Claire Saffitz Makes Apple Cider Donuts | Dessert Person

oh you know no big deal just the propane torch fell from the top shelf onto the floor don't look over here don't look over here hey everyone i'm claire saffits welcome to my sort of kitchen in a cabin in the hudson valley and we've been taping some episodes especially for the holidays and this time of year which has been really fun so today i'm making everybody's apparently favorite thing to eat this time of year which are apple cider donuts truthfully i never had one that i liked because i think that they're overrated but today i think that i have assembled a recipe that is incredibly delicious actually tastes like apple and it's fun to make at home are they good are they good just a question i have today hopefully the answer is yes [Music] donuts are not my favorite treat of all time and i still prefer a yeast a donut over a cake donut so like apple cider donuts have a couple strikes against them in my book right from the start my main problem is that to me they can often be really oily and they don't really taste like apple but i think if we go over a couple of really important like principles of cake donut making and i point out a couple important ingredients that i'm adding and using then i think we're going to have a very very tasty apple cider donut i don't object to them in principle at all just in practice they don't come out the way i want them to so today we are making an idealized version of we could just unplug that thing we don't have to have that noise go off that's okay today i'm making an idealized version of apple cider doughnuts hopefully and i love apple flavor and i always want to get a ton of apple flavor into any apple dessert that i'm making so that's my goal here it's like we're going to get an apple cider donut that actually tastes like apples [Music] so we're going to use a hand mixer to put together the batter you could use a stand mixer but i often find it easier to maneuver with a hand mixer a rolling pin for rolling out the dough then over here i have already heating up my oil in a dutch oven with a deep fat candy thermometer so here i have a round cutter to cut the hole i have just a pastry chip so i'm going to use the wide end of the pastry tip and we'll have that shaped donut which looks good to me some parchment paper on a baking sheet and a little bench flower the most important ingredient that we're adding is apple cider and here i have a third of a cup of apple cider that i got from the store and boiled down so it's unsweetened unfiltered apple cider quiet feeling i just took basically a half gallon so eight cups boiled it down to two cups so it's 75 reduced and then i just measured out a third of a cup and then you have the rest for other baking projects and it does add like a really nice tanginess the other very important ingredient i have is apple butter so apple butter is applesauce that is just further cooked down and concentrated so there's less water so here i have granulated sugar two large eggs melted and cooled butter brown sugar some sour cream cinnamon sugar for coating all purpose flour baking powder baking soda salt nutmeg cinnamon vanilla kind of a lot of ingredients but the batter comes together very easily so the first step is to combine all the dry ingredients i have all-purpose flour i'm actually not using cake flour because like it needs to have a little bit of structure so the all-purpose is fine to that i'm going to add two teaspoons baking powder that's not right two and a half teaspoons baking powder so i'm adding baking soda and powder and i'll talk about why so this is powder two and a half teaspoons and then a half teaspoon of soda then i have a teaspoon of kosher salt you could do like any warm spices that you like for this i'm gonna add a teaspoon of cinnamon i kind of just like the warm spices to be in the background i don't want it to taste so strongly of cinnamon and of course i have a little bit of cinnamon sugar to coat the donuts in and then nutmeg i i go very very conservative conservative on the nutmeg because i just find it a really strong flavor and i like it but it can be overpowering to me so for this i'm going to do a quarter teaspoon this is very lumpy so i'm going to break it up um you want to add a little shiny a little clove i think we have some ground cloves i love clove same thing though it can be really strong here we go but it is that very very classic winter spice i actually love clove but same thing it's super powerful so i'm just gonna do like that's it because it's so strong and it's so spicy you really get it it just creates like a warming sensation in the background which i really like so up to you what you want to use it could be just cinnamon could be a mix of stuff no cow sugar is a wet ingredient someone's been listening so i'm just going to mix this together with cake doughnuts it's tricky because you need enough flour to bind everything together and make the dough workable so you can punch it out and maneuver it into the oil and of course you need the structure there but you don't want to put so much flour that it loses all of its flavor and texture and becomes dry and so it's a little bit of a balancing act set that aside now i'm going to mix my wet ingredients except for my eggs and except for my shimmer so i'm gonna mix the apple cider the sour cream everything is room temp so the sour cream has been sitting out in the apple butter if you can't find apple butter you can make it you can take applesauce and then just cook it down you could also just roast in the oven and let it dry off all the water and then my vanilla one or two teaspoons so stir all that together okay so i'm going to start to mix together the batter i have two large eggs room temp then i'm gonna add my sugars so i have a quarter cup of granulated and a quarter cup of brown sugar okay so i'm gonna start by mixing this together so i'm gonna beat this with the hand mixer until it's sort of thickened and lightened the color has gone a few shades paler and probably like doubled in volume so you can increase the speed [Applause] you can see this is nice and moussey and it's lightened in color and gained in volume now i'm going to add my butter and i had melted this but it's kind of cool in here so the butter hardened again and i'm going to warm it up just until it's melted because i want to stream it in and it will emulsify into the eggs ooh my hands smell like cloves ah so you just don't want it hot so melted and cooled but not quite solidified like i had it so with the mixer running i'm going to stream this in [Applause] so you don't want to pour the butter in all at once because you want to give it a chance to slowly incorporate and emulsify and if you add it all at once you it would really you might have sort of a broken mixture where the butter is not emulsifying with the eggs but it's only four tablespoons of butter so it's really not very much [Applause] [Music] so now i'm going to incorporate my dry and wet ingredients and if anyone is a practiced cake maker you'll sort of recognize this next step which is to alternate the wet and dry so i'm going to add about a third of the dry ingredients and then as soon as most of the flour disappears i'm going to work in half of my liquid i have like some lumps of the sour cream it doesn't really matter because it all spoons out so make sure all that is incorporated then half of the remaining dry ingredients a third of the total [Music] then the remaining liquid so when you're adding wet and dry into a cake batter you always begin and end with dry because the dry ingredients will bring a batter back together if it's a little bit broken and it can look broken if you add too much liquid so you just want to always begin an end you're going to have a nice thick batter which you need to have because it is not like a cake where you're baking it in a pan you need to be able to punch out circles and have it hold its shape and be workable to be able to handle it then the remaining dry ingredients and i'm going to mix this until i mostly see the flour disappear but i have a couple of white streaks and then i'm going to go by hand and finish folding it so you can see it's starting to get quite thick so pop out the beaters so i don't want to overwork the batter and sometimes it's an easy thing to do with a hand mixer and i really want to make sure that it's evenly mixed so no kind of liquidy parts trapped at the bottom no parts that have too much flour so i have more control when i switch to a spatula i can do it this way go ahead and fold it well i have a little bit of extra flour here i have a piece of parchment paper my rolling pin and we want to get this out into like uh between half and three quarter inch thickness give it a little sprinkle if you hold your hand a little higher the flour has a chance to spread out as you sprinkle and then rather than just adding one huge portion of batter into the middle i'm going to kind of try to spread it around a little bit just kind of gives myself a head start sort of dollop it around the batter is thick but it's still a bit sticky once we chill it though it will firm up now i'm going to use floured hands to kind of pat it down [Applause] once i have it in a pretty even layer i'm going to give it a tiny bit more flour and then put a second piece of parchment paper on top and roll it out to my desired thickness keeping in mind the sort of size of the cutter the dough is soft and my rolling pin has like a little weight to it so i don't want to press too hard instead of just like dragging it over you need to add a little more flour it's getting a little sticky all right that looks good so i'm going to brush off any excess flour now i'm going to slide this onto a baking sheet parchment paper goes back on top and i'm going to chill this just for a few minutes if you can if you can fit in your freezer that makes it really fast just like five minutes and then i'm gonna punch out the donuts oh there we go oh that's much easier though okay i just have this one baking sheet and everything else is in use i'm going to slide it back off the baking sheet onto my cutting board and i'm going to cover the baking sheet in these little squares so that i like to sometimes use individual little pieces of parchment for each donut because it gives me a means of getting the donut into the oil without having to disturb the dough very much especially if it warms up again and becomes very soft i don't want to have to lift the donut into the oil i can just lift the parchment paper and then it slides right off here i have obviously quite a bit of flour this is for flouring the cutter which helps to prevent any sticking i'm going to quickly punch out all the donuts that i can in the shape that i have so sometimes i like to sort of plan out my my root a little bit and do a little wiggle press down god so sticky more flour for sure so i would say a generously floured cutter because the exterior of the dough has dried out a little bit but the interior still kind of has that wet cake battery texture i'm going to transfer them at this point to the parchment squares and then i'll cut out the hole when they're on their final kind of resting place with a little flower on the spatula as well just kind of lift underneath you can dust off any excess flour in place so obviously the faster you work the easier it's going to be because batter will warm up a little bit so now i'm going to clear off the remaining of the dough and then we're going to punch out the holes and i think we can move right into frying check my oil oh yeah the oil is almost at temp so we're going to roll right into frying [Music] so i just dusted off any excess flour because the cutter left kind of a ring of flour so i'm dusting it off because i don't want that to dry out the donuts at all and now i'm going to cut the donut hole the centers and in that like transferring process some of the circles got a little bit less circular so i'm just kind of pressing them out some are a little bit thicker than others too the dough is still nice and kind of workable now