And if they happen to be filled with jam, so much the better! Homemade yeast doughnuts are so light they practically float on air, which makes it possible for me to inhale about half a dozen on a good day. Don’t try that at home, kids. I’m a professional. Good yeast doughnuts start with a […]
READ ONOnce upon a time, superfine sugar was a fixture of the sweetener section of every grocery store. That’s before the shelves came to be crowded with a.) dozens of artificial sweetener products and b.) dozens of “natural” and “raw” sugar products. Between the forward-looking diet crowd and the backward-looking natural foods crowd, a pastry baker […]
READ ONA few emails have come in about that, and the answer is yes. You can bake yeast doughnuts in a hot oven, but I’ll tell you now that a baked doughnut is not even close to the same experience as a fried doughnut. I strongly advise against it. The great misconception about frying is that […]
READ ONThere are two schools of thought on filling jelly doughnuts. Purists (often Austrians, who enjoy small and delicate krapfen during waltz season) frequently claim that the only proper way to fill a jelly doughnut is before frying. How does one do that? The answer: by cutting a thin round of dough, laying a spoonful of […]
READ ONTrained pastry chefs are taught elaborate techniques for fashioning pastry bags out of folded paper. I admire that, but I also have things to do and places to go. So when I need to do a little piping, say of jam into a doughnut, I go the pre-fab route. The basic components, tips and couplers, […]
READ ONFor many people the word Berliner conjures up images of JFK’s famous gaffe by the Berlin wall in 1963, where, intending to say “I am a resident of Berlin” (Ich bin ein Berliner) he actually said “I am a jelly doughnut”. The quote goes like this: All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens […]
READ ONRegular reader and commenter Gerhard, sounding an awful lot like yours truly, writes in with this: First, it’s Berliner, not Berlinen (you need an “r” at the end). Here in Vienna we call them Krapfen, and they are most popular between January and March (the Christian period of fasting). However it is possible to find […]
READ ONWould you believe nobody really knows it? The reason, because jelly doughnuts are a relatively recent addition to the doughnut case. Prior to their becoming a staple of the stand-up Dunkin’ box, they were considered to be very different things and went by many different names. Most of them German. They’ve been called Berliners, Pfannkuchen, […]
READ ONThough doughnut allegiances were never formally declared after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, there does seem to be North-South divide when it comes to doughnuts styles. I submit as evidence Krispy Kreme, a chain out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which specializes in yeast doughnuts. Dunkin’ Doughnuts, which began in Quincy, Massachusetts, was […]
READ ONThey’re doughnuts leavened with yeast. Think of them as sort of the America League of doughnuts. The National League is made up of cake doughnuts, which are leavened chemically, usually with baking powder. The more interesting question is: what are raised doughnuts related to? If you’d like to test your baking mettle, have a look […]
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