How To Make Donuts with Erin McDowell | Dear Test Kitchen

ready to eat some doughnuts always the answer to that you would like wake me up in the middle of the night are you ready for some huh right now welcome to video studio my name is Josh I'm here with Aaron Aaron what are we doing today we're gonna make donuts one of my favorite things to make and of course they're delicious to eat as well yeah and their yeast doughnuts which are my favorite but how do you feel about doughnuts are you a cake doughnut person yeast doughnut person I prefer yeast doughnut but I'm I will eat any doughnut my turn say yes because these doughnuts are so good it's actually a recipe passed down from my great-great grandma that I've just changed a little but it's so good it withstood the test of time it's great we're gonna make this real easy for you today and you're gonna walk away and also delicious yes they're so good that's the thing at the end of the day you really can't top making them and eating them warm from scratch so it's worth that little bit of effort and I promise I'll pep talk everyone through it Aaron I'm gonna leave the doughnut making to you here all right I gotta I'm just gonna kind of come back when they're warm and ready I see how you work okay it's fine when they're ready to eat I'll let the expert do what they do I'll take it from here see you soon okay sounds good all right so I'm so excited to make these Donuts like I said these are yeast doughnuts so that can scare people for a lot of reasons but I promise it's really simple and you actually probably have most of the ingredients already in your pantry so I'm gonna start by adding my flower to my mixer bowl and I'm gonna do a pinch of the nutmeg you could do freshly grated nutmeg too or this is already ground nutmeg and a pinch of cinnamon I also need my sugar and I'm just going to go ahead and mix those two combined or just a second because I don't want the yeast to get to direct of contact with the sugar sometimes that makes the yeast angry just a quick mix is all we need to do and then we can add our yeast this is a tablespoon of instant yeast just gonna mix it for a second and then I'm gonna add the rest of the ingredients we've got our warm milk and butter which I'm gonna add over here and our water and then to eggs and the eggs and the butter and the milk also keep this dough rich it's an enriched dough and that gives it that kind of buttery delicious kind of richer flavor than something like a baguette that doesn't have anything in it except flour and water so we've got it's also gonna help them Brown really beautifully so we've got that kind of combination of a really rich taste and then we'll finish it off with a sweet icing and it'll be so delicious so we're just gonna mix it on low speed for a few minutes until the dough starts to come together at first it's gonna look pretty wet and then it will start coming together and especially when we kick up the speed a little bit and basically we just want to mix this until a uniform dough forms it's about three to four minutes in total but you can kind of keep an eye on it eyeball it while you're working you don't want to over mix the dough like this because that can start to make it tough but like I said it's pretty easy to tell when we get to the end here this recipe is just a slight tweak of a recipe that I found in a family recipe box that was my great-great grandma's and it said yeast doughnuts at the top in her handwriting and I just switched a couple of things I used butter instead of shortening for the most part this recipe has been in my family and been passed down for years and years and years because it is just that good okay so we're about there and basically what we're looking for is just for the dough to be smooth and evenly combined like I said it's gonna look pretty sticky right now but don't let that make you think that this is gonna be a hard dough to work with it is not so the dough gains strength as it rises which basically ensures that it's going to be easy for you when you go to roll it out you're not gonna need to be battling this sticky dough just gonna give it a good scrape make sure it's all combined and then I'm just gonna dump it into this oiled bowl I've just greased it with a little bit of a neutral oil and you could use nonstick spray or vegetable oil or even butter here and scrape it get all your dough out because we want to make as many Donuts as we possibly can and then we're gonna let this rise I went ahead and put this into a pretty large bowl because I want this dough to expand by almost two times before I go to do the next step so one of the easiest ways to do that is to put it in a bowl that's about twice the size of the dough itself so when this dough gets up close to the rim of this bowl I'll know that it has risen enough in rich dough's like this can take a little bit longer to rise because of the butter the eggs the milk that sort of weigh them down but about an hour should do the trick in a nice