Of course, I never opened the book or removed the labels from the pan. Most of March was spent traveling. One of my work colleagues left the company in April, so things in the office started to pick up. Another work colleague left the company in June, so I was headed into the Independence Day holiday with no plans. Other than maybe to knock a book off the pile of my pleasure reading stack.
And then I made the mistake of opening an email from the cookware company that operates the local cooking school. Their summer sale advertising caught me in a moment of weakness and, long story short, I ended up registering for a Global Doughnuts cooking class offered in the afternoon on the Independence Day holiday. I pretty much forgot about having done that until Bea stopped by desk in the office on the Monday (or Tuesday?) before Independence Day. We had been chatting about our plans for the holiday - she was catching up with her best friend; I was just chilling at the house - for a good five minutes when I suddenly remembered that I had registered for the doughnut class. Bea was intrigued, even though I couldn’t quite articulate what a “global doughnut” was. Since she and her best friend still had no concrete plans for their time together, Bea suggested that they join me at the cooking school. Her best friend agreed; that’s how the three of us ended up in doughnut class together.
What are Global Doughnuts?
The global doughnuts class turned out to feature three recipes for doughnut-like confections from North American and Western Europe. We started with bomboloni from Italy, which are circles of a deep-fried yeasted dough that are typically filled with something sweet. We would be filling ours with Nutella. Then we progressed to beignets from New Orleans, which are also puffs of deep-fried yeasted dough. Every time that I’ve had these from Cafe du Monde, I seem to have been wearing a black top, which I inevitably got covered in white powdered sugar. Churros (with a Mexican chocolate sauce) were our last recipe. These require a completely different dough from the others: a pâte á choux dough as opposed to a yeasted dough. Basically, the class consisted of learning how to make the three types of dough, and learning how to properly deep fry food. Which was completely fine by me!
We started the class with the bomboloni dough recipe because it was a yeasted dough that needed to rise for about an hour before we could shape it. The recipe started with proofing the yeast, water, and sugar for about ten minutes; however, we used SAF yeast, which was a type of instant yeast that required no proofing. Normally, when baking with yeast from the supermarket (like Red Star or Fleischmans), the yeast has to be mixed into the room temperature and allowed to set until it is bubbling. With the SAF yeast, we were able to mix it up and move on to the next step of the recipe without waiting.
For me, the hardest part of making the bomboloni dough was remembering to start the mixer out slowly so that the dry ingredients didn’t puff all over the place. That’s how easy the recipe was! Essentially, it was just yeast, sugar, water, milk, salt, eggs, melted butter, and flour beaten by a mixer until smooth. Once the dough was smooth, we set it into a proofing drawer at about 90F for about an hour so that the yeast would work to raise the dough to twice its original size. Of course, in the absence of a proofing drawer, the bowl could go into a 90F oven (if the one in your house goes that low) or just into a warmish place.
Beignets
The beignet dough was so similar to the bomboloni dough that we didn’t need to clean the mixer bowl between the two recipes. However, unlike the bomboloni dough, we did proof the yeast first by mixing it with the water in a small glass and then setting it aside until we needed to add it to the mix.
Despite what the recipe said, we didn’t need to use separate bowls for different steps; we just used the one (dirty) mixer bowl. The recipe started out with the sugar, salt, and milk in the mixer with a paddle attachment. After that was mixed together, we gradually added in most of the flour and let that go until smooth. The butter was next into the mixer, but we had to break the into pieces using our fingers to help it combine into the dough. Then the yeast mixture went in, followed by the remainder of the flour. At that point, we checked to see how soft and wet the dough was. Fortunately, the chef instructor had adjusted the amount of flour before class, so our dough was perfect and didn’t require any additional flour. Once the finished, it got covered and stuck in the refrigerator. Since it needed to be refrigerated for approximately four hours, we wouldn’t be using that dough for our class; the chef instructor already had a dough ready for us to use.
After its turn in the refrigerator, we dumped the dough out onto a floured work surface and rolled it out to a rough rectangle that was approximately one-quarter inch thick. Unlike the bomboloni dough, this dough required a lot of flour on the rolling pin, work surface, and hands to keep it from sticking. Once the rectangle was rolled out, we used a pizza cutter to cut the dough into two inch by two inch squares. Because the dough was so wet, we needed to use a bench scraper to remove the dough from the work surface. For each piece, we rolled the edges under (like a chocolate croissant) to help it keep its shape when frying. The shaped beignets were placed on a lightly floured baking tin and set aside until it came time to fry them. We didn’t have to worry about re-rolling scraps for this dough because we made an even rectangle of the right size to begin with.
