Friday, 19 November 2010
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Alton Brown's Yeast Donuts
This is a guest post from Kirbie's Cravings.
I love donuts. I mean, I know I have a serious sweet tooth, but I have a special place in my heart for donuts. When I was a kid, the thing that would get me out of bed early was if there were some fresh donuts from the bakery.
So I had a serious craving for donuts lately and while I absolutely love the little cute baked ones I’ve been making, they aren’t a substitute for the fried yeast kind.
A few weeks ago, there was a flurry of donut posts by bloggers and many of them used a yeast recipe by Alton Brown. After successfully making Alton Brown’s recipe for soft pretzels, I was excited to try his recipe for yeast donuts.
These donuts ended up taking forever to make. The dough was messy, sticky and complicated. I followed the recipe and instructions exactly but when my dough was done it was really, really sticky. The recipe says that you have to flour your working surface, but I had to do much more than that. My dough needed a lot more flour. In fact, I used almost 2 cups of flour to get the dough in working condition. All the stickiness had to be taken out of the dough or else the dough wouldn’t cut properly, or once it was cut it would be hard to drop it in the frying pan without losing shape unless it was no longer sticky.
The end result was just okay. The donuts did rise like yeast donuts should, but they weren’t amazing. It was about the same taste as frying up some premade pillsbury dough. I was pretty disappointed with this recipe and these didn’t satisfy my craving for donuts. They also didn’t keep well. They were already starting to turn hard the next day.
Before and after shots of the donuts rising:
I did wonder if I did something wrong, but when I went back to the website and read the comments, I saw that many other people encountered the same problems I did. If all donut recipes are this complicated, I may just stick to buying yeast donuts. You can view Alton Brown’s recipe here.
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- From: kirbiecravings
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Comments (6)
I had the same problem with Alton's biscuit recipe. It was way too sticky roll out or cut. I had to add a ton of flour to get it so it could work with it and then the biscuits were just so-so.
ahh... that looks good. too bad i gave up on donuts though
have ya tried watching on the youtubez? Sometimes watching technic can make instructions easier.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLACCFjhyBEI <3 Alton Brown. He was the first person to ever help me make cookies.
homemade donuts are the best!
ive tried several of alton brown's recipes and found out that he is in fact not a god. actually, some of his recipes are down right unnecessary (cake flour for chocolate chip cookies?). i realized, just because you sound like you know what you are talking about doesn't mean you actually know what you are talking about.
a better place to refer to is Cooks Illustrated. they are basically 1000 alton browns combined.
their recipes are not perfect, but its as close as you will get to what alton brown 'supposedly' represents with his show, which is a technical understanding and application of successful methods to create quality food.
alton brown just tells you his opinion in a scientific way. cooks illustrated actually has a team of cooks who go through hundreds of trials of one dish in order to perfect and simplify it.
but at the end of the day, even that is just an opinion. the best thing you can do is find as many sources of one recipe as possible and take as much as you can from each. then apply your own adjustments and thinking to it.
but, cooks illustrated is still the best base to start from i think.