Today on Sugar Spun Run I'll be showing you how to make homemade donuts.
Hey everyone. It's Sam here and today I'm sharing my favorite recipe for homemade
yeast raised donuts. Now as far as yeast recipes go
this is a fairly simple recipe and I think you're really going to love it. Now
to get started, you are going to need 2 cups of all-purpose flour. Now you're
actually going to need a lot more flour than this for this recipe, you will need
about three and a half cups total, but for starters we're just going to be
using two cups. We're going to add this into the bowl of our stand mixer.
Along with the flour we're going to add 1/3 cup of granulated sugar, two and a half teaspoons
of instant yeast, and 3/4 teaspoon of salt. Stir these ingredients together until they're well combined.
Once you have your dry ingredients combined you are going to need 2/3 cup of whole milk and 6 tablespoons of
unsalted butter. Now we are going to melt these together. You can do this in either
a saucepan on the stovetop over medium-low heat, or you can do it in a
microwave. The important thing is that you melt these together and you heat
them to between 110 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Today I'm just going to be melting them
together in the microwave. I'm going to be using a quick read thermometer to
make sure the temperature is right, and you definitely want to make sure that
you're stirring the mixture pretty frequently. That way you're not just
hitting a pocket of a particularly warm or particularly cool milk and butter.
This is a little too hot so I'm going to give it a couple minutes, check the temperature
again, and then once it finally is between 110 and 115 we can go ahead and add it into our flour mixture.
The next thing you'll need is two large eggs, and I recommend using
room-temperature eggs. It's just going to help your ingredients combine a little
bit better since we're going to be adding them to a mixture that's already
going to be a little bit warm. Now along with eggs I like to add a little bit of
vanilla extract. I'm just going to be adding 3/4 teaspoon of vanilla extract.
This is optional, but I love the flavor it adds. I'm going to combine the eggs and the vanilla.
Now turn your mixer speed to low and we're going to add
these eggs into the mixture and we're going to stir until everything is nicely combined.
Now here I like to switch over to using my dough hook rather than using
my paddle attachment. So I'm just gonna swap that out go ahead and give the bowl a nice scrape while I'm at it.
Now if you remember, from the beginning of the
recipe, we've started with flour but it wasn't all that you need for these
donuts. We have another 1 and 1/2 cups that we are going to gradually add with
our mixer on low speed and we'll add this now.
I just want to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl because my dough hook
is having some trouble or reaching the flour on the sides.
Now when working with yeast I've found that the amount of flour you need to add
is never really an exact science, which can be a little bit frustrating. Rather
than saying you need three and a half cups of flour and that's that, I like to use a
little bit less flour and then we add as much as needed until we get a dough
that's the proper consistency. So for us what that's going to look like is a
dough that is smooth, a little bit elastic, a little bit tacky to the touch,
this right here is still too wet. So what we're going to do is we are going to add
additional flour, a little bit at a time with our mixer on low speed until we get the consistency we're looking for.
Now what this should look like is your dough
should be pulling away from the sides of the bowl. It should be forming a ball and
as I mentioned it should be tacky to the touch.
Generally when I'm making these donuts I find that I need to often add another
three to four tablespoons of flour, but that can vary depending on your own kitchen.
So here we have a nice soft ball of dough. It's pulling away from the
sides and it's a little bit tacky to the touch without sticking to my fingers.
We're in a pretty good place right now, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to
transfer this dough into a lightly oiled bowl.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and then we're going to let this sit in a warm place until the dough has doubled
in size. For me this usually takes about 30 minutes, but it can depend on the
temperature of your kitchen. One thing I like to do is I like to turn my oven on
and then put this on top of my oven, on my stovetop where it gets a little bit
warmer. Once your dough is risen we're gonna go ahead and turn this out onto a
clean lightly floured surface. Lightly dust your donut dough and we're going to
just roll this out to be about a half inch thick.
Now use a doughnut cutter, or in my case, two cookie cutters to cut out as many
doughnuts as you can from the dough. You want to keep your cuts as close together
as possible because you are going to want to take any scraps and regroup them
to make more donuts, but every time you do that your donuts are gonna get
a little bit messier looking. So as many cuts as possible out of the first roll. I
like to keep the donut holes that I cut out and use them as donut holes, just
cook them that way, but if you don't want to do that you can regroup them into the
other donut holes in the scraps we roll it out and cut out more donuts that way.
We'll transfer these doughnuts over to a wax paper lined baking sheet.
Now, ideally, once you have all of your donuts on your baking sheet you would cover them with
plastic wrap, let them sit in a warm spot until they've puffed up while you are
heating your oil. Turns out I don't have any plastic wrap in my pantry right now
so we're just going to cover them with a clean towel.
While our donuts are rising we're going to want to start heating our oil. it's gonna take some time for the
oil to get to the temperature we need. Now you're going to want to use a medium
sized heavy-bottomed saucepan, and you're going to want to fit it with a frying
thermometer, or a candy thermometer. Make sure that your thermometer is not
touching the bottom of the saucepan. We're gonna go ahead and take this over to our stove top.
We'll fill this saucepan about two inches deep with
vegetable oil and turn our heat to medium or just below medium. We're going
to want to heat this oil until it reaches 355 degrees Fahrenheit. Don't
crank up the heat to speed up the process or you're going to end up
burning your donuts. Now 355, or rather 350 - 350 five degrees Fahrenheit, is the
sweet spot for making these donuts. If your temperature is too low they're
going to end up greasy and undercooked. If the temperature is too high they're
going to end up burned on the outside and under cooked or raw in the
middle. You definitely don't want that. Take your time,
let the oil heat slowly, and besides our donuts need to be rising at this point anyway.
Once your oil has reached temperature and your donuts have risen,
we are going to carefully lower them one at a time into the oil.
Now these donuts are going to need to cook for about 45 seconds on
each side. You want them to just be a light golden brown. I always recommend
doing just one donut at a time because then after you do that first donut we
can cut it into it and make sure it's not raw in the center. Make sure it's
cooked properly and then we can adjust for the rest of our donuts.
Now after you cook one of your donuts the temperature of your oil is going to drop. Wait for it
to get back up to 350 five degrees Fahrenheit before cooking your next
donut. So I'm placing my donuts on a baking sheet that's lined with paper
towels. Lots of paper towels, and it has a cooling rack on it. I'm going to just let
some of the oil drain off for a couple seconds and then I'm going to carefully
take this donut and I'm going to dip it in powder,
I mean granulated sugar. Powdered sugar would work too, though you'll just want
to let you're donut cool a longer so it doesn't melt. I want to get both sides covered in sugar,
And return that to the cooling rack where I'm going to let it cool completely.
Today I'm just doing granulated sugar for my donut coating,
but granulated sugar and cinnamon mixed together would be great, or I also have a
very simple delicious butter glaze recipe on the blog that I'll include
below. That is also great on these donuts. While I recommend letting the donuts cool
completely so that you don't burn yourself, I can never wait that long. I
let them cool down just enough so I don't burn my fingertips and then that's when I dig in.
And that is how to make homemade yeast-raised
donuts. I hope you guys enjoyed this recipe and if you try it out please let
me know what you think. As you know I always love hearing from you. Thank you
guys so much for watching and I will see you next time.
That's good.