Ever heard of Café du Monde?
Is this the beignet place?
Eat it slow. You're never going to have your first beignet ever again.
Pretty cool.
-It's cool, right? You like it? -Mhm!
Hey what's up, guys. Welcome back to Binging with Babish
where this week, we're taking a look at the beignets featured in Chef from Café du Monde.
I've got a box of their commercially available beignet mix here.
I thought that'd be a good place to start
and then we can take a crack at making some of these suckers from scratch.
We got to start by reading the directions on the box
which tell us to measure out two cups of the mix
into a large bowl and combine with seven ounces of room temperature water
So we're going to do as the box tells us and mix these guys together
until a shaggy ball of dough forms.
Don't be worried if it's a little sticky.
Beignet dough is sticky by nature.
But we do want it to form a cohesive ball so we can turn it out onto a generously floured countertop.
I'm talking "Scrooge at the end of Christmas Carol" generous.
Plop out our dough. Make sure that it's lightly dusted on both sides with flour
and then roll it out to about a quarter-inch thickness.
You don't have to, like, measure it or anything.
This dough is pretty forgiving.
Just roll it out so it's nice and thin
and trim off the edges so we can cut it into nice, uniform rectangles.
You can use a knife here, but ideally you'd want to use a pizza cutter.
It's going to give you cleaner, neater cuts that don't drag or stretch the dough.
Ball up and roll out your scraps
and cut those into rectangles as well. Don't be wasteful.
And then over on the stove, we've got two quarts of vegetable oil
heating to 368...369...
370 de–
Oh
Close enough.
If you don't have a digital thermometer, go get one.
But if you doggedly refuse to, you can tell if your oil's hot enough if your beignets
pop up after about five seconds.
We want these to brown as evenly as possible
so we're going to baste their skyward-facing side with oil
continually for the first two minutes that these guys are in the fryer
and then we're gonna give 'em a flip, let 'em cook for another thirty or so more seconds
until they are golden brown and crisp.
Evacuate them onto a paper towel lined plate
Let 'em drain for a few minutes before dusting them liberally with powdered sugar
I'm talking Alexandria Ocasio Cortez liberal *fire reference*
Because beignets derive most of their sweetness
from the mountains of sugar they are be-dusted with.
Now, these are pretty good, but as you can see
they're pretty thin, and they're not soft and fluffy
and they certainly don't make me feel like donning my best linen suit
and ordering up a...cloudy snifter of absinthe.
So we're gonna take a crack at making some of these things from scratch.
We're gonna start with buttermilk, a cup and a half of it
to which we're going to add a half a cup of boiling milk
making a tepid mixture perfect
for allowing our four teaspoons of dry yeast to bloom.
And just to encourage their feeding frenzy
we're going to add our sugar (two and a half tablespoons worth)
and we're going to give that a good mix
Don't be afraid to deploy your adorable little whisk.
*that'swhatshesaid*
Set that aside for ten minutes, during which time
we're going to assemble our dry ingredients.
We're going to start with 22 ounces of bread flour
to which we're going to add a half teaspoon each
of baking soda and kosher salt.
I was skeptical about using bread flour at first
but I think it ended up making the beignets nice and chewy, which is what we're after.
So we're going to mix those together and then add our milky, yeasty, sugary concoction
Drop down our dough hook and mix for about 3-4 minutes
until a massive dough forms that begins to pull away
from the sides of the bowl, but is still a big sticky mess.
Try to resist adding flour, unless it's really really super wet
But you want it to look just like this
a nice sticky situation.
We're going to pull everything down off the dough hook
cover and let rest for one hour
during which time, it's going to double up in size.
Wow!
It should be less sticky and more tacky at this point
but it's still plenty sticky, so we're going to flour our work surface
with unbridled enthusiasm.
Turn out the dough with a bowl scraper if you've got one
and before it gets the chance to stick to the table
we're going to coat it with a nice thicc layer of flour
that's going to create the perfect consistency in our dough once we've rolled it out
which we're going to do next.
Roll it out to the same thickness as before
trim the edges as before, and cut into rectangles as before.
We've still got our oil preheated to 370°F
into which we're going to deposit our donuts
and immediately you can see that these are puffing up
in a way more significant and exciting way than our last batch.
We're cooking them for about the same amount of time on each side
draining them on paper towels and dusting them down
with lots and lots of powdered sugar.
Now these are the beignets that I was looking for.
I'm not going to say that they were as good as Café du Monde
but they were damn close.
As my neighbor said, they are crunchy, squeezy, and soft
three of the finest descriptors I could have asked for.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go hit the StairMaster.