warm place and then at that point if you're want your Donuts tomorrow you don't want to wake up early and be making donut dough you can put the dough that's risen for an hour into the fridge for up to 12 hours before proceeding or you can go ahead and use it right away after the end of one hour it's up to you so I'm gonna go put this in a warm place for one hour covered with plastic wrap all right so I'm gonna let that dough that I made rise I already have one that I made yesterday and did sort of the overnight method it rose up to the top rim of this bowl but I punched it down so you can see that now it's it's back down but that doesn't mean it hasn't risen it's just a nice cold dough that I punched down and it's ready to roll out into Donuts and what all we need is a rolling pin and a little bit of flour for rolling it out on and then we need our donut cutter you can use a lot of different things as a donut cutter you can use different circle cookie cutters so you can use kind of a larger one and then use a small one to punch out the center you can even just use a glass and then use make sure you flour the edge of the glass each time before you press it into the dough and then you can use a shot glass to make the donut hole in the center but of course I have a fancy tool which is this donut cutter which evenly cuts both the outer round and makes them just perfect so that's what I'll be using today so I'm gonna go ahead and dust my work surface with flour and you can be pretty generous you don't need to worry about being too light we don't want to incorporate too much flour during the rolling because that can make the doughnut a little bit more tough but we're also not gonna have to roll this out that much that's one of the things that is really unintimidating about donuts versus other things you want a nice fluffy doughnut so they can actually be pretty thick when you're done rolling them out so the first thing I like to do is sort of shape the dough into a little bit of a square shape just so it stays even while I roll it out a little flour on top and I'm just gonna roll it out to about an inch thick so again this isn't like pie dough or tart dough or anything where we're trying to roll cookie dough or we're trying to roll it really thin we want a pretty thick piece when we're all said and done we just want to focus on making it even as even as possible and you can sort of turn your dough around I'm stretching it at the edges to keep it sort of squared off that just helps me keep it even and I'm just applying an even pressure as I roll out these donuts they already smell really good I can smell the cinnamon and the Nutmeg we're not even frying them yet and they still smell good all right we're already almost there I'm just gonna give it one more pass here okay I think we're there so I've got my nice even dough and I'm just gonna punch out with my donut cutter and I'm gonna go all the way to the edge because I want to really maximize the amount I'm gonna get I like to save the donut holes to test the oil to make sure it's at good frying temperature and the donut holes are sticking a little bit so I'm just gonna dip my cutter and flour and see if that helps so I'm just gonna bundle up that extra dough and we can just separate all our doughnuts and doughnut holes oh they're so cute this is my other favorite part about making doughnuts is they're just adorable at every stage when we put icing on them and sprinkles I may not even invite Josh back I'm just gonna eat donuts in here by myself just kidding we'll make sure Josh comes back let's roll out our scraps at least one time I'm just gonna knead it together gently only so we don't have a ton of lines but sort of you can tell that we pushed all the scraps together and this time I'm just gonna try to use some of the flour that's already on the surface so I don't use too too much but right after that first one we rolled it'll be no problem to roll out again this will make about a baker's dozen of donuts with when we roll out all the scraps which is a really good amount but this recipe also doubles easily it'll still fit in the standard mixer if you double it so if you wanted to make filled Donuts stuffed with jelly or pudding or cream or something you would just cut around so you wouldn't need the inside donut hole you would just cut around from your Donuts and then after frying you could fill them with anything from whipped cream to lemon curd to custard if some great filled donut recipes on food 52 they're some of my favorites that you think you're eating a delicious doughnut and then there's even another surprise inside so I think we're good we can roll out this scrap one more time and get one or two more and then we're ready to fry I know that frying is a pretty scary thing for a lot of people but I'm here to put your mind at ease for one thing I don't even mess with a thermometer or anything when I'm frying I just use the donut holes to help me determine if the temperature is just right I like