- When you flip these trays of flan,
you gotta just be super confident
when you approach this task,
work super fast and
(pan bangs)
go right into it.
The whole flan inside the donut situation.
I don't know how I came up with it, honestly.
I think what it came down to was they wouldn't
be actually experiencing the flan
unless there was an actual flan in it.
(upbeat music)
When we start prep on Wednesdays,
the first thing we do is make the dough.
We are starting on our brioche dough.
Basically, this recipe is the base for all of our donuts.
Depending on the flavor, we'll change it up a little bit.
We'll add cocoa powder for our chocolate
and ube extract for ube dough.
So Kevin is our co-founder
and he's also the operations director here at Kora.
He's gonna go ahead and get the eggs in.
He actually takes over all of our doughs now.
Next we have milk and you can see there's ice in here.
Brioche tends to prove very quickly because
of the sugar content and if brioche,
or any bread for that matter,
proves too quickly or too much,
it starts to develop this alcoholic flavor and smell
and it's just not pleasant.
So we figured that to slow down the process
to have pretty much all of our ingredients cold.
So we're going in with the flour.
We use two different types
and they have two different percentages of gluten.
I like to have a really, really fluffy donut,
a donut with a little bit of bite in it.
And so we found that this balance of flours,
this ratio of flours, has given us
the lightest, fluffiest donut.
(laid back music)
Right now, I'm just performing something
called the window pane test on our dough
to see that the gluten has developed.
The point of this is to see how elastic the dough is.
The more elastic a dough is, the more air it can hold in
from the gases that are being released by the yeast
as it's proofing.
Every culture has their version of donuts.
This donut is similar to bomboloni dough.
It's honestly almost exactly the same.
The process is so similar.
Before I started this donut business, I don't even remember
the last time I had a donut in my life.
The fact that I'm doing this as my full-time job these days,
it just really makes me laugh.
- [Kevin] Currently, we do only offer pickup
and everything that we produce currently during the week
is already paid for and available for pre-order.
I think one of the biggest challenges
with running a business with this model,
I guess a pre-order model, is that,
being that everything is already paid for,
you're kind of on the hook for it.
For some reason, Chef gets sick and she can't come in
or the dough is not reacting properly, you know,
it's one of the struggles.
- Okay, so now we're gonna degas our doughs.
They've been resting in the fridge for a couple of hours.
You can see how nice and fluffy they are.
They've doubled in size.
So we just wanna take that excess gas out of them.
If you allow this to just keep puffing up
and it might puff up so much
that it'll just push the top right open
and then the dough will start to dry out and crust.
We don't want that.
We can only do so much, but at the end of the day,
the dough's gonna do whatever it wants.
It's a living, breathing thing.
Understanding how dough reacts to its environment
and how you work with it is such an art.
I mean, it's a science, really.
We have this machine over here that we call R2D2.
And what that machine does for us is it portions dough
into 36 balls.
Brioche dough, because of its high fat content.
It's just got so much butter in it
and lots of whole milk and eggs.
It actually lasts longer
than your typical yeast-raised donuts.
Take this over here.
(can thuds)
And a lot of people ask why we don't use the big cans.
For some reason, condensed milk in volume is hard
to find that doesn't have the fillers in it.
We are making the flan now.
Filipino flan is really different
from maybe the flans you've had in Spain
or in other Latin American countries
because it's got a lot, a lot, a lot of egg yolks.
So I'm just gonna get this nice and smooth.
I just wanna get rid of big pieces of egg
and get it nice and homogenous.
Now, when my grandma used to make this,
she actually would take all of the eggs
and she would put it through a cheesecloth.
And that's how she would strain it, with her hands.
We've got Christiana, one of my cooks.
- [Christiana] Hello!
- She's emptying some condensed milk and evaporated milk.
(laid back music continues)
Coming through, hot.
If it doesn't fully coat the bottom of the tray,
your flan's gonna be naked in some parts.
And they're not gonna have that nice, even color
across the entire flan.
If the caramel itself on the tray is not level,
then when you bake your custard, it's not gonna be level.
You gotta work super fast.
