Donuts (first attempt, not tested/completed recipe yet)

I have a little bit of a fixation on donuts.

If you think about it, donuts are mostly air. This is what makes a truly evil donut. While being full of sugar and simple carbohydrates and (often hydrogenated, unnatural) fats, the bulk of a donut is nothing, just air, which will enable you to eat an irresponsible amount of them before realizing it was too many. Which can be bad. But the good thing about donuts is that there's pretty much always room for one. I have a pretty good vegan beignet recipe that also lends itself well to proper, circular tori.

I'd finally gotten the time and motivation to update the baking blog, but unfortunately I was at home, not at work, and didn't have the proper vegan-y substitution ingredients I'd normally been resorting to (egg replacer powder, mostly).

"To which I'd normally been resorting."

I thought about it and it's really not my style to resort to things like that anyway, and it was about time to find a more legit way to approximate eggs in my donut recipe.



I googled around for different recipes. I pulled up the original beignet recipe I'd based mine on, another vegan beignet recipe, a tried and true traditional donut recipe, and then, just for a lark, a sourdough/starter/natural yeast recipe one. I have access to a pretty sweet, healthy little starter right now, and I'm supposed to be dumping out a bunch of it and feeding/replacing it every day anyway, so I figured I'd do the right thing and use some of the discarded portion.

My awkward notes:

To find a base recipe to work on and improve on, I took an average of the four recipes and came up with this:

110g water
20g tapioca balls

Cook these on the stove, stirring constantly. Tapioca pearls will find any opportunity to stick to a pan and just stay there, forever. Cook until completely translucent.

Add 230g coconut cream. I chose coconut cream over coconut milk so that the added richness will make up for the absence of the richness of egg yolk.

Now add 5g cornstarch.

I used an immersion blender... a regular blender would probably work, but you'd have to return it to the pan in a sec. I blended until thick and unctuous and gummy. Then I cooked until boiling, so that I just had a big old pot of thick starchy gummy liquid. Most commercial egg replacers are combos of potato starch, tapioca starch, sometimes cornstarch, and leaveners. I figured using this paste as some of the liquid portion of my recipe would replace at least the binding and fat properties of the egg, and I'd just compensate for leavening with starter and baking powder.

Now for the dry ingredients. I put my coconut starch water in the mixer and added:
115 g coconut oil (I use Earth Balance at the restaurant, but I had some of this really nice coconut oil at home so I just went for it),
515 g starter
400 g flour
115 g sugar
15 g baking powder
5g salt

For a minute, in a panic, I couldn't find the sugar. I thought we were out.

It's hard to tell in the picture, but there's 3 bags of powdered sugar, a bag of brown sugar, a bottle of corn syrup on the floor, a 25lb sack of flour in the foreground...

Oh, there it is.

Public service announcement: Clean as you go. You'll thank yourself, and any roommates or significant others will hate you less. Enjoy your finished product, guilt-free.

I mixed it until smooth...

And covered it to let it rise. If you're used to commercial yeast, this step will irk you, because sourdough rises like four times slower than commercial yeast. But it is worth it.

Mine didn't rise too much.

I got a little frustrated. I realized two things. I was hungry, and also that I think I had kind of assumed that I was just going to eat a lot of donuts for dinner. I was disappointed in myself for finding this thought in my brain. I took a dab of dough out onto the counter and patted it into a little sad flat shape.

I left and bought some dinner.

Then I came back. The dough-dab had risen a bit. And the dough mass had finally actually at least gotten a little bubbly around the edges. I decided to just go for it and see what happened. I heated some oil, dropped the lump in... fried to a golden brown on each side and...

Day-amn.

That's a good donut. Look at that irregular, organic hole structure; so nice. It tasted as good as it looked.

I took some more dough out and worked a little more flour into it and cut it into irregular beignet-y shapes. The dough was very delicate and lacy, I'm going to add more flour the next time I work this recipe, especially so I can cut them into tori/donut-shapes next time.

Finished extra-flour doughnuts.

They're great. They have a nice snappy crispness in the crust, probably from the tapioca/corn starch mix. They have that nice kind of chewy translucent-y crumb that sourdough bread has. They are ethereally light and addictively delicious. I'll work the recipe out and post as soon as it's perfect. 

Vegan baking. What's up with that?

