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.
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.