Then we measure out two and a half quarts of the custard.
And then we're gonna take the torch and torch the surface
of the custard to get rid of any bubbles.
The flan has finished cooking.
It's cooked for about an hour in there at 250 degrees.
The flan is nice and cooled down now.
You could not work fast enough and the entire flan
will just like slide off the tray
if you're too nervous about it.
And then we'll just have to make a whole 'nother flan,
start from the beginning.
So now we're gonna go ahead and punch our flan into circles.
This is actually one of my favorite projects to do on prep.
It's just so satisfying.
- The next step for the leche flan donut
is to actually punch the hole in which the flan goes inside.
Nothing too much to it.
You kinda feel it bite back at you.
You don't wanna go all the way,
you kinda just wanna fluff it back up.
And ideally, it looks something like this,
where there are no creases on the edges.
Here we have our flan cream.
It's basically a by-product of the actual flan circles.
Once we punched the flan circles,
everything that's left behind, the scraps,
we blend in a Robot Coup and it turns into this flan cream.
Second to last step here is to actually add the flan inside.
We basically got two desserts here in one.
- [Kimberly] So Kora is my grandmother's name.
Her full name was Korazon Mendoza.
The leche flan recipe is from my grandmother's recipe book
that I found after she passed away.
- Last step of the flan here,
we go the extra mile and then use the leftover caramel
to brush clean the flan.
And we really, really just want a nice,
shiny, perfect circle, right in the center.
- Our team is very, very small and we've always been small.
When we started, it was really just Kevin and I, honestly,
for the first few months.
- All right, team, good morning.
Going over the numbers really quick,
we're gonna be producing 130 boxes total.
- All of our current employees are quite young.
I think they're all under 23, 24,
so they're all very early on in their careers.
For me, that's the most exciting thing.
Being their current mentor or their current leader,
I just love to watch them grow.
Lance, get in here, bro.
This is Lance, another one of our cooks.
So he's already peeled all of the ube, which,
and I put it in quotes because it's actually
a Okinawan purple yam.
And we use this purple yam for the garniture
just because it's like the closest thing that we can find
and it's, personally, I think,
the closest in flavor to actual ube.
So you can't find fresh ube in America
because ube is an invasive species, actually.
It doesn't grow anywhere.
The only way you can get your hands on authentic ube
is frozen, imported from Philippines.
This is a frozen grated ube.
We had to have ube on our menu. I already knew this.
You can't pass that vibrant purple color.
So we are now making the ube pastry cream.
In these pots, we have milk heating up
with a little bit of ube extract
and she's adding the frozen grated ube
to each of these batches.
The base of our pastry cream, what really gives it
that unctuousness, that thickness,
and makes it, you know, a cream that's pipeable is starch.
So here we have some corn starch and this pastry cream
in particular is quite thick because of the ube.
So as she's stirring, I'm gonna pour this in,
in a thin stream, so that we don't get big clumps
of this mixture cooking in there.
And you're gonna see how quickly it thickens up
because the milk is already so hot.
What that's doing is gelatinizing the starches in this mix.
Ube, in its natural state,
really does have a really deep earthiness to it
because it is grown underneath the soil.
Smells kinda like vanilla a little bit,
almost fruity, I would say.
We've rinsed this about three, four, five times,
as many times as it takes to get the water
pretty much clear.
That means that most of the starch has been rinsed off.
These are the purple yam chips that are gonna go
on top of the ube donut for garnish.
I think a lot of people, when they do make ube desserts,
I feel like they don't go hard,
they don't take it all the way home with it.
Every component of our donut has ube somewhere in it.
You know, whether it's extract,
whether it's the actual grated yam, you know,
it just gives you that maximum ube punch of flavor.
- The busiest part of the day is usually about two hours out
from when we're ready to start boxing,
I would say about 12 o'clock.
It really just all comes down to crunch time
and we just really is a race to the finish line.
One o'clock, y'all.
- [Workers] One o'clock.
- We're running behind.
We all gotta really pick up the speed, all right?
- [Worker] Good!
- Right now I am working on the garniture
for our Kamote Cue donut.
