Hey, we all love donuts, right?
They’re a delicious cultural touchstone.
You’ve got your yeast donuts, you’ve got your cake donuts.
It’s all fried dough, right?
So what makes cake donuts and yeast donuts so different?
Of course the answer is chemistry.
We asked Zach Foster at Blue Dot Donuts in New Orleans what makes donuts so great.
And along the way, he showed us how to make a mean cake donut.
Now look, we’ll try to keep our yeast vs. cake partisanship to ourselves and just bring
you the facts except YEAST DONUTS RULE and ok now it’s out of my system.
I’M PARTIAL TO CAKE DONUTS MYSELF You’re wrong.
Anyway, this is a yeast donut, and this is a cake donut.
Both contain mostly the same stuff: flour, sugar, eggs, milk, butter, and bit of salt.
Both are traditionally deep fried instead of baked.
“The main difference between both them is your leavening agent.
Cake is usually done with the baking powder and then yeast donuts, or a yeast raised,
is done with a yeast, either fresh or dried.”
Yeast is alive; it’s fungus -- it’s called Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
And its job is, basically, to eat the donut dough before you eat it.
Not all of it, obviously.
Yeast munches on the sugar and starch in the donut dough and produces carbon dioxide gas
as waste -- as well as lots of little molecules that add to the flavor of the final product.
That carbon dioxide creates all the spongy air pockets you see in a yeast donut and gives
the dough its rise.
But something has to prevent all the CO2 from just bubbling away.
That job goes to the wheat protein complex we call gluten.
Now we’ve got a whole video on gluten if you’re interested, but it basically creates
a strong stretchy web that traps the gas inside the dough.
It also gives the dough that chewy texture, or crumb in baker’s parlance.
Cake donuts are chemically leavened.
That means they contain baking powder, baking soda, or both.
Baking soda is a base, and it reacts with an acid to produce that same exact CO2 that
the yeast produces in a yeast donut.
If you’re going to leaven a batter with baking soda, you need to add some acid for
it to react with.
Buttermilk, which contains lactic acid, is a popular choice.
Baking powder is a combination of baking soda and an acid already mixed in -- something
like cream of tartar or sodium aluminum sulfate.
Those reactions look like this -- and generally they won’t happen until the dough is wet
or heated, meaning your cake donuts will puff up in the fryer.
Now chemical leaveners are new on the scene, well new meaning they’ve been invented within
the last 200 years or so, and they provide some benefits over yeast.
Like being way faster.
Yeast has to be proofed, which means it wakes up from the preserved state you buy it in
before it can start eating.
“So if you’ve ever made like bread or made any kind of dough, pizza dough even.
A pizza dough you’re trying to stretch it out.
If it’s too fresh, if it hasn’t proofed long enough, it won’t stretch, it will just
start shrinking right back.
So you have to make sure you have enough proof time to get it to be able to do what you want
it to do.”
So the yeast needs time to munch on those sugars and produce the carbon dioxide you
want.
But that speed affects the texture too.
Yeast doughs are kneaded to build up that gluten web.
Chemically leavened batters are generally just...mixed.
There’s very little gluten developed, and that leads to that softer, cakier texture.
But since it doesn’t trap as much CO2, cake donut batter is denser.
After that, the donuts go into the fryer.
Cake donuts can be baked, but Blue Dot clearly prefers the oil method, as do I.
“And all it does is drop out the certain amount you want anywhere from 1 ounce to 3
ounces.
We max ours out.
Go big go big or go home.
The longer they stay down the denser they will be.”
This is generally pretty similar between cake and yeast donuts, although yeast donuts have
to be shaped and proofed a second time before they go in.
Cake donuts can be piped just before you put them in the fryer or straight into the oil.
Oh, and if you want to know more about frying we’ve got that one covered too.
So that’s the how and why of the great donut divide, and may we remind you that the correct
side to be on is team chewy, fluffy yeast donuts.
SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, HEATHEN
Just kidding.
We wouldn’t say anything mean against these fine people’s cake donuts.
Thanks again to Blue Dot Donuts, and thanks for watching.
If this video made you hungry for donuts, share it with your friends so they have to
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videos like this one.
We’ll see you next time.