Preaching the Donut Gospel

Before I go into a recap of my weekend spent spreading the donut gospel to eager culinary students, just a couple fun announcements:

Remember the Driscoll’s berry dessert contest that I won? Part of my prize was the opportunity to have one of my recipes featured on Driscoll’s website. That recipe, Swirled Strawberry Cupcakes, is now up, in time for your Valentine’s Day baking. Go take a look!

Also, I was flattered to be interviewed by Poor Taste magazine, an irreverent online food periodical. If you’re curious, pop on over for a read and take a look at some of the other great articles.

Back to donuts: If you were following my Instagram the last couple weeks, you might have been wondering why I was going on a donut bender. The truth was that I was testing out donut recipes for a class I would be teaching at Tante Marie’s Cooking School, my pastry alma mater. Tante Marie’s offers weekend cooking courses alongside its professional culinary programs, and I agreed to teach a one-day class on donuts and muffins. Hence the sweet smell of deep fried sugar pervading my home. Above, some freshly made yeasted donuts (As I told my students, once you’ve eaten fresh donuts at home, you will forever turn your nose up at those horrible, stale, leaden specimens from inferior stores).

Rows of cinnamon-and-cardamon-sugar dusted cake donuts. My preference for yeasted or cake donuts varies per my mood at the moment, and I feel like certain flavors lend themselves better to each style (crumb-topped yeast donuts FTW), but I like how cake donuts are so easy to make. Almost too easy…the way the donuts came out of the frying pot and tumbled conveyor-belt like onto the cooling racks was a little scary. We rid ourselves of them as quickly as we could as they were too tempting to keep in the house.

Piped pâte à choux for French crullers, which turned out to be my favorite recipe. Although I’ve made cream puffs and profiteroles many times before, why had I never thought to deep fry the dough? Piped batter in a swirly circle means crullers, but you can pipe out straight lines for churros, or simply drop batter in heaping dollops that will puff up gloriously into beignets. This is the donut recipe I included at the end of the post because seriously, if you make one donut at home, this should be it.

Day of class! The students couldn’t wait to start making and frying donuts. I noticed that one of the bigger challenges they faced was keeping the oil at a consistent temperature. I like to fry my donuts around 350 degrees F – about a minute and half per side of a regular-sized donut seems to produce optimal results. If the oil is too hot, the donuts will of course burn. If the oil is not hot enough, it will take too long for the donuts to finish cooking, and they’ll absorb too much oil in the process and turn greasy and soggy. Once your oil reaches 350, remember to turn the heat down but not off – as you add donuts to the oil, they will cool the oil down. Periodically check the temperature to make sure it the oil hasn’t cooled down or overheated – sometimes in the excitement of frying it’s easy to forget.

Some beautifully fried ricotta fritters. I’d say they were a big hit. Fried cheese  = yes.

We also made muffins in class to contrast leavening methods. The students learned about baking soda and baking powder, and how lumpy batter is better than overmixed batter.  Among the successful muffin-making results: some adorable mini corn muffins.

I’m always impressed with how creative students can be.  A couple of students took some leftover pate a choux dough and piped out some eclairs that got drizzled with chocolate sauces. Some other students glazed their yeasted donuts with a chocolate ganache and then did some fancy marbling with melted white chocolate. Pretty!

I have to give a special mention to the youngest student in the class – this young lady who is already planning on becoming a pastry chef. She helped me demo the French crullers and did a beautiful job. Margo, you have a very bright future ahead of you and I look forward to trying out your pastries!

It’s always gratifying at the end to see all the students’ hard work on display – they usually can’t believe they’ve accomplished so much! At the beginning of the class, when everyone is hungry and raring to start cooking, it’s hard to convince them that by the end of the day there will be more food than they know what to do with. After the initial mad sampling of the first few donuts, people start slowing down. By the end we’re reminding people to take some more treats home to share with family and friends.

And there’s still leftovers  – breakfast for the professional culinary class next morning!

I’ll be teaching another class on Cookies Around the World in March at Tante Marie’s. See the class calendar for other classes – hope to see you at the school!