Pastry Chef School: Donuts and other deep fried baked good
“Donut eat a whole tray of donuts”
This week in pastry school we deep fried pastries: donuts, beignets, crullers, fritters, cannoli and more.
These Old-Fashioned Glazed Donuts were a great example of glazing donuts. A well-glazed donut will only have the top half glazed without the glaze running down the sides.
How to glaze only the top half of a donut? Keep glaze under seran wrap until ready to use. Dunk donut in and move it around. Pick up the donut and let it drip. As the dripping slows down, start rotating your wrist to move the glaze, pool together and it’ll keep dripping. Once glaze stops dripping, place on wired rack to cool.
These beautiful Pastry Cream Filled Donuts tasted great. To get that line in the center, we fried one side first and then within 30 seconds flipped over using chop-sticks to fry the other side. The filling is a loose pastry cream made with cake flour and without any cornstarch.
How much filling is enough filling? When I picked up these donuts and dropped them from 1" high, there was an audible thump sound in the room. I really like the notion of a fat kid going into a bakery holding two donuts and choosing the heaviest of the two.
These Cannoli are just beautiful. To make them we made a dough from AP flour, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, marsala wine, and a bit of sugar, salt and cinnamon. That ferments refrigerated overnight and gets sheeted thin like pasta dough would. Then stamp out circles, fold into tubes and glue together using whole egg mixture. Those tubes are then deep fried at 350°F, left to cool and piped full of filling.
What’s in this Cannoli Filling? It’s sweet ricotta, chopped chocolate, chopped candied orange and a bit of sambuca liqueur. We then decorated with chopped pistachios.
These Buckwheat Beignets are made from a 4:1 ratio AP flour : buckwheat flour, milk, eggs, butter with a bit of sugar, salt, vanilla, orange zest and instant yeast. The dough is mixed, left to ferment for 1h on floor, 4h refrigerated, divided into 14g/28b rolled balls, left to proof for 45m, deep fried at 375°F and coated in vanilla sugar.
Why is the appearance for these so rustic? The dough is super wet and working with it at room temperature leaves indents in the dough that then show up after frying. To make more classically straight edged beignets the dough has to be a lot stiffer.
These Parmesan Cruller are choux dough w/ sugar and parmesan cheese added to it that then gets deep fried (at a temperature range between 320°F–360°F). This isn’t a true cruller in the sense that it isn’t a rectangular dough that gets twisted.
These Apple Fritters tasted and look great. The dough is fermented and rolled into a rectangle, half of which gets covered with filling. The filling is apples cooked down with sugar and lemon juice, and finally gets sprinkled with a cinnamon-flour mixture.
Why do Fritters look burned after deep frying? Apple fritters get fried for a pretty long time to cook the insides and they come out looking pretty burned. However by just applying a warm vanilla white glaze they look a medium-light brown instead of burned.
This Coffee-Chocolate Dessert is an ode to both chocolate and coffee. What’s in this dessert?
- The cake is a foam opera cake w/ chocolate liqueur.
- On top of it is a chocolate cremeux which just ended up being a 180°F angalsie emulsified with chocolate. The cake cuts into square molds which then has the cremeux poured into them and left to cool.
- On top of it are two isomalt-coffee chips with whipped coffee ganache in between.
- In the cup there’s a coffee granita with the same whipped coffee ganache but whipped to a more loose consistency.
- On the plate there are coffee fluid gel dots.
To make the chips we combined espresso coffee powder with powdered isomalt, sprinkled into circular stencils and baked in a still oven until caramelized. Once baked we folded the silpats to create that angle we were looking for.
Read more about my adventures in pastry school by reading about last week’s plated desserts:
