- Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making old fashioned donuts, so let's get started. First off, we're gonna
be sifting three cups or 360 grams of cake
flour into a medium bowl. And here's the deal, these are cake donuts. They're not a leavened yeast donut. So the whole joy is having a delicious melt-in-your-mouth crumb on the inside with that crisp outer edge. If you don't have cake flour, you can still make these donuts. All purpose flour will work fine. Just use 3/4 of a cup of that and add in about two
tablespoons of cornstarch. These donuts have to get nice and puffy so they have all those fried edges. Two teaspoons of baking
powder will do the trick. Now we want one teaspoon of salt. This gives our donuts a
little bit of contrast and I'm using kosher salt. If you use fine grain salt, use a little bit less. It's time to sift it out. Cake flour can actually be
a little bit lumpy sometimes so it's nice to give it a sift. Now in a large bowl we're gonna combine our butter and sugar. The donuts themselves only need
four tablespoons of butter. So like 57 grams. In you go. Just make sure it's room temperature. And by the way, you can see I'm
using a hand mixer for this. If you use a stand mixer, it's gonna be a little bit difficult just because there's not that much butter for it to whip up. 2/3 of a cup. It's 133 grams. These donuts, by the way, took a lot of recipe
testing to get just right because they're Brian's favorite donut. I just could not put out anything less than perfection for this. I'm gonna show you later on in the video some things that can go
wrong and why that happens. I want this to get nice and fluffy. It's gonna be about a
minute of mixing on high. That looks light and fluffy-ish. Right now, we're gonna
add in three egg yolks. The yolks are gonna give us a lot of richness and also help
hold things together. They're a bit of a binding agent. One of the things I like
about old fashioned donuts is because it's a cake-based donut, you can make the dough ahead of time and just leave it in the fridge. There's no yeast to worry about here. Set these aside. You could use them to make some
delicious meringue cookies. Ah, these are one of my favorite treats. Now we're gonna mix this
up and as you can see, the egg yolks are really
gonna help the butter and sugar combine into a wonderful paste. This is about two minutes of mixing and it's gonna be really wonderful and creamy when you're done. That looks so nice. Look at this color. Ah, it's like the most wonderful
pastel lemon in the world. I once had pants like this in high school with the same color and
my mom said I was brave. (John chuckling) I'm scraping the bowl down right now and it's time for a magical ingredient you might not have seen on
the channel in a minute, sour cream. Oh my gosh. One of my favorite things to use. This, like yogurt, adds so
much moisture into your dough but because it's thick, the batter's not gonna spread out. It'll hold its shape. It also has a little bit of acid, which means that you
are gonna get even more of a tender crumb and it'll
be a little bit fluffier too. If you can't get ahold of it, plain yogurt is a good substitute as well. We're gonna mix this up
now and today, by the way, we're making a plain old fashioned donut with a vanilla glaze. A classic that Brian loves but so many variations you could add too. Lemon zest, orange zest. You could make them chocolate. You can let me know in the comments what your favorite flavor
is and if you'd like to see that video on the channel. Now it's time to add our
flour mixture into the wet. And one thing I will
tell you is this dough is so simple to make, as you can see. However, the whole trick of these donuts comes in the shaping and the frying. Keep an eagle eye out for
that part of the video. I'm mixing this on low, lowest settings, until it's almost
combined, just like that. Now I'm gonna use my spatula
and just fold it together. You do not wanna over mix your batter for these donuts or any other baked good. Just until you see the flour disappear. You know that when you
over mix the batter, you're activating protein in the flour and you're just gonna get
a little bit of a tougher, less moist melt-in-your
mouth delicious treat. I'm really just looking for that flour to not have any streaks and
this dough is gonna get chilled. So one nice thing is any
moisture that's residual hanging out in places here or there will soak into little crumbs of flour and it'll come together. Now we're gonna scrape our
bowl down one final time, get all of that dough off of your spatula. We're gonna cover this up and refrigerate for at least an hour but you can do this overnight
for delicious morning donuts. Towards the end of your chill time, you're gonna grab a
big, heavy bottomed pot. Two inches of oil right into our pot. You also want a thermometer for this pot. The oil temperature is really important to get the perfect old fashioned donut. We're gonna place this over medium heat and while it heats up we
can roll our dough out. We're going to be sprinkling
some flour onto a surface. You can be a little bit liberal with this. And plop your dough right onto that. This dough is wet and
full of deliciousness, so feel free to use a
little bit more flour so things don't stick. A little flour for the top too. Grab a rolling pin with some more flour. We wanna roll this out to be half an inch. Too thick and it's too thick. Too thin and it'll dry out
and this won't puff up enough. So you wanna be a little
bit precise in this step. Part of the joy of frying
anything is that crisp, crunchy exterior, and the inside of anything
fried is basically steamed. It's steam heat from the inside that warms it up and cooks it. So we want to have like pillowy soft, melt-in-your-mouth donuts. Part of that is the thickness
