(upbeat music)
- Most doughnut shops make doughnuts at night
or early morning and then it's whatever they sell.
But we always want people to get the freshest doughnut
they can so we make them in small batches
throughout the day, so anytime you come,
you're gonna get a fresh doughnut.
The dough is the most important part of the doughnut
because it's the canvas for everything else.
Our doughnut kit that we make, this is our recipe,
the secret ingredients, and we have sort of a dry kit.
Certain things in this cannot mix,
otherwise the yeast is gonna start to activate.
So we mix these two right before.
Nothing else in the recipe changes except the liquid
and that varies depending on the weather,
the humidity, the temperature,
and so once you make the first batch,
you kind of tell like, maybe it needs a little more water,
maybe it needs a little less.
It kind of talks to you
and that just comes with experience.
Food is very linked to identity.
Being away from home is what brought me closer to it.
I was born and raised in Mexico City.
There's a lot of flavors that are echoed here
that always have a Latin influence.
This is our Mexican cinnamon tea.
It smells so good.
Mexican cinnamon is more floral and it's not spicy.
Like we tried it with different varieties
and so this variety just lends itself really beautifully.
Like you can't taste the cinnamon in the dough.
It's kind of like seasoning.
So now everything's gonna start to come together.
We're gonna add the butter.
My intention when I created these doughnuts
were that even if you were gonna have like a naked one,
it's delicious on its own.
And then we also use nutmeg
and we fresh-grind nutmeg for every single dough.
I feel like all those little things make a difference.
The dough is really nice and it's this beautiful
kind of elastic dough that's very smooth,
like nothing sticks to my hand.
And so now we're just gonna cover it let it proof.
The dough is going to rise.
The yeast is gonna make its magic.
That's gonna help in the texture.
It's gonna make it be sort of that fluffy,
but with a bite kind of thing that we're looking for.
You know, I always say I'm kind of like the anti-pastry chef
in many ways because I started my career in the savory side.
I'm not the most organized or the most methodical,
so I think that my approach is more instinctive.
There's a lot of stuff that just comes with the feeling,
with the touch, and the experience that you get.
That's something you just acquire.
Nobody that works here had experience
making doughnuts, including myself.
So once it's proofed,
then it's sort of where the hands go in.
When you make things by hand, there is just heart
that goes from beginning to end
into every single thing that you do.
There's intention, there's purpose.
It's all about the human connection.
You're kneading all these emotions,
you know, I really believe that.
The sheeter is a machine that mimics
someone rolling out and that just allows for us
to be consistent.
Every single one gets cut by someone.
The little hole gets cut by someone
and then each one gets hugged to try to make sure
that it's as round as possible.
Afterwards they get proofed again and then we fry it.
What we're looking for is a doughnut
that when you flip it, you see the white line.
That's very important.
If you touch it right after it comes out,
you could hear it almost like a light crunch,
and then inside it has a soft, but chewy interior.
Danny Boy is our salted brown butter caramel doughnut.
What we're gonna make now is the Danny drizzle.
We're gonna make a caramel with this.
So here we're gonna wet the sugar.
So we mix it and the reason you wanna wipe the edges
is so that none of the sugar start crystallizing
'cause then that can create like this big rock.
There are certain flavors that we have
that people come specifically for.
Danny Boy is one of them.
We're going to create a deep caramel.
Use your sight to see the color, but mostly your scent.
It's sort of like when you smell it,
you can almost taste it in the back of your throat.
It just needs to smell like deep caramel
and taste like the beginning hint of bitter.
Now it's ready.
I'm gonna put some cream.
Doesn't that smell amazing?
Nice and dark, everything is smooth.
And we're gonna add the butter.
So this is our brown butter.
We make brown butter for a lot of different things
and we have different depths of brown butter,
depending on what we're using it for,
so this is gonna be for our Danny drizzle.
Brown butter is butter that you cook for a very long time
over a slow flame and the milk solids start to caramelize.
It sort of separates like the water to the fat.