Cuisine, the techniques, recipes, standards and definitions that make up the French culinary approach and modern food, was codified in the 19th century by Georges Auguste Escoffier. That was all you needed to know about that to move on to the next question in one of my first semester culinary school finals. Marie-Antoine Careme (kind of a crappy name for a dude) did a lot of the work as well. Another dude fell on his sword because a fish delivery was late. It was an exciting time to be cooking, and French. They took the bizarre, heavy spice-laden, 17-birds-each-stuffed-inside-the-next-larger-and-then-roasted-loving Medieval cuisine and decided it was time to lighten the sauces a little, figure out a system, and find better ways to do things and make food taste better.

I respect order and systems like that. Real military-like. I've worked in a lot of good, high-end old-school classical French-system kitchens. I've been to culinary school (for a minute). I own Gastronomique and more textbooks than a culinary school dropout oughta. That said,  I work in a vegan/vegetarian/somethinglikethat restaurant. I describe it as "2 Legs or Less". We cater to any diet or eating quirk you could dream up; desserts AND entrees. Raw vegan? Grain free? Regular vegan? Obligatory Simpsons level five vegan quote vegan? Gluten free? Nut free? Oil free AND vegan?

How did I end up here, given my background? Wouldn't I be happier with my eyes rolling back at the thought of bacon or stinky veiny cheese, or putting a hard sear on a ton of shortribs, mounting my celeriac purees with whole local butter and frozen foie gras shavings? It's kind of a calling. I've always liked vegan stuff. It's a challenge. All the tasty, fatty, creamy, meaty crutches are removed. Coming up with stuff to satisfy random requirements in, first and foremost, a tasty manner,  is pretty much how I get my jollies. It sounds really New Age-y, and it is. It gets interesting when you try to approach it from a more classically (French-ly) trained and non-vegan background like mine is. Often, elbow deep in bizarre vegan cake recipes that are technically muffin recipes, or sauce recipes that are really recipes for Asian style cornstarch gravy sauces, or fruit-sweetened tofu that I'm passing off as vegan creme fraiche, I start getting frustrated. I've been cooking a long time, and I've eaten a lot of food, and if something 'tastes vegan', I get upset. I start wishing vegan and alt-diet 'technology' and method were as explored and legit as the buttery meaty Escoffier/Careme school is. I start wishing the vegan and alt-diet cookbooks were as enlightening and no-nonsense as Gastronomique, or even Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I start wishing I could trust the blogs and recipes that come up when I google for something as simple as "vegan snickerdoodle cookie". Vegans do not deserve chalky brownies. Vegans do not deserve rope-y barbecue sauce. Nobody deserves doughy slimy agave-sweetened cakes.

"We bumble along reading cookbooks that often aren't even tested, written by enthusiastic foodies rather than trained experienced cooks, and we throw together what they tell us. When the result emerges from the oven edible we deem it an instagram-able succuss!, a perfect, delicious facsimile of whatever non-vegan dish the recipe is imitating. We have nothing to compare it to, and no standard by which to measure it."

And then I start wondering why I don't just stop daydreaming and do something about it maybe?

So, this blog.

This blog and its recipes are written by a trained cook. In its entries you will find:

-Solely my own recipes... unless they're somebody else's. Then I'll give them credit.
-Instructional, step by step photographs (if any), as opposed to glossy, awkwardly large, artful, borderline pornographic finished-product photographs.
-Legitimate, professional cooking terms. No "mix til goopy". No "half a palmful".
-Amounts by weight as opposed to 'cups', 'heaping tablespoons', etc.
-Actual methods, actual recipes. I will not give you a recipe for 'vegan BLT' that calls for "vegan bread, vegan bacon, veganaise, tomato, lettuce'.
-Whole food ingredients whenever optimal. No 'vegan cheese', and often even eschewing soy milk or tofu (!).

You will NOT find the following:
-'HEALTHY' recipes for the sake of being healthy. Man, I don't know what healthy is for you. I drink so much iced tea every day it should probably be a jailable offense. If eating eggs or dairy causes you to die outright, then these are way healthier recipes for you. One of the biggest setbacks plaguing vegan food is the nasty preconception that it's crunchy granola 'health food'. Sprouts. Brown rice. Kombucha. Whole spelt bread. Applesauce as a substitute, you know, to cut your cholesterol intake. Most of these recipes are desserts and comfort food, no anti-obesity agenda. If you want a salad, eat a salad. If you want pecan pie, make my pecan pie.

So, thanks for bearing with me, in advance, and enjoy some tasty treats.

Cortez