🥞 #004: Anything Fried is Fine
A holiday guest post on testing donuts for family, and a celebration of the first Panadería cookbook zine
Happy Holidays, breakfast friends! We have a special guest post from Georgette Eva today that I wanted to get out before the holidays. Additionally, I wanted to share some words on Morgenmete contributor Teresa Finney’s wonderful new cookbook zine.
If you missed it, I was happy to be a guest on Fernando Augusto Pacheco’s print podcast for Monocle, The Stack. You can listen to the whole episode here on Monocle, or wherever you get your podcasts.
That wraps up an incredible year for us, and we’ll see you with new breakfast stories in the new year. Enjoy this issue!
Tim Lampe, Editor-in-Chief
🍩 Anything Fried is Fine
By Georgette Eva
Whoever said “out of the frying pan and into the fire” never specified what they were cooking per se, but I bet it was doughnuts. Comforting crullers can make an early meeting less of a slog. Krispy Kreme’s hot light can turn one’s day around. Plus history shows that in times of crisis, doughnuts seem to be a go-to.
During WWI, Salvation Army volunteers savvily fried dough in helmets, delivering fresh doughnuts to soldiers in the trenches.
Female Red Cross volunteers in the Korean War operated clubmobiles, churning out 20,000 doughnuts a day in their small kitchen for American soldiers.
That’s all to say when my mother-in-law said I could bring “anything fried” to my first family Hanukkah, doughnuts felt like an obvious, albeit panicked, solution. As a Filipino-American who grew up Catholic, I had nonexistent experience with the Jewish celebration or culture as a whole. Like any ‘90s kid, a lot of my knowledge came from the Rugrats Chanukah special.
I wanted to contribute to my first Hanukkah as a family member. If anything fried was all I had to do, I could certainly come up with a crowd-pleaser.
Reader, I did not. The rose-infused, raspberry-filled sufganiyot I made was a hit with the adults at the table. On the other hand, the Israeli doughnuts, a cross between a beignet and jelly doughnut, were a miss for the kids.
I couldn’t blame them. Rose-infused jelly has a specific taste, almost like nice bathroom soap. It also leaves a note of potpourri in the nostrils. While tiny hands excitedly grabbed a doughnut, many were left nibbled on plates, their raspberry guts eking out.
This year, I decided to live under the stress of my own making and find a better doughnut recipe that the entire family would enjoy. I should note that this is not the spirit of Hanukkah, which commemorates the Maccabean victories and rededication of the Second Temple of Jerusalem.
In fact, this mindset is the capitalist, competitive spirit that Charlie Brown accused us of with Christmas. It brings to mind another doughnut story. As immigrants entered the U.S. via Ellis Island, they were greeted by volunteers with a blanket and a doughnut wrapped in paper stating, “As you go through life make this your goal: Watch the doughnut, not the hole.”
Well, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll watch the doughnut. Granted that’s because I’m frying the first test batch.
Puff-Puff
I decide to explore the world one doughnut recipe at a time. Many cultures have their version of fried dough, which is heartening. We clearly all use fried foods and sugar as comfort.
In my research, I discovered the Puff-Puff, a tasty deep-fried street food popular in many West African countries. There are a few ways to prepare them. Depending on the country, it goes by a different name: Buffloaf in Ghana, Gato in Guinea, Botokoin in Togo, to name a few. I opt for a Nigerian Puff-Puff recipe.
Thankfully, it’s an easy recipe to kick off my test. I start mixing the flour, sugar, yeast, water, salt, and oil. Mixing is easy, and the wait for the yeast to do most of the work is even quicker. I sit down at my kitchen table and start holiday shopping.
An Hour Later: After waiting for the dough to proof, I am cheered by its bubbliness. Though making globs to dump in my hot oil becomes a sticky mess. The dough didn’t want to leave my hands, so I started dolloping the dough into the hot oil with a metal spoon. This works well but visions of a stovetop fire prevent me from raising the temperature.
Results: This process takes me a little while because of the unlocked incendiary fear. In the end, I have a nice pile of delightful Puff-Puff. The first doughnuts are pale like they stayed inside watching TV during summer break, while the latter attempts are golden and gorgeous. My husband and I eat them on our couch, one after the other. They’re extremely easy to pop into your mouth.
They taste very much like high-end funnel cake. I've read you can enjoy these with peanut butter which sounds delightful. You can also make them savory and cook with peppers and onions. Personally, we like them as is. That is unless you count leaving them on the counter and eating one every time you walk by as a serving method.
Malassada
I bring up my doughnut test to friends. Over drinks, friends tell me about Hawaiian malassada. It’s technically a Portuguese sweet brought in by sugarcane laborers, and double dipping into two cultures feels even more productive! The Portuguese version might not have a filling, but in Hawaii, you’d find coconut, chocolate, or passionfruit. I opt for ube.
