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It’s day 15 of Stream Ink and today’s word is Unholy! Since I painted a classic ring doughnut guy for Hole Day, it stood to reason that Unholy Day should be a lovely jam doughnut guy!

#jam doughnut #cute art #doughnut #food illustration #ink painting #art

Season 3 Episode 7: Jam Doughnuts

Over the course of this challenge, it so rarely happens that I’m presented with a technical challenge bake that I’ve actually heard of, let alone one I’ve eaten on multiple occasions. So I felt pretty confident going into this week’s bake of Paul Hollywood’s jam doughnuts (although I suppose I’d sound pretty silly ordering a JAM doughnut in an American bakery instead of a JELLY one). Still, this bake presented a few challenges. First, doughnuts are made with a yeasted dough, and I still don’t have a ton of experience baking with yeast, although I’ve picked up quite a bit over the course of this blog. Second, these doughnuts would need to be fried, and I’ve never personally deep-fried anything. But armed with Wilson’s Dutch oven, I felt pretty confident that I would be able to figure it out and not burn myself too horrifically with boiling oil.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/jam_doughnuts_90953

I love a recipe that starts off by dumping all the ingredients into one bowl, so I felt we were off to a good start here.

A big ol’ doughnut batter soup.

I used my hands to mix all the ingredients together until they formed a dough, which turned out to be incredibly sticky.

Got my dad to help with photography on this one.

Next, I added some more water and kneaded the dough in the bowl, at the end of which the dough was still extremely sticky.

Unfortunately I left my Kitchenaid stand mixer complete with dough kneading hook at my apartment and had to do the hard work with my own brute strength.

But my kneading adventure wasn’t over yet: I then had to knead the dough for 10 full minutes on a floured surface until it finally stopped sticking to my hands and formed an autonomous ball.

Kneading a wet dough like this is actually extremely soothing. I highly recommend.

Now it was time for the big proof. I put my little dough ball in a bowl and went on my merry way, hopeful that it would double in size after an hour.

Before…

And oh boy, double in size it did. This was where the recipe may have started to go off the rails a bit. When I returned to my dough an hour later, it was HUGE.

I have created a monster.

I figured that lots of volume was better than no volume, but still, I’ve heard the words “over-proved” through around enough on the show to know that Paul Hollywood does not approve. However, I decided a light airy doughnut was better than a dense one with no rise to the dough at all, and soldiered on. I divided my dough into ten pieces, even breaking out my scale to try to get my dough balls as even as possible.

Ten relatively even little doughnuts-to-be.

I then stuck my doughnuts under a towel and once again went on my merry way for an hour. But then, I returned to this…

This picture doesn’t really do justice to how huge these doughnuts were, but they were intimidatingly large.

I felt slightