Hot and Crisp Apple Fritters - Kitchen Conundrums with Thomas Joseph

hey everybody thomas joseph here and today we are tackling apple fritters one of my favorite things now perhaps you've tried to make them at home and maybe they're undercooked in the center and burnt and oily on the outside well today i'm going to share with you a foolproof method in making apple fritters at home and they use apples in three different forms so let's get started [Music] for my apple fritters i'm going to start by making the kind of apples or the caramelized apples that go into the fritters and then we'll tackle the dough so to get started you need a little bit of butter now i'm working in two batches here guys so you need to repeat this process twice but i've already done a batch so this is my last batch here so two tablespoons of unsalted butter in a skillet and to the butter i'm gonna add a half of vanilla bean now i'm using a fresh vanilla bean here and the way that you extricate the seeds from the pod is by using the back of your knife down the split vanilla bean and you just scrape up the millions and millions of seeds that are in between the pods so those are all of the vanilla beans there you can actually add the vanilla bean into the mix as well and we'll remove it once the apples are nice and cooked and caramelized now there are a lot of apple fritter recipes out there and some of them actually have you adding raw apple into the dough and i find that when you do that the raw apple creates these little gummy pockets that are really kind of unappetizing so the cooking of the apple in advance what it does is it helps to concentrate the apple flavor but it also rids the apple of a lot of its moisture so i have here three granny smith apples that are cut up into half inch cubes and i'm going to saute them in the butter here with a little bit of sugar this is two tablespoons of granulated sugar just sprinkle it over the top and a quarter teaspoon of ground cinnamon now ground cinnamon adds a really great flavor it's you know a classic kind of combination with apples but cinnamon actually has a gelling power to it similar to cornstarch or something like that where it helps to thicken juices which is really interesting and nice and helpful here when we're making the fritters so this mixture is gonna have to cook down for about four to five minutes and i'm using granny smith apples here and granny smith apples are really great for cooking and baking because an apple that has a little bit more acidity and structure to it really works well the apple will maintain its shape during the cooking process and the frying process all right guys so it's been about four to five minutes here and you can see that a lot of the juices have evaporated from these apples and they're sizzling away nicely here and now it's time to add in our other ingredients which are going to really add a great depth of flavor i have some sparkling apple cider here this is a half cup and i'm going to just pour this over our apples and then two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar which adds a bit of complexity to these apples that will be really nice and will help to contrast all of the sugar that's in the apples here and also in the dough and this just needs to cook until our liquid here has evaporated and the apples are nice and syrupy and that should really only take about two minutes more on this high heat all right our apples look great you can see that the liquid has reduced down to a pretty viscous syrup here and now these apples have to cool completely and while they do i'm going to start making the dough which we're then going to fold these apples into all right guys so our apples are cooling and now it is time to start our fritter dough so in the bowl of a stand mixer here what we're going to do is we're going to add a little bit of milk this is two-thirds of a cup of warm milk you want milk around 100 to 110 degrees that's the ideal temperature for proofing yeast and proofing yeast again is waking the yeast up allowing it time to kind of nourish itself and to start activating and i'm using active dry yeast today this is one packet of active dry yeast and that's a quarter of an ounce this is going right into the bowl of the stand mixer with the milk i'm just going to mix it up a little bit here and i'm going to add some pastry flour now we haven't really used pastry flour on kitchen conundrums but pastry flour is used in a lot of bakeries and restaurants and it's a finer flour it has a medium level amount of protein to it and it's used for a nice kind of luscious silky texture in a lot of baked goods so this is two cups and i'm going to add the pastry flour directly on top of the yeast mixture and so this is going to proof together now for about 15 to 20 minutes and while this is happening i'm going to start to mix together the other ingredients in the dough i'm going to start by cracking some eggs now i just need the egg yolks here for this dough which really adds a nice richness to the dough and i need four large egg yolks in total and to this bowl i'm going to add a little bit of sparkling cider so we use this in the apples and again we're going to use it here in the dough and this is a third of a cup of the sparkling apple cider right here into the bowl with the egg yolks and a half a cup of granulated sugar mix these three ingredients together stream in melted and cooled butter this is a half a stick four tablespoons so one teaspoon of coarse kosher salt this is a half teaspoon of a cinnamon and one tablespoon of vanilla extract and to this mixture we're going to add the remaining pastry flour this is a quarter of a cup of pastry flour and one cup of bread flour now i have one cup and a little extra in here because i'm going to save a little bit and you might have to add it into the dough if the dough is too tacky so reserve about two tablespoons and once we get this all mixed together then we'll add the remaining flour if necessary so i'm going to switch here to a rubber spatula and now since our yeast has had a chance to kind of wake up and proof i'm going to add my wet ingredients this batter to our yeast milk and pastry flour mixture so mix this together on a medium speed just until it comes together and you can see the consistency of the dough and then we'll determine whether or not we need to add the rest of this flour mixture now this is going to be a very tacky dough a very wet dough which is great because in the end you're going to end up with a very delicious and light fritter and i think we're going to need this because the dough is kind of a little bit too liquidy it doesn't have enough structure to it so i'm going to add the remaining two tablespoons of bread flour and i'm going to using the dough hook knead this dough for about four to five minutes in the stand mixer and what that's going to do is it's going to encourage all of the flour and the wet ingredients to mix together and it's going to start to activate the gluten within the bread flour and the pastry flour all right guys it's been about five minutes and the dough is nice and tacky and stringy it's almost like a brioche that's the texture you're looking for here i'm gonna take the dough hook off lightly flour my surface here and i'm going to turn the dough out and just gently knead it into a shape and form it into a ball and then this is going to proof in a oiled bowl for about one and a half hours in a warm spot until it's doubled in bulk and this is going to be the first of three rises so using one of my favorite tools this is a bowl scraper a plastic bowl scraper scrape out your dough i will warn you this is a very wet dough as i had said before so don't be nervous or afraid if it seems too tacky it might be difficult to work with at this stage but in the end it's going to be a really great supple silky dough so now flour your hands a little bit even flour the bench scraper and just bring up the sides of the dough into the center we're really just creating a nice shape and turn this upside down form this into a ball and then this goes right into an oil brushed bowl cover with plastic wrap and again about an hour and a half in a warm spot until it's doubled in bulk and then we're ready to start the apple part all right guys it's been an hour and a half and our dough is nice and puffy you can see that it really has kind of doubled in size i'm going to remove the plastic wrap and i'm going to spread this out on a lightly floured surface you can see how spongy the dough is it's really had time to absorb a lot of the moisture so it's more of a cohesive mass now and now using lightly floured hands stretch this dough out to a 10 by 15 inch rectangle about 10 by 15. so this looks pretty decent and now i'm going to take half of the apples that have cooled completely and spread these over two-thirds of the dough we're kind of replicating the laminating method that you would do for puff pastry or croissant dough but instead of butter we're using our wonderful flavorful apples so spread your apples out in a nice even layer and then we're going to fold the dough over so the side that's not covered is going to be folded over on top and then the side that does have apples on it over here is going to be folded over on this side and don't worry this might be a little bit messy but it doesn't really matter so now we're going to turn the dough pat it out into a 10 by 15 inch rectangle again and then we're going to repeat the process and don't worry you guys if you get little holes in the dough from the apples it's totally fine this is just really a method in incorporating the apples into this stiff dough if you tried to mix this in by hand it wouldn't work so this laminating method really does help to evenly distribute the apples into the dough so spread this out nice and evenly i'm going to flour my hands a little bit bring it over the side that's not coated in apples fold this side over so now we're going to shape this dough into a nice ball another oiled bowl here dough goes in plastic wrap on top and again this is going to proof now until it's doubled in bulk it'll take about a half an hour to proof all right guys so i'm spreading out a little bit of pastry flour on my work surface i have a dutch oven over here heating with a neutral oil so a vegetable oil a grape seed oil something that can reach high temperatures i'm going to take my beautifully proofed dough and again since we have those apples in here it proves at a much faster rate because there's a lot of excess sugar in this dough now so scrape the dough out onto your work surface and i'm patting my dough out to again that same size we're looking for a 10 by 15 inch rectangle but you guys it really doesn't matter you're just looking for something that's about an inch in thickness now generously flower a parchment-lined baking sheet and what we're going to do is we're going to use a two and a half inch cutter here guys i have a round cutter cut out little rounds of your dough and then this goes right onto our parchment lined baking sheet and as i cut in place gently stretching the dough to an oval and it's about four inches in length now and that's just to give it kind of a nice organic shape so you can repeat the process with the remaining dough here and these fritters now need to proof or rest for just a little bit i would say maybe about 10 minutes and by that time our oil should be heated up to 375 degrees and then we are ready to fry these babies up all right guys our oil is up to 375 degrees and it has been about 10 minutes and our fritters have puffed up just ever so slightly here now you want to carefully pick up those fritters and place them into the hot oil and these are going to take about two minutes per side they're going to sink down to the bottom a little bit and then float up to the top don't overcrowd the pan do these in batches make sure you're maintaining the heat so if the temperature of the oil does dip down a little too much you can certainly crank it up a little bit higher so that you're maintaining 375 degrees that will help you to avoid a really soggy fritter because you want a high enough temperature that the outside will brown nicely but it will cook on the inside and add one more so it's been about two minutes maybe about a minute and a half to two minutes here guys and now i'm going to flip these guys over you can start to see that the coloring around the edges is a nice golden brown and so now just using i use a fork but you could use a chopstick or a skewer a metal skewer or you could use a pair of tongs just flip them over gently and again it's going to cook on this side now for another two minutes all right two minutes again guys and these are nice and dark and golden brown look at how amazing these look now drain them on a wire rack set over a rimmed baking sheet and now i'm going to repeat the process with the remaining fritters here so now just to gild the lily here a little bit of that wonderful confectioners sugar glaze i'm using a brush here but you could certainly dip these if you didn't want to use a brush just a very light coating of this white glaze over the top while they're still warm which will help the glaze kind of melt down and become slightly translucent i think these are going to be a real treat for you and your family this is cranking hot guys but look at the inside you can see it's not gummy at all but there are beautiful pockets of apples on the inside the dough is nice and tender and rich and i can't wait to give this a try so delicious this really is the perfect recipe for apple fritters at home i encourage you to give it a try as always any kitchen conundrums you have whether they're baking or savory or whatever write in the comment section below or reach out to us using the hashtag kitchen conundrums enjoy your fritters guys and as always guys click like and subscribe [Music]

Channel: Everyday Food

Views: 911,316

Keywords: Recipe, Recipes, Cooking, Cook, Food, Dinner, Easy meal, Dinner tonight, Everyday Food, Home made, Sarah Carey, Martha Stewart, Family meal, easy cooking, how to, food ideas, quick dinners, fast recipes, easy recipes, quick recipes, apple, fritters, crisp

Id: BlUJa-7Um-E

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018