This week we had a friend of ours, Karen, visiting, and invited her to join us. She showed up as we were frying our first batch, and helped shape the doughnut holes for our second batch.
Alison had spied a recipe online for making doughnut holes, using biscuit dough. Unfortunately when she went to print it, she found that the recipe had been pulled. Some searching revealed another doughnut hole recipe, from which we tried to recreate the recipe she had found, using the new one to get information on how to do the actual frying.
Research showed that the Heart Smart Bisquick is vegan, and using soymilk, we make the biscuit dough using the recipe on the box. The dough ended up quite sticky, and a little hard to work with, and we believe that using almond milk might fix this problem, based on Alison’s previous experience. We rolled the dough into balls, the batch making 11 doughnut holes. Because of the extra Bisquick needed to get the sticky dough off our fingers and the cutting board, the balls were less than smooth, creating fault-lines in them.
We had an 8-quart pot to which I had added all of my vegetable oil, then all of my canola oil, in an attempt to have enough oil to cover the doughnut holes. Lacking a thermometer to test that the oil was to the recommended 350 degrees, we used little bits of dough to test the oil. When it got to the point that the test dough rose immediately to the top of the oil, bubbling, and starting to brown almost instantly upon dropping it into the oil, we knew it was hot enough. We then added our doughnut holes to the oil. They weren’t quite submerged, and we kept rolling them to make sure they cooked all the way through, and evenly on all the sides. We watched as they expanded as they fried, and we realized that our 11 doughnut-hole sized treats were expanding into monster treats.
Once they were done frying, we fished them out of the oil, turning the heat down, but not off, and put them on a paper towel briefly. Then the still-hot monster doughnut holes were put into a paper bag which had a confectioners sugar / cinnamon power mix. Shaking the doughnut holes in the bag, they came out nicely coated, but we added a second paper bag to the outside, after the first go-round, as there was a little bit of mess from the attempt.
For our second batch, we made the same biscuit dough, but made the raw doughnut holes much smaller, yielding about 4 times as many as the first batch. Aside for some small burns from splashing oil (I’m very sorry, Lila), these worked much better.
The larger doughnut holes were a little damp in the middle, while the smaller ones cooked faster and more thoroughly. We found that the more oil was on the doughnut holes when we put them in the bag of sugar and cinnamon, the more coating they picked up, but the less like traditional doughnut holes they looked. The oil had the effect of making a paste-like coating, which tended to break off the treats when handled. With less oil on the doughnut holes, the sugar was more of a light dusting, which had a more firm hold on the treats.
This recipe will take some practice to get a consistent treat, but the only adjustment we might make to the recipe itself is trying almond milk or rice milk to see if either yields a less sticky / easier to work with dough.
No comments:
Post a Comment