to fry all the donut holes first because then if you do have any problems with your oil if it's running too hot or it's a little too cold you get those all worked out before you put in the big full donuts so you don't miss anything important up so the first thing I'm gonna do is grab one of my donut holes and I'm gonna add it I think my oil is about right and I'm gonna add it in and see how my oil is looking now if it's come to temperature the donut hole should rise to the top which it just did and it should start to brown pretty quickly so we're definitely probably in good shape here one of the things to look for to know if your door your oil is too hot is if the dough starts browning really fast so as you can see right now it rose to the top but it's only just starting to brown in this little spot here so that's a good sign that we've got a good temperature of oil if you do want to take a temperature with a thermometer and just be sure we're aiming for about 325 to 350 somewhere in that range and it's okay for it to fluctuate a little bit while you're frying there I'd got my one donut hole you can just kind of flip them around the donut holes are harder to get evenly brown because they love to float up at the top sometimes it's hard to get the blonde side to go downward another thing to remember when you're adding dough into or anything into hot frying oil is that the temperature of the item you're adding is gonna bring the oil temperature down so if you add too many donuts all at once and then all of a sudden you notice the donuts aren't browning that's probably a sign that you just need to turn the heat back up I'm using a nice neutral oil here I like to use vegetable oil or canola oil you could use safflower oil peanut oil just anything really neutral and that can heat evenly even at a high temperature like we're talking here 325 to 350 and you really don't have to worry about adding too many at once in terms of crowding the pan with the little donut holes when it comes time to adding Donuts you're gonna want to make sure that you don't put too many in at one time just for the sake of having room for all of them you'll see we can probably do two or three at a time so some other concerns about frying oil just while these guys finish up people worry a lot about kind of the mess of frying so one of my best tips for that is to use a nice deep pot so that way if you have any splatters or anything they sometimes still sort of stay in the vicinity of the pot itself you can see that I just have a couple inches of oil in this pot here maybe three inches ish oil and that is really all you need you can always go deeper but the more oil you use the longer it's gonna take for it to heat up and the more you're gonna have to deal with later so when I'm just doing a single recipe like this I like to just use as much as I think all me the three inches is about great for donuts and then I'll only have to worry about discarding three inches worth of oil when all is said and done so I'm gonna uncover a few of our donut babies here and drop them in to the fryer one thing to be careful of when you drop a donut in is that the dough is pretty soft so if you hold it for too long above the dough you can see that it will elongate the hole here and if you want to keep them a little nicer and rounder you just want to try to keep them more together as you drop them in and drop them in pretty quickly so that you don't worry risk losing that perfect round shape that we're working so hard to attain and I'm just gonna go ahead and fry these the donut holes take about a minute minute and a half these will take a little bit longer just to make sure that the dough is cooked all the way through to the center when they brown on the one side you can flip them over it's really not a bad thing to keep flipping them repeatedly but I tend to like to try to just flip them once and in a size a pot about this big we're gonna probably not want to do any more than four at one time just to make sure that there's enough room for the oil to sort of circulate around the donuts while we're working and we're gonna do talk about a couple different finishes today but one of the finishes is cinnamon sugar and cinnamon sugar you want to make sure that you add that to the donuts while they're still pretty warm so this first batch I'm gonna go ahead and cinnamon sugar right when they come out of the fryer here I'll let them cool for just a minute until they're cool enough to handle I love this level of golden brown for a donut that for me is perfect I'm gonna take that guy out I'm draining them over here on a rack that is over a couple layers of absorbent paper towels just to catch any drips and grease that we have going on you're seeing I'm gonna have to adjust the temperature a couple of times while I work and that's totally normal okay while those finish up we can dip these guys into the cinnamon sugar I'll go ahead and do all the doughnut holes and you can see what I was talking about some of the