After one year and 104 recipes, I finished the Brooks Bakes Bread Project on March 27, 2012. You can still find me baking and cooking at my new blog, Tangled Up In Food.

Archives: 28 January 2012

Raised Doughnuts, Maple Bars, and Dough Gobs
January 28, 2012

by stacy
Published on: January 28, 2012
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“[Raised Doughnuts] are old American standards and remain hearty, delicious tidbits for breakfast or for picnics or just between meal-snacking.”

“Maple bars are one of my great weaknesses, and I must confess that even now when I go to a bakery and see those luscious rectangles of fried dough with a maple glaze on them I am tempted to indulge and often do.”

“On Nantucket there used to be, and may still be for all I know, a summer hotel where on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays one could go and have dough gobs for breakfast.  They were simply marvelous.”

-James Beard, Beard on Bread

Raised Doughnuts, Maple Bars, and Dough Gobs all use the same dough recipe; the only difference is the shape and the glaze in the case of Maple Bars.  Since there is a limit to how much fried dough Mike and I can eat, I made one batch of dough, divided it into thirds, and used each portion for a different recipe.

Here are the ingredients:

Raised Doughnuts, Maple Bars, and Dough Gobs Ingredients

Last night, I mixed up the dough, kneaded it lightly, and put it in the refrigerator to rise overnight.

This morning, I rolled out my dough and cut out a few doughnuts, some rectangles for the Maple Bars, and formed the rest into gobs.  Then, I placed them on a cookie sheet lined with wax paper (as advised by the recipe) to rise for about an hour.

Raised Doughnuts, Maple Bars, and Dough Gobs After Second Rising

I ran into a major snag when I attempted to remove my dough from the wax paper: it was stuck.  After several minutes of frustrating salvage attempts, I gave up, scraped all of the dough off, and re-formed my shapes.  My advice is to skip the wax paper entirely and let the dough rise on a heavily floured board.

Heeding the lesson learned from Bunuelos, I was careful to monitor my oil temperature as I fried my various pastries.  My results weren’t as aesthetically pleasing as I had hoped, but I was able to make some passable Raised Doughnuts, Maple Bars, and Dough Gobs.

While I let the pastries drain on paper towel, I mixed up half a recipe of a maple glaze using 1/2 cup of powdered sugar and about 3 tablespoons of real maple syrup.

Mixing Maple Glaze

Raised Doughnuts:

Raised Doughnuts

Maple Bars:

Maple Bars

Dough Gobs:

Dough Gobs

These recipes taught me that there is a functional advantage to the hole in the center of a doughnut: it ensures that the pastry cooks evenly.  Both the Maple Bars and the Dough Gobs were overdone on the outside, but still slightly doughy on the inside.  Only the Raised Doughnuts cooked to perfection, inside and out.  If I make doughnuts again, I would make them doughnuts shaped, but use the delicious maple glaze on top.

Bunuelos
January 28, 2012

by stacy
Published on: January 28, 2012
Categories: Bunuelos, Fried Cakes
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“Similar forms of this deep-fried pastry are found in Europe and Latin America…This version comes from Mexico.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread

I have never deep-fried anything in my life.  I am more likely to eat a salad than French fries, a bagel over a doughnut.  But there is a “Fried Cakes” section in Beard on Bread, so on Thursday I embarked on a new culinary adventure.

I decided to start with Bunuelos because they looked to be the simplest of the fried cakes.  In a rush of confidence after a particularly invigorating 5K run on the treadmill, I started baking at 9 pm on a work night.

Here are the ingredients:

Bunuelos Ingredients

I halved the recipe to yield about 16 Bunuelos.

I mixed the ingredients together to form a stiff dough, and then kneaded until it reached a smooth texture.  Next, I divided the dough into 16 pieces and rolled each out into an approximation of a circle, about 1/4 inch thick.  Now for the hard part: frying in oil.

Bunuelos Before Frying

I heated my canola oil up to what I though was the right temperature, judging by the fact that the mercury on my candy thermometer had surpassed “doughnut” (370 degrees Fahrenheit) and was off the chart.  Why I thought this was the right temperature isn’t clear to me anymore.  Maybe my logic was the hotter the better.  Anyway, I placed two of the Bunuelos in the oil.  Then the oil started smoking, a little at first, then a bit more, then before I knew it, black smoke had filled the kitchen and my eyes were burning.  I had the intelligence to take the pot of oil off of the burner (my only redeeming moment of the whole debacle).  Mike looked up “frying in oil” on his tablet while I opened all the windows.

“It’s a good thing you took the oil off of the burner when you did,” said Mike, “because once the oil gets 30 degrees hotter than the smoke point, it bursts into flames.”

At this point, it was 9:30 at night, we had to wake up for work at 6 am the next morning, our house was filled with smoke:

Kitchen Filled with Smoke

and my only two cooked Bunuelos looked like this:

Charred Bunuelos

But something (stubbornness?  my type-A personality?  a longing for fried dough?) made me heat up some more oil, carefully monitoring the temperature this time.  I had to constantly adjust the burner temperature to keep the oil at a steady 370 degrees.  But I was able to fry up some fairly nice looking Bunuelos, which I let drain on paper towel and sprinkled with powdered sugar and cinnamon.

Bunuelos

Bunuelos are really, really good.  They are deliciously fried and crispy on the outside, with a wonderfully soft center.  I have to agree with Beard–they are  “absolutely marvelous.”

 

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About the Baker
I'm a paralegal living and working in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. Besides baking, blogging, and eating bread, I love knitting and enjoying the Minnesota outdoors. My husband, Mike, is the Brooks Bakes Bread website developer, bread photographer, and chief taste tester.
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