- Hey, I'm John Kanell,
and today on Preppy Kitchen,
we're making old fashioned donuts,
so let's get started.
First off, we're gonna be sifting three cups
or 360 grams of cake flour into a medium bowl.
And here's the deal,
these are cake donuts.
They're not a leavened yeast donut.
So the whole joy is having a delicious
melt-in-your-mouth crumb on the inside
with that crisp outer edge.
If you don't have cake flour,
you can still make these donuts.
All purpose flour will work fine.
Just use 3/4 of a cup of that
and add in about two tablespoons of cornstarch.
These donuts have to get nice and puffy
so they have all those fried edges.
Two teaspoons of baking powder will do the trick.
Now we want one teaspoon of salt.
This gives our donuts a little bit of contrast
and I'm using kosher salt.
If you use fine grain salt,
use a little bit less.
It's time to sift it out.
Cake flour can actually be a little bit lumpy sometimes
so it's nice to give it a sift.
Now in a large bowl
we're gonna combine our butter and sugar.
The donuts themselves only need four tablespoons of butter.
So like 57 grams.
In you go.
Just make sure it's room temperature.
And by the way, you can see I'm using a hand mixer for this.
If you use a stand mixer,
it's gonna be a little bit difficult
just because there's not that much butter
for it to whip up.
2/3 of a cup.
It's 133 grams.
These donuts, by the way,
took a lot of recipe testing to get just right
because they're Brian's favorite donut.
I just could not put out anything less
than perfection for this.
I'm gonna show you later on in the video
some things that can go wrong and why that happens.
I want this to get nice and fluffy.
It's gonna be about a minute of mixing on high.
That looks light and fluffy-ish.
Right now, we're gonna add in three egg yolks.
The yolks are gonna give us a lot
of richness and also help hold things together.
They're a bit of a binding agent.
One of the things I like about old fashioned donuts
is because it's a cake-based donut,
you can make the dough ahead of time
and just leave it in the fridge.
There's no yeast to worry about here.
Set these aside.
You could use them to make some delicious meringue cookies.
Ah, these are one of my favorite treats.
Now we're gonna mix this up and as you can see,
the egg yolks are really gonna help the butter
and sugar combine into a wonderful paste.
This is about two minutes of mixing
and it's gonna be really wonderful
and creamy when you're done.
That looks so nice.
Look at this color.
Ah, it's like the most wonderful pastel lemon in the world.
I once had pants like this in high school
with the same color and my mom said I was brave.
(John chuckling)
I'm scraping the bowl down right now
and it's time for a magical ingredient you
might not have seen on the channel in a minute,
sour cream.
Oh my gosh.
One of my favorite things to use.
This, like yogurt, adds so much moisture into your dough
but because it's thick,
the batter's not gonna spread out.
It'll hold its shape.
It also has a little bit of acid,
which means that you are gonna get even more
of a tender crumb and it'll be a little bit fluffier too.
If you can't get ahold of it,
plain yogurt is a good substitute as well.
We're gonna mix this up now and today, by the way,
we're making a plain old fashioned donut
with a vanilla glaze.
A classic that Brian loves
but so many variations you could add too.
Lemon zest, orange zest.
You could make them chocolate.
You can let me know in the comments
what your favorite flavor is and if you'd like
to see that video on the channel.
Now it's time to add our flour mixture into the wet.
And one thing I will tell you is this dough
is so simple to make, as you can see.
However, the whole trick of these donuts
comes in the shaping and the frying.
Keep an eagle eye out for that part of the video.
I'm mixing this on low, lowest settings,
until it's almost combined, just like that.
Now I'm gonna use my spatula and just fold it together.
You do not wanna over mix your batter
for these donuts or any other baked good.
Just until you see the flour disappear.
You know that when you over mix the batter,
you're activating protein in the flour
and you're just gonna get a little bit of a tougher,
less moist melt-in-your mouth delicious treat.
I'm really just looking for that flour
to not have any streaks and this dough is gonna get chilled.
So one nice thing is any moisture that's residual
hanging out in places here or there
will soak into little crumbs of flour
and it'll come together.
Now we're gonna scrape our bowl down one final time,
get all of that dough off of your spatula.
We're gonna cover this up
and refrigerate for at least an hour
but you can do this overnight for delicious morning donuts.
Towards the end of your chill time,
you're gonna grab a big, heavy bottomed pot.
Two inches of oil right into our pot.
You also want a thermometer for this pot.
The oil temperature is really important
to get the perfect old fashioned donut.
We're gonna place this over medium heat
and while it heats up we can roll our dough out.
We're going to be sprinkling some flour onto a surface.
You can be a little bit liberal with this.
And plop your dough right onto that.
This dough is wet and full of deliciousness,
so feel free to use a little bit more flour
so things don't stick.
A little flour for the top too.
Grab a rolling pin with some more flour.
We wanna roll this out to be half an inch.
Too thick and it's too thick.
Too thin and it'll dry out and this won't puff up enough.
So you wanna be a little bit precise in this step.
Part of the joy of frying anything is that crisp,
crunchy exterior,
and the inside of anything fried is basically steamed.
It's steam heat from the inside
that warms it up and cooks it.