doughnut holes have a little bit of a blonde side that's okay the cinnamon sugar will help even them out this is cinnamon sugar you can just make it to taste I put a couple heaping teaspoons of cinnamon in here and you could add other things too vanilla sugar would be delicious citrus sugar all of those things would be really really yummy and then while the doughnuts are still warm you want to really coat them and make sure you put some in the center of the hole oh yeah oh my gosh I want to eat this okay take these guys out let them cool for just a second on the rack because you don't want to be touching them right after they come out of the hot fryer oil but you don't want to let them cool down too much or that cinnamon sugar isn't gonna stick to them and then I think for the rest of these doughnuts we'll go ahead and glaze them which is so much fun cinnamon sugar is so delicious and so easy that it's a really nice nice thing to do but the glaze just gets really fancy and fun all right now we fried all our doughnuts and we are coming towards my most favorite part which is glazing or decorating the doughnuts so there's different ways to make glazes and I'm going to show you a couple of my favorites starting with the simplest all of these bowls just have powdered sugar in them and to start off I'm just gonna make a simple vanilla glaze that just uses some milk and a little vanilla extract so I just eyeball this but you basically just want to add it about a tablespoon or so at a time until you make a nice glaze that all comes together now there's two different kinds of glazes there's sort of a thin all-over glaze like think about what you're probably going to think of when you hear glazed donut a thin all-over coating or there's something more like an icing that goes on the top they're actually both the same just differing levels of moisture inside of them so with this vanilla glaze I'll make it a little bit thinner to show you what an all-over glaze looks like and then for the fruit glazes that we're gonna make I'll make them a little bit thicker so they're more just for the top of the donut and now that I'm almost done I'm gonna add a little vanilla extract to this too or a lot whoops luckily that's one of those things it's okay to add a lot of so I'm just gonna whisk this until it's nice and smooth and that's a nice all-over glaze consistency you don't want it too thin or it's all just gonna run right off the donut so I'm gonna set that one aside for now and I'm gonna make a couple of fruit glazes which are super-fun and end up beautiful colors totally naturally so this is raspberry puree that I made myself I just cooked pint of raspberries with a little bit of sugar in it and cooked it until it got all nice and soft and then strained it to remove the seeds you can do this with almost any kind of fruit you could also just buy purees sometimes they're available in the freezer section of grocery stores whatever you want to do you can really do no wrong you can also just use fruit juice it just isn't gonna be as strong of a flavor so I'm just gonna actually add the raspberry puree right in here and you could also use Jam for this you could kind of warm up a little bit of jam on the stove and then let it cool a little bit before you add it to your powdered sugar but these make just the most incredible vibrant beautiful colors and they make incredible tasting glazes as well so I'm just gonna mix this oh this is gonna be such a pretty color so you can see the difference in texture of this glaze I'm making it much thicker so it's sort of just a top glaze for this and you see it can fit thickly is falling off my whisk not in like a long continuous stream so that's a nice thickness for that I'm gonna just set em aside and then I'm gonna make my last glaze which I'm using mango puree this I just bought at a gourmet food store I did not make this one myself but again you could you could just use thawed frozen mango so you don't even have to mess with cutting them and this is gonna make such a gorgeous color and an incredible tasting glaze to boot I love mango so you can really make any flavor of glaze you want you could make chocolate glaze by throwing cocoa powder into the powdered sugar here you could also just use a thin ganache you could chocolate with cream to make kind of ganache glaze on these you could use coconut milk instead of regular milk to make a coconut glaze really the sky is the limit and that's one of my favorite parts about making donuts is there's so many opportunities to be creative with the finishes so I'm just gonna whisk this oh my gosh look how pretty that is beautiful so we've got another nice thick glaze here very pretty okay I think we're ready to start dipping them and when you want to glaze something over fully you can pour the glaze over or you can just dip them in and really submerge them in the glaze yep this is the part where you get your hands a little dirty and that's okay so then you're just gonna let some of the glaze