Puff-Puff making spoiled me. I waited to make these doughnuts on election night, thinking I’d at least have fried comfort as I watched the results. It turns out there are two proofing steps. Begrudgingly, I mix the bread flour, yeast, and dry ingredients before adding the egg, milk, and butter. The finished ball of dough seems sad, or that's just my opinion. I pop it into the fridge and go to bed.
Next Day: I can’t tell if the dough ball is proofed at all. It seems dense. I roll it out and use a cup to cut out circles, like biscuits. I have to prove it again, unfortunately, so I leave for a workout class. Puff-Puff never betrayed me like this.
Making Them: My hopes are low when I get back, but to my surprise, the circles puffed up slightly. When dipped in the oil, the doughnuts grow in confidence. As I pull them out of the hot oil, I coat each side with powdered sugar and poke each with a barbecue skewer. This is key for the ube pastry cream. While a few doughnuts finish, I uncover a frosting bag in the depths of my kitchen and channel Martha Stewart as I fill each.
Results: The recipe yielded six, but I burnt two trying to find a pastry bag. In the end, I have four pretty good doughnuts to comfort me post-election. They are satisfying, sweet, and messy. The dough itself is dense, so I end up grabbing the pastry cream mixing bowl and dipping a few last doughy bites in.
Buñelos
Traditionally served at Christmas, Mexican Buñelos are proof that cinnamon sugar and fried dough are all you need. I like that these doughnuts are flat in appearance; new shape to try! After the malassadas I know I need something simpler.
As I mix the dried ingredients, I’m confused by the lack of yeast. The donut is flatter, but I wonder why. My brain still can’t compute. Happily though, once I have the dried and wet ingredients mixed, all I have to do is knead the dough before letting it proof for 30 minutes. Malassada would never.
Making them: Coming back to my kneaded dough ball, I can’t seem to pull apart pieces to create smaller balls. It’s stretchy and pieces don’t want to leave the larger portion. I pull apart with abandon, separating the dough family before rolling each out into flat discs.
Frying them: I’m just using a pot on the stove to deep fry, so I can only fit one dough disc in at a time. It’s not too bad at first, but as it cooks, I hear oil noises I haven’t before. Hovering over the pot, the oil wants to escape the dough disc. It’s hissing, and my mind imagines another fire.
Results: Admittedly, I turned off the stove a few times because I was scared, but I finished with some beautiful doughnut discs covered in cinnamon sugar. They’re simple and satisfyingly chewy. The oil punched up bubbles too so you have crispy spots. My husband and I take satisfying bites out of each. They’re not too sweet and the flat shape means less mess.
Doughnut Test Results
I’m trying to convince myself not to make a small batch of each doughnut to share with my in-laws. My husband voted for the Buñelos, but I thought the Malassadas felt more like traditional sufganiyot. The Puff-Puff was so good. Wouldn’t variety mean I have a higher chance of success here? Something for everyone to enjoy!
But then again, maybe I should pick one. If only to temper the risk of my newly discovered fear of grease fires.
📕 Teresa Realizes Her Zine Dream
I was so excited to see Teresa Finney AKA At Heart Panadería release her debut cookbook zine. I was lucky enough to work with her on a recipe for Morgenmete Issue 02, and it’s wonderful to see her zine dreams come to life.
Writing for her substack, Teresa wrote:
Working on the cookbook zine was a wildly different experience from publishing recipes online in as frequent a pace as possible—nearly nine months of working on the same project was the antithesis of posting quickly to the timeline with instant gratification. I wanted to step away from sharing recipes, and instead found a better, more satisfying method for doing so through zines. Not quite a magazine, but my teen self and I learned at last some of the decisions that go into print production, and now we’re both in it for the long haul.
Working in print is tough, and she put together an absolute dream team to help with Elizabeth Goodspeed designing (also a Morgenmete contributor!) and Zoé Maghamès Peters illustrating. I’m a big fan of print, and producing a lo-fi version of what you want to put out in the world. I got to pick up my copy this weekend from Teresa’s pop-up and it’s really gorgeous in print - I’m looking forward to many more.
My hope is that Teresa inspires creatives to produce something in a space they’ve been cultivating. It doesn’t need to be a full-blown print piece, but finding a creative outlet for your voice is so impactful. The world will be better with it.
If you loved this and still haven’t had a chance to grab a copy of our second print issue ‘The Always Connected Issue’
That’s all for this month. We’ll see you again in January. In the new year, we’ll be putting out a call for submissions for Issue 03 of Morgenmete, and if you feel this could be a good home for your voice, don’t hesitate to send me a pitch tim@morgenmete.com.
Have a great holiday and happy new year!