Depending on how far you take it,
it smells like different kind of nuts.
Sometimes it's like hazelnut, sometimes it's walnut.
Once it dissolves, then we're ready.
So now it has quite a lot of butter
so it's inevitable that it separates
so then all we do is just blend it together.
You have to be careful so you don't burn.
I have a bad caramel burn here from many years ago.
So now we're gonna make the glaze.
And even though like it has
like a lot of similar ingredients,
they both taste different and they add layers.
I always like to think of different ways to layer
so nothing is like one note.
This is warm now.
I'm just gonna add the brown butter to it.
The butter has melted.
It's like this beautiful brownish color.
Add the sugar.
So there's a word in Spanish called sazón,
which means seasoning, but seasoning is not just like,
oh, I put this little salt and pepper, whatever.
It's something that comes from within.
It's what makes that thing that you're making special.
We're gonna add confection or sugar and salt.
This is gonna kind of thicken it.
So you see it's all beautiful, silky.
There's no lumps.
It's not too thick, it's not too thin, it's velvety.
It kind of drips, you know, which is what you want.
I love that.
And those little specks that you see,
that's the brown butter.
Once everything is glazed, then we put the Dan Drizzle
on top and then we put some pecans
and we're gonna finish it with a little bit of Maldon salt.
When I did this one, it was one of those that I was like,
oh my god, I love this flavor.
So I gave it to my husband, his name is Danny,
and for some reason I wanted to record his reaction.
I was just so excited about it.
- Mm, mm.
- And he went like that, like a little kid.
That's why it is Danny Boy.
It's as sweet as he is.
We do a couple of different shapes at Fan-Fan,
so we do the classic.
We do a regular classic braid,
and then we do like a flower
that was inspired by making challah.
I'm Mexican and I'm Jewish
and we do like these round challahs for the Jewish New Year.
When you tie it together,
it just creates more of a bite to it.
This is our passion mango flowers.
I like to use a lot of tropical flavors and I love color.
I just like colorful things,
but I don't like to use colorings or artificial anything.
And then here,
'cause we want to kind of see the little grooves.
These are poppy seeds.
There's something almost very meditative about glazing.
Like when I'm glazing, you feel like the orchestra director,
you know, something like that.
There's just like a lot of movement
and it's not something that you can rush.
It's like the last point of quality control.
Mexican culture is very colorful
and I want that to be shown in the doughnuts.
I like things that are layered, whether that's in flavor,
whether that is just literal visual,
there's a lot of heart that goes into it,
a lot of struggles in personal ways
and it's sort of like this pent-up creativity
that I had for a long time.
This is a very personal exploration of my own.
These are called Fan-Fans.
Before opening the shop,
this is the first thing I knew I wanted to make.
So this is more inspired by an éclair.
First we make just a little hole.
This is just so that when we put the filling,
it doesn't squish it too much.
And so we have a couple of signature Fan-Fans
that we never take off the menu
and our most popular one by far is the guava and cheese.
This is a cream cheese filling
and this particular cream cheese
is from an Amish farm upstate New York.
This one is just so creamy
and now I'm gonna top it with a guava glaze.
It's so good.
I mean it's a classic combination
used in a lot of places in Latin America.
I'm literally drooling.
This is a walnut graham cracker, brown butter crumble.
It just adds a lot of texture.
Whenever I have it, I'm like, "Oh my god, that's good."
I need a minute.
- [Producer] Do you have a favorite?
(producer laughing)
- I just love it.
It's so good.
I'm gonna have one more bite.
(upbeat music)
Fan-Fan to me, I can't even describe it into words.
It's a very personal place.
It's about community.
It's sort of going back to the roots and the essence
of who I am, but also what I hope for the world for our son.
And often it's rooted in nostalgia.
I miss home a lot and that's my way of connecting to it.
We always try to have a very happy,
joyous music and have a joyous kitchen.
I feel you can taste that through the dough.
Even if it's for a moment, you're gonna be so happy.
So I feel like what we do has a big purpose.
It's to bring joy.