that we roll them out to. I have no ability to
measure things with my eyes, so breaking out my circle cutters. That is three inches. And for the inside, I
want 1 1/4 quarter inch. This by the way, is one of
my favorite kitchen tools. It's just a set of
circle cutters that I use for everything from cookies,
to biscuits, to donuts. We're gonna flour our cutters just like you would for biscuits. Then cut them out. Don't forget to grab a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. All right, one donut down. If you're wondering what
my favorite donut is, which is a totally valid question, it's a cruller. But on the West Coast,
we call 'em crullers. Don't worry about the
edges looking perfect because you actually want
kinda like a gnarly finish to these old fashioned donuts. The amazingness, as Brian
frequently tells me, comes from that texture. The giant groove in the
middle, those split edges. And I do have a question for you which I want you to
answer in the comments. Brian tells me that on the West Coast, 'cause this is his favorite donut, that all the donuts
have like little ridges. You're gonna see what that
looks like in a minute. But he doesn't see them as
much here where we live. So let me know if your donuts have ridges where you get them. Okay, we're almost through this set. In between, if they're sticking a lot, you can just run your
finger along the edge of your cutter and re-flour it. And you can see here, I ran out of big spaces
so just re-roll the dough, it's no big deal. If this was a glazed donut, I'd be kind of annoyed if
there was like any kind of weird, craggy surface. But for old fashioned
donuts, it's totally fine. I used all my scraps,
meaning there were no scraps. So we're gonna use our 1 1/4 inch cutter and just cut those centers out. By this time, your oil
should be just about ready. So keep an eye on it. I was tripping. It's a one inch center for the middle. So cut those out. These are your delicious
old fashioned donut holes, which is my favorite part of the donut. One, two, three, four, five, six seven, eight, nine, 10, 11,
12 donuts with a lot of holes. This is the optional step for Brian. I'm gonna use a knife and cut most of them so you can see what happens. And I'm not cutting, I'm gently scoring four times
on the outside of the donut and that will just allow them to kind of puff up and segment. Brian says that the most joyous part of eating these is
breaking them into pieces. By doing this, you're
giving more surface area for the crispy part and the glaze. I'll leave a couple unscored too so you can see the difference. These are ready to go into
the oil and while they fry, I wanna talk about the temperature and why that makes a big difference. You can do this in batches
of two or three if you want. Definitely do a test batch of one donut just to see how it comes out. I'm gonna place these in
carefully with my hands but I have a spider ready to drag 'em out. This is a must have tool for frying. These guys are frying. I'm gonna toss some of the
donut holes in there as we well and just keep an eye on the thermometer because as you add the donuts in, they're cold, it'll bring
the temperature down. So you're gonna play with
the heat a little bit as you fry and turn the
heat up, turn the heat down, just keep it in the range
of 330 to 340 if you can. You're gonna watch these
guys sink to the bottom but then they will float back up, and for the first side they're
gonna for about two minutes or fry for two minutes. Then you're gonna flip 'em over and it's gonna be two minutes more. You can fry them a little bit more to be perfectly golden if you want. It's really up to you on how deeply golden you want your donuts to be. Ooh, okay. Pop those out. And we're gonna repeat this
out for the rest of our donuts. So you really have to be
careful about the temperature. It is so easy for the oil
to get too hot or too cold. Just keep an eye on it and like really prioritize the thermometer as much as you are prioritizing watching those donuts for golden-ness. For the glaze, we're adding 2 1/2 cups or 300 grams of powdered
sugar into a bowl. You could be totally loosey goosey with the glaze recipe here. Gonna add five tablespoons of water here. I'm also adding 1/2 a
teaspoon or so of vanilla and a little pinch of salt. Scale's all done and
I'll whisk this together. I wanna see a really thin glaze, not like a drizzling consistency that you would use on a bundt cake. This is a coating glaze that'll
become almost invisible. So there we can see really watery. That's what I want it to look like. Seeing all the donuts together, you can totally tell the
difference between oil that was perfectly in
the range of 330 to 340. Nice, craggy surface, cracked open on top. And when the oil got a little bit hot, it's just sealed into place. Not as much cracking, still delicious, but less of that signature
old fashioned look. So I actually just mixed
in an extra tablespoon and a half of water. Really eyeball it. It's up to you on what look
you want the donuts to have. It's gonna be delicious either way. Dip them in halfway through. You can shake off some of the excess. And then just let them dry and become set. If your donuts are really hot, the glaze will kind of melt over them. These, I mean, they feel hot to me but they're on the warm side. So you wanna have a thinner glaze that can just drizzle through and really highlight
the shape of the donuts. You don't wanna cover that up. Golden, crispy, melt-in-your
mouth amazingness. (donut crunching) That is so delicious. This really might be
my new favorite donut. I hope you get a chance
to make this recipe and if you like this video, check out my donut playlist.
