making something that will be deep-fried.  True.

The dough comes together really easily, you pretty much just put everything in a bowl (flour, yeast, sugar, salt, milk, eggs and vanilla bean paste), mix it together and knead it with the dough hook on your mixer forever... 30 minutes.  Then you add the butter and mix it until it just comes together.

The dough rises in the refrigerator overnight which I was originally annoyed by until I remembered that you eat doughnuts for breakfast and I guess it's kind of convenient that you make this ahead of time and then you can fry them up in the morning.  I ate these for dessert because I made them during the week and I am NOT getting up early on a weekday to fry doughnuts for breakfast.  I've made a lot of sacrifices for good food, but even I have my limits.

Once the dough rises overnight, you roll it out and use 2 circle cutters to cut out big circles, then small circles in the middle of the big circle to create the doughnut shape.  Then you let them proof for a couple of hours.

The instructions in this recipe actually say "the holes can be proofed and fried, or discarded."  Are you freakin' kidding me?  Who would throw away doughnut holes?  In fact, I took all the scraps and rolled them out again and made more holes.  They weren't as perfectly round as the original holes but they tasted just as good.  The holes were my favorite part because I got to pretend like I wasn't eating a whole doughnut even if I did eat 5 holes.

Now comes the part that had me wracked with fear.  You see, frying freaks me out.  It freaked me out when we CA made fried chicken for Chicken & Waffles and it freaked me out today.  I don't even have any more examples to give you because I don't fry things... except turkeys on Thanksgiving, but CA and my dad are in charge of that.  It's too easy to screw up fried food.  You can get the temperature too high and burn the crap out of it while the inside is still raw.  You can get the temperature too low and you get an oily mess.  You can also set fire to yourself, your kitchen and your whole freakin' house.  Frying is scary.

However, the frying of these doughnuts went very well.  No drama, no overheating, no underheating, no fires.  I was full-on OCD about the oil temperature and the timer but I think it was justified and totally worth it because these doughnuts fried up just fine.

After frying, these warm guys get tossed in vanilla sugar.  I've been making vanilla sugar for months but I've never used it on anything before.  I read somewhere once that you should take all our used vanilla beans and store them in a container with sugar.  Over time the bean pods flavor the sugar.  I've been doing that for a while now but haven't had an opportunity to use any of the sugar until now.  It smells great and I think added a little extra something to the doughnuts as opposed to plain sugar.

My only disappointment with these doughnuts was that the sugar didn't stick to them all that well.  It stuck for the pictures, but by the next day it had pretty much fallen off.  Booo.

I thought these doughnuts were pretty delicious... for doughnuts.  Except that I don't really have much of a point of reference because I don't eat doughnuts enough to know what a really amazing one should taste like.  CA really liked them but thought they were a little heavier than regular doughnuts.  I think he also would have been cool with some glaze.

Julie