And our Kamote Cue donut is based off
of a Filipino street food that, essentially,
is a fried sweet potato that's caramelized
and it's nice and crispy and then it's sprinkled
with a little bit of toasted sesame.
We actually source our sweet potatoes
from a local Asian vendor.
They give us really huge sweet potatoes
so that we can yield these nice big circles out of them
that kind of crown the donut.
We need almost 200 pieces for this week.
At Kora, I am very extra when it comes to my work.
I just love having multiple components
in everything I make, multiple textures.
I love having different mouth feels,
different flavors come at you from different places
and every time you take a bite.
A mousseline is basically a pastry cream.
The basis is the same.
We've got our starch that thicken up that milk.
Sugar, of course, and eggs.
But a mousseline is one that's a little bit fluffier
than a standard pastry cream.
So this is a toasted sesame paste.
You can see how dark it is.
It's a little bit darker than peanut butter.
This is sort of the mousse part of the mousseline
and basically what we want is for the butter
to look nice and white and fluffy
before we add that pastry cream that we made earlier
that's now cooled down.
And that is our mousseline.
I'm just gonna give it a taste.
I always like to taste all of our fillings
before we put them in bags
'cause that's the last time I'll see them.
This is my lovely mother, aka, Tita Babes.
Today, she's gonna be helping Shanice
glaze our Kamote Cue donuts.
Ma, you wanna say anything for the camera, for the peoples?
- Very proud mama.
- Oh my God, you're gonna make her cry
and then I'm gonna cry.
Oh my God, and here comes the big boss.
My dad's here too and I had no idea he was coming.
So this is my dad.
He is a, I don't know, he's just hanging out. (laughs)
- [Woman] Got nothing else to do.
(Kimberly laughs)
- Having my mom and my aunt onsite with us,
it's a lot of fun.
It's definitely brought us closer together,
especially over the fact that we're bonding over her mother,
my grandmother, and how this business was built on that.
Right now, they're just getting the glaze
to the right temperature and the right consistency.
It's essentially our, the same glaze base,
it's the white chocolate base for our glaze
with some muscovado sugar added.
So our sweet potatoes are done.
They've been baking for about 20 minutes.
They've got a little syrupy.
They're really nice and soft, almost like a custard.
When they fry the sweet potato,
they actually throw some sugar directly into the oil
that caramelizes and wraps around the sweet potatoes
and this sort of emulates that
because it gets nice and crispy.
So while I'm torching the sweet potato,
Shanice is starting to fill the donuts up.
So she's gonna go in with the first layer of filling,
which is our sweet potato puree
that we made from the scraps.
The last step of the Kamote Cue donut is
to take our bruleed sweet potato piece
and roll just the edges in a bit of toasted Sesame seeds.
It gives it a nice little crunch,
a little bit of a nutty flavor.
That is the finished Kamote Cue.
We are almost done with production.
This is actually the last donut that's getting assembled
before we start our line to get all
of the donuts packaged in their boxes and twined
and then given to our customers.
(upbeat pop music)
- [Kevin] Hey, how are you?
- [Man] Good, how are you?
- Good, good.
Here you go.
- Sweet.
- Oh, under Frieda. Okay, I've got one--
- In the beginning, I didn't feel burdened
to put Filipino culture or food on the map.
I think in more recent times,
I've been feeling some pressure to create more.
Don't know if that's necessarily because
of feeling pressured to be an ambassador
for this Filipino food movement.
I think it's been more of pressure on myself
from a personal and professional standpoint
to just be a better chef
because I'm constantly thinking of new ideas
and how I wanna put something new into the world
and I want it to be so unique.
Kora is the coming together of my entire life.
There is no way that my grandmother is looking down on us
and isn't so proud of all the work we've done.
Honestly, it always started with her
and it's going to end with her.
Wherever Kora takes us, behind all of it
is my connection with her and my connection with my heritage
and my connection with my family.
So it's the end of the day,
we just finished eating family meal,
and now we're packing it all up
because we ordered way too much food and--
- And then what?
And then we gotta do this all over again, next week.
- Yup!
(inaudible)
(upbeat pop music continues)