same thing i'm gonna fly on my cutter which is just the wide end of a pastry tip and straight down give it a little twist just so you know that you're removing it and now to get it out of there i like my little you can use a skewer toothpick i have a little cake tester so i'm going to go ahead and finish punching out the holes from the rest of the donuts save them obviously we'll fry them as little donut hole treats and then we'll move over to the frying area [Music] let's talk about our at home deep frying setup so i have a dutch oven that's filled with an inch or two of oil you don't really want to fill it more than halfway you don't need to and i have a candy thermometer in here so i see the temp i'm at like 342 or 44 which is great for frying we want to be somewhere between 325 and 350. and next to the fryer i have a wire rack set over some paper towel for draining the donuts and i have a shallow bowl with cinnamon sugar because i'm going to coat the donuts while they're still hot out of the fryer in the sugar mixture my doughnuts right here so you just need something for turning the donuts you can use a spider you can use like two chopsticks this is a danish dough hook that happens to be very useful for cooking donuts you can lift them out and so you want to make sure you don't crowd the donuts when you're frying them so in this touch oven i can probably get i'll start with three and see how they are you want them to have some room to swim around pay attention to your oil temp you'll notice that when you add a couple donuts it'll drop the temp and so you might need to regulate the heat a little bit but as long as you're somewhere in that 325 to 350 range you should be fine you don't want it to go hotter or colder hotter means you might overcook the exterior before the center cooks through colder means it might absorb a lot of oil as it's cooking and that's not good either once you've added your donuts to the oil they're going to cook for a couple minutes on each side they're going to puff at first they might sink and then as that baking soda and powder is activated they'll release some gases they'll float to the top and bob around you want to turn them and go until they're like brown and crisp on each side the dough is already brown so you're going to get pretty dark but that's normal [Music] so i have all my donuts fried all 10 of them and i'm just going to coat the final batch that came out of the fryer in my cinnamon sugar and you want to coat them while they're still warm because having like a little sheen of oil gives the sugar something to stick to but actually i will point out that like there is no they're not slick with oil so i think having the oil at the right temp not crowding it making sure that it doesn't drop too much means you do not have a greasy donut and going into the fryer you definitely felt the weight of the dough and it you know there's a heft to it and coming out they've expanded so much in size that they really feel light and airy and not dense i know the donuts are done because it smells like fry oil in this entire house but that's okay because now we have these beautiful apps rewind it smells like oh all right what was i thinking it smells so delicious the coffee is ready it's hot it's steaming very excited to have a little treat of something that i think i'm gonna like a whole lot hopefully whatever i don't know okay coffee is excellent i have to say okay so it's time to try our donuts they look great i have to say this is a very pleasing thing to look at like i love the little craggy areas i can tell that the exterior is going to be a little bit crunchy and then it's picked up this incredibly sparkly sugar so visually it's like really enticing me and i'm excited to try should i start with a donut hole i kind of want to eat like a little these i just these turned out so cute like they're so perfectly round i just really want to eat one oh that looks good fluffy and not gummy and totally cooked through and light and we know what i don't see that sometimes i see on cake donuts that i find very off-putting is like even if the exterior is dry to the touch sometimes you see oil like a ring of wet kind of oily part and i don't see that at all so it's a good sign donuts are not my favorite treat of all time truthfully i never had one that i liked i think that they're overrated quiet feelings did you convert yourself these are really good they're extremely delicious they really do taste like apple if this is what all apple cider donuts taste like i think i would love them let's pull this guy apart so fluffy really looks like the interior of cake another thing is incorporating apple butter it does the same thing that it does in a cake which is it makes it very very tender we didn't need to use cake flour just very tender light texture i also think it's a great amount of warm spice it's just like a background that you get you don't taste it and think like wow it's so cinnamony or it's so spicy it just kind of combines with the apple flavor to make this really sort of encapsulation of fall flavors really good now i feel like i'm like in a cool club of people that i was like looked at a little bit sideways but now i get it these are really good it really is like the perfect fall treat so i hope you try it at home thank you for watching i'm gonna finish my donut and my coffee and remember to like and subscribe high five high five good boy very good boy [Music]

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 767,311

Keywords: doughnuts, doughnuts recipe, homemade doughnuts, donuts, donuts recipe, homemade donuts, apple cider doughnuts, apple cider doughnuts recipe, apple cider donuts, apple cider donuts recipe, homemade apple cider donuts, easy donuts recipe, best donuts, easy donuts, making doughnuts at home, donuts from scratch, bon appetit, claire saffitz, claire saffitz dessert person, how to make doughnuts, gourmet makes, how to donut, donut, apple, apple cider, easy donut recipe, claire, bake

Id: dVCYAqcTvVc

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021