run off and you're gonna invert it back onto your rack and you're gonna see the glaze will continue to kind of run down the sides here like that you want your donuts to cool a little bit before you glaze them or the glaze will really run off so if you're trying to make a really thin glaze that's an okay thing they can still be a little warm but when you want these just kind of on the top glazes you're definitely gonna want those donuts to cool a little bit or the glaze is just gonna run right off the sides so this is a thicker glaze so the way that we'll dip it will be a little bit different so we're just gonna dip it and you really want to make sure for this one you want to leave room for it to run down the sides you're not going to dip it fully into the glaze and you can see even when I pull it out that it comes off a little bit different and then you're just gonna sort of shake it to even out that top so that you don't get any lines or anything all right mango that's so pretty I love when something tastes as good as it looks and this mango definitely will oh my gosh so using powdered sugar for your glazes also helps make them real shiny and the powdered sugar will also set as the donuts set so you'll end up with kind of an outer layer so they're not going to keep being drippy and goopy on you if you let them set for a little while first so while the doughnut glaze is still sort of soft we can add sprinkles or any other kind of adornments to them so I'm gonna do that now I'm gonna add some sprinkles I'm officially having too much fun let's add some fun sprinkles rainbow so when I moved into my current house I thought it would be so fun to have an entire cabinet of sprinkles but the cabinet's already overflow if I have too many sprinkles so I now have multiple shelves and a true sprinkle addiction so let me add some sprinkles to that one while it's still wet so you can see kind of how quickly that glaze sets up just a couple of minutes and your sprinkles may not stick anymore this is a great thing to do with your family too you can do all the hard work of frying the donuts and bring them in for this part the decorating part the mess making part but I wanted to have all this fun for myself I'll just invite Josh back to help me eat them okay so which one do you feel compelled to try first I'm not gonna tell you what any of them are uh I sort of want to try a mini first let's do it I'm okay I'm gonna do that with you because it's a perfect they're just cinnamon sugar Cheers donut cheers Cheers [Music] really light and fluffy right this recipe also sort of has a little bit of a crunchy exterior like crunch is gonna be the wrong word for crisp so then it almost amplifies that fluffiness like it's substantial hmm it's not like a total okay pick another I'm gonna do a red one if that helps you all right I'll join you for that thank you right um cheers again total silence no offense to the little do you think you know what it is on top okay like this is raspberry that's mango you don't forget when someone tells you especially when you know you're gonna eat them in like 30 minutes yeah it's like I had overheard that early I'm sorry no that's fair doughnut itself is such a perfect vehicle for whatever you exactly and then the doughnuts are not too sweet either that's one thing that I think is really important people think of doughnuts is a really sweet thing but the dough itself all these doughnuts have had a quarter cup of sugar in it so we can really go nuts with those finishes and make them really sweet and like I saw your museum pause for the beginning you had like a little bit of cinnamon and a little nutmeg in there yeah Joe you'll be able to taste it or anything it's pretty soft so you can taste it but it is just a little pinch yes please do cuz it's just a little pinch so knowing that it's in there you might but it's more like just that little bit of warmth that gives the dough so especially once the glaze and stuff is added this is my goal in life it's stupendously good yeah to make people this happy with baked goods but particularly doughnuts so I'm gonna have to watch this whole episode now and sort of figure out exactly what you did this looks so beautiful I can't thank you oh and it's so much easier than you think it is I'm certain thanks so much for coming on okay I'm happy too especially if it results in doughnut thing doughnut forget to Like and subscribe for more of these wonderful videos

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Views: 1,254,132

Rating: 4.8717165 out of 5

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, recipes, recipes for breakfast, recipes for kids, breakfast recipes, breakfast ideas, breakfast, doughnut recipe, doughnut, donut recipe, donuts, donut hole, how to make donuts, how to make donuts at home, how to make donut glaze, how to make donut holes, homemade donuts, erin mcdowell, donuts recipe

Id: OY2edngsL6o

Length: 26min 53sec (1613 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 07 2019