Churros are made from a basic pâte á choux dough, which I’m fairly familiar with because I did an entire class on pâte á choux patisserie last October when some friends from south of the Mason-Dixon Line came up to visit me. Basically, the dough requires bringing water, butter, and salt to a boil over high heat. After the mixture comes to a boil, lower the heat and dump in all the required flour. And then start to beat it with a wooden spoon in order to develop the gluten and cool down the mixture. We were looking for a skin to develop on the bottom of the pan. At that point, the pan came off the heat. We could have dumped it into a mixer to cool down further and mix in the eggs; however, our chef instructor preferred for us to do it by hand. One by one we added the eggs, mixing thoroughly after each addition. After the last addition, we had to keep beating until the gluten was fully developed, which was when a string of dough formed during the pinch test. The pinch test is when you take a pinch of the dough between your thumb and forefinger, and then slowly separate the two fingers. If a string of dough remains between the two fingers, then the dough is good to go.
To make the Mexican chocolate sauce, we brought some cream, cinnamon, and cocoa powder to a simmer over medium heat. Then we poured the hot cream over a bowl of chocolate chips. We let that sit for a minute or so, then beat it to a smooth sauce.
All three of the pastries were fried in the same manner using the same vegetable oil. Basically, we heated a big pot of vegetable oil to between 360F and 375F; we let the pastry fry on one side until puffed and golden; we flipped over the pastry and repeated on the second side; we skimmed the pastry from the oil and set it on a cooling rack that was set inside a paper towel lined baking tin. Oil temperature was critical. If it dropped below 350F, the pastries would take too long to fry and end up being greasy; however, if it went above 375F, the pastries would brown too quickly on the outside without cooking through the inside. I thought that draining on the combination of cooling rack, paper towels, and baking tin was pretty genius, as it kept the pastries from sitting in oil and getting greasy.
Once the bomboloni were cooled, we filled as many as we could with Nutella. Some of us had been working to fill pastry bags with plain tips with the Nutella as others had been frying the pastries. To fill a bomboloni, first we needed to break the crust with a skewer and hollow out the center a bit. Then, we just inserted the tip of the piping bag into the hole and gently squeezed until the Nutella started coming out of the bomboloni. We used an entire large jar of Nutella to fill the pastries, and still had plain ones left over.
The filled bomboloni were sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar, as were the cooled beignets. The cooled churros, however, were rolled in a mixture of white sugar, cinnamon, and salt.
I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to make each of the pastries. Even the frying went fairly quickly because our chef instructor kept a thermometer in the oil so we could monitor the actual temperature of the oil. That’s something I’ll have to remember the next time I make fried chicken! The recipes each made a ton of individual pastries so I was able to eat my fill during the class, and resist the temptation to take some of the leftovers home to the house. I couldn’t really taste the difference between the bomboloni and the beignets, other than that the bomboloni had a Nutella filling, but the churros were definitely different - in a good way! I wasn’t a fan of the salt added to the cinnamon and sugar coating to the churros (it was a bit much) but otherwise I thought all the pastries turned out well.
All in all, the global doughnuts class was a fun afternoon out. Our little trio integrated well with the other three people at our workbench, so there was a lot of laughter and light hearted chatter. And of course, only time will tell if I actually make the recipes at home. Maybe for a late brunch party…
The Postscript
In the previous post, I wrote about my experiment with the Lavender Empress cocktail recipe that I found on the local distillery’s webpage. At the time, I had mentioned trying it again in the future with San Pellegrino limonata soda instead of lemonade. My curiosity eventually got the better of me; I picked up two cans of limonata soda on sale during my last trip to the grocery store. When I mixed the drink over the weekend, I did remember to include the half ounce of lemon juice that I had forgotten when I made the drink with lemonade. The mixed drink was quite good. It didn’t have the effervescence that I had expected from the soda (which was nose-tickling fizzy straight from the can) but it had a much stronger lemon taste than I expected. In general, I think that the recipe is a solid one regardless of whether it is made with still lemonade or sparkling limonata. The straight lemon juice is probably optional in either version.
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