So we want to have like pillowy soft,
melt-in-your-mouth donuts.
Part of that is the thickness that we roll them out to.
I have no ability to measure things with my eyes,
so breaking out my circle cutters.
That is three inches.
And for the inside, I want 1 1/4 quarter inch.
This by the way, is one of my favorite kitchen tools.
It's just a set of circle cutters that I use
for everything from cookies, to biscuits, to donuts.
We're gonna flour our cutters
just like you would for biscuits.
Then cut them out.
Don't forget to grab a baking sheet lined
with parchment paper.
All right, one donut down.
If you're wondering what my favorite donut is,
which is a totally valid question,
it's a cruller.
But on the West Coast, we call 'em crullers.
Don't worry about the edges looking perfect
because you actually want kinda like a gnarly finish
to these old fashioned donuts.
The amazingness, as Brian frequently tells me,
comes from that texture.
The giant groove in the middle, those split edges.
And I do have a question for you
which I want you to answer in the comments.
Brian tells me that on the West Coast,
'cause this is his favorite donut,
that all the donuts have like little ridges.
You're gonna see what that looks like in a minute.
But he doesn't see them as much here where we live.
So let me know if your donuts have ridges
where you get them.
Okay, we're almost through this set.
In between, if they're sticking a lot,
you can just run your finger along the edge
of your cutter and re-flour it.
And you can see here,
I ran out of big spaces so just re-roll the dough,
it's no big deal.
If this was a glazed donut,
I'd be kind of annoyed if there was like any kind
of weird, craggy surface.
But for old fashioned donuts, it's totally fine.
I used all my scraps, meaning there were no scraps.
So we're gonna use our 1 1/4 inch cutter
and just cut those centers out.
By this time, your oil should be just about ready.
So keep an eye on it.
I was tripping.
It's a one inch center for the middle.
So cut those out.
These are your delicious old fashioned donut holes,
which is my favorite part of the donut.
One, two, three, four, five, six
seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 donuts with a lot of holes.
This is the optional step for Brian.
I'm gonna use a knife and cut most of them
so you can see what happens.
And I'm not cutting,
I'm gently scoring four times on the outside of the donut
and that will just allow them
to kind of puff up and segment.
Brian says that the most joyous part
of eating these is breaking them into pieces.
By doing this, you're giving more surface area
for the crispy part and the glaze.
I'll leave a couple unscored too
so you can see the difference.
These are ready to go into the oil and while they fry,
I wanna talk about the temperature
and why that makes a big difference.
You can do this in batches of two or three if you want.
Definitely do a test batch
of one donut just to see how it comes out.
I'm gonna place these in carefully with my hands
but I have a spider ready to drag 'em out.
This is a must have tool for frying.
These guys are frying.
I'm gonna toss some of the donut holes in there as we well
and just keep an eye on the thermometer
because as you add the donuts in,
they're cold, it'll bring the temperature down.
So you're gonna play with the heat a little bit
as you fry and turn the heat up, turn the heat down,
just keep it in the range of 330 to 340 if you can.
You're gonna watch these guys sink to the bottom
but then they will float back up,
and for the first side they're gonna for about two minutes
or fry for two minutes.
Then you're gonna flip 'em over
and it's gonna be two minutes more.
You can fry them a little bit more
to be perfectly golden if you want.
It's really up to you on how deeply golden
you want your donuts to be.
Ooh, okay.
Pop those out.
And we're gonna repeat this out for the rest of our donuts.
So you really have to be careful about the temperature.
It is so easy for the oil to get too hot or too cold.
Just keep an eye on it
and like really prioritize the thermometer
as much as you are prioritizing
watching those donuts for golden-ness.
For the glaze, we're adding 2 1/2 cups
or 300 grams of powdered sugar into a bowl.
You could be totally loosey goosey
with the glaze recipe here.
Gonna add five tablespoons of water here.
I'm also adding 1/2 a teaspoon or so of vanilla
and a little pinch of salt.
Scale's all done and I'll whisk this together.
I wanna see a really thin glaze,
not like a drizzling consistency
that you would use on a bundt cake.
This is a coating glaze that'll become almost invisible.
So there we can see really watery.
That's what I want it to look like.
Seeing all the donuts together,
you can totally tell the difference between oil
that was perfectly in the range of 330 to 340.
Nice, craggy surface, cracked open on top.
And when the oil got a little bit hot,
it's just sealed into place.
Not as much cracking, still delicious,
but less of that signature old fashioned look.
So I actually just mixed in an extra tablespoon
and a half of water.
Really eyeball it.
It's up to you on what look you want the donuts to have.
It's gonna be delicious either way.
Dip them in halfway through.
You can shake off some of the excess.
And then just let them dry and become set.
If your donuts are really hot,
the glaze will kind of melt over them.
These, I mean, they feel hot to me
but they're on the warm side.
So you wanna have a thinner glaze
that can just drizzle through
and really highlight the shape of the donuts.
You don't wanna cover that up.
Golden, crispy, melt-in-your mouth amazingness.
(donut crunching)
That is so delicious.
This really might be my new favorite donut.
I hope you get a chance to make this recipe
and if you like this video,
check out my donut playlist.