| Cynthetiq |
10-04-2008 03:53 PM |
Your favorite doughnut?
Quote:
View: Fry, Baby
Source: Nytimes
posted with the TFP thread generator
Fry, Baby
October 5, 2008
The Way We Eat: 10-5-08
Fry, Baby
By KELLY ALEXANDER
It’s tricky to claim that eating a ring of fried dough will improve your life. But Jacques Chiron, the creator of the biodiesel-fueled AstroTurf car, says it’s so. He recently told reporters that his pioneering ride could run on the stuff of “French fry . . . barbecue . . . doughnut.” America might solve this energy crisis yet.
Although they’d long existed in Central Europe as enticements at saints’ days and festivals, doughnuts were popularized as a quotidian treat in this country. In the early 19th century, Washington Irving wrote that Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam had a table that “was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat and called dough nuts.” The holes were removed toward the end of the century, as an 1870 baking catalog attests. As recently as 1950, when the journalist Clementine Paddleford edited the food pages of The New York Herald Tribune, cooks were still making doughnuts at home. Martin Weldon, a reporter for WCBS radio, spent the better part of a week trailing Paddleford; she let him mix the batter for the recipe of the week, crullers. “Well, the batter stayed up, and I thought I passed with flying crullers,” he wrote.
Home doughnut-making peaked shortly thereafter. Who wanted to wield her tongs over a caldron of boiling oil when Dunkin’ Donuts, franchised in 1955, was just up the block? Today, the fear of both fried food and the act of frying means that doughnuts are strictly outsourced. Savvy New Yorkers count on folks like Mark Isreal, the grandson of a doughnut baker and owner of Doughnut Plant, to elevate the form with creative flavors like pistachio and lavender.
While testing Paddleford’s recipes for a book I was co-writing about her, I was reluctant to try the crullers, heeding the wishes of my waistline. But once I got up the gumption, they were so easy and delicious that I wondered what was wrong with everybody else.
Whether they’re called doughnuts, crullers, fritters or beignets, they’re usually made of a combination of flour, eggs and milk that is raised with baking powder or baking soda. The ideal dough is stiff enough to be shaped but moist enough to retain its sponginess. A good doughnut should have an airy puffiness, which is achieved when small pieces of dough are dropped into hot fat and quickly heated to well above the boiling point, so that steam aerates the inside before the outside can harden. A brief blotting on a paper-towel-lined plate and they’re ready to eat.
Chefs have never abandoned the doughnut, however humble or trans-fatty. Alain Ducasse has offered doughnut holes as a dessert course. For years, Thomas Keller has sent out cinnamon-sugar-dusted doughnuts with cappuccino semifreddo after meals at the French Laundry. The Manhattan chef Doug Psaltis, who has cooked with Ducasse and Keller, said chefs love the whimsy of making them. “The fun part is that they bob around in the oil like duckies in the bathtub,” he said. And in an era of intellectualized food, he pointed out, doughnuts remain a simple pleasure: “The best thing about them is that you’re not eating air cakes from some molecular gastronomy chef.”
But it wasn’t until recently that doughnuts began appearing on menus in earnest. The latest haute incarnation is at Dovetail in Manhattan, where the pastry chef Vera Tong spikes her cream-and-orange-infused doughnuts with Earl-Grey-tea sugar for a delicately fragrant result. At the Southern end of the spectrum, Amy Tornquist, the chef at Watts Grocery in Durham, N.C., fries up her version of Mexican churros (which, after all, are just straightened-out doughnuts) to be dipped in bourbon-spiked chocolate sauce.
The one fact that no one can dispute is that doughnuts are best consumed immediately. Sure you can pack Paddleford’s crullers in a picnic basket, but nothing beats eating one while it’s still hot. And as soon as you’re done, you can take that leftover oil out to the garage.
Kelly Alexander is the co-author of “Hometown Appetites: The Story of Clementine Paddleford, the Forgotten Food Writer Who Chronicled How America Ate.”
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I love fried dough.... I love all kinds of fried dough from zeppolis to chinese doughnuts, mexican churros to spanish churros, regular doughnuts...
I have a couple of all time favorite picks... raised chocolate iced or an apple fritter.
What's your favorite? |
