Perfecting Café du Monde-style Beignets

[Music] hi I'm Philip Dart I'm the chef and owner of create catering and the dining Studio Minneapolis Minnesota today I want to make beet for you beignet are a Marty gr favorite they're tradition in New Orleans but you know what there's nothing that says you can't make them all year round today we're going to make perfect Cafe dumon style beet Cafe dumon has been making these beet for 150 years so they must be doing something right as with any recipe we want to start with high quality ingredients we're going to start with some yeast some warm water not too warm if you go over 105 you might kill your yeast and a little bit of sugar we're going to whisk this all together and make sure that all the yeast dissolves in this bowl the sugar helps activate the yeast so if you're making this recipe at home you'd let this sit for 12 minutes it's called letting the yeast Bloom we'll pretend right now that it's been 12 minutes in a smaller Bowl we're going to add our eggs we're going to add our evaporated milk and we're going to add our salt we're going to whisk This Together very well it's nice and smooth won't take long just like that now we're going to take our egg mixture and pour it back into our yeast mixture and we're going to whisk these together too so it's nice and smooth we're almost done our ready so now we're going to take three cups of our flour and we're going to add that we want to whisk this together until it just starts to come just like that so it kind of looks like pancake patter we remove that and now we're going to add our shortening shortening is a key ingredient here because what we want to do we want to make really nice tender pillowy style beet and this shortening will help cut gluten that might develop gluten is fantastic for bread it makes wonderful chewy crusty breads but we want pillowy tender beignet now we're going to add the rest of our flour and again we're going to stir and stir until it starts to come together and once this starts to come together we're going to turn it out onto our work surface and then we're going to get kind of dirty here cuz we're going to knad this and we want to knad it as little as possible but it's enough to make it smooth so as you can see this is starting to come together we're going to pull this out I'm going to just Stir It by hand just a little bit here now it goes onto our work surface to start kneading we want to get all that flour that's still on the bottom there here we go start to knead see how this is coming together already so I want to fold it over I want to turn it a quarter turn and I want to push with my hand right down same thing I'm going to fold it over and knead it Fold It knead it here we go now this dough is a little bit tacky if you're used to making bread this may throw you for a little bit of a loop but rest assured tacky is good in this case so get into it really let yourself work now it's starting to come together it's just about smooth there we go I can't feel any clumps at all that's exactly what we're looking for so then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take another Bowl I'm going to add just a little bit of cotton seed oil here and I'm going to spread this around this is the bowl that our dough is going to rise in so now put our dough in the bowl we want to cover it with a linen let it sit for 2 hours at room temperature this is a key don't rush it we need this to about double in size all right our dough has risen for 2 hours and here it is you can see how it's virtually doubled in size which is just a wonderful wonderful dough it's very light and Airy so during that two hours I also preheated our cotton seed oil to 370° cotton seed oil is a perfect Med for frying beet it has a neutral flavor really lends itself to delicate desserts cotton seed oil and beet go back 1 15 years that's a pretty long history so I'm not about to mess with that we're going to use 100% pure cotton seed oil for this our next step is to flower our board lightly and we're going to turn out our dough see how nice and Airy that is we're going to put a little bit of flour on top we're just going to rub that in and now we're going to roll we want to roll to about a qu of an inch so not too thick not too thin there we go by letting that dough rise for two hours you can see all the air pockets here and it makes it really easy to roll out so now it's time to cut our beignet we're going to cut just a little bit of a corner off here to do our test our cotton seed oil is 370° we want to test that temperature by dropping just a little piece of our beet in and if it floats within 8 seconds which it magically did already we know that our fryer oil is ready to fry a batch of beet I'm going to put a little bit more flour on top of here and now I'm going to cut now I like the traditional Square beet but you can get a cookie cutter you can cut whatever size or shape you want there we go so now I'm going to gently drop these in and I like to use the basting method and that means I just gently wash the oil over the top of the beignet and this will help it puff up really quickly this takes about a minute to a minute and 20 seconds to do and we want to pull them out we want to flip them when they're perfectly golden brown if you don't have a fryer like this at home maybe you have a a smaller fryer uh you can cut your beignet as small as you want uh if M you can also use a uh a cast iron pan with a thermometer but I'll tell you one thing that you have to have is 100% cotton seed oil so now you can see we flip these over they're perfectly golden brown about another 15 or 20 seconds I'm going to continue to base this side cotton seed oil is available at Bass bro shops and it's also available at any number of other sporting goods stores there we go now we're going to pull these right out of the fryer they're just perfect I'm going to let these drain for just a few seconds uh at home you can use a plate with a paper towel on it let it drain for a few seconds and then what you want to do is cover it in powdered sugar and now we add these to the ones that we've already fried and nothing will finish these off like a nice cafe dumon Style Cafe Olay for more information on cotton seed oil visit cottonseed oil tour.com [Music]

Channel: CottonseedOilTour

Views: 443,954

Keywords: beignet, Mardi Gras, Café du Monde, fry oil, cottonseed oil, video contest

Id: 7THoDg9uKGs

Length: 7min 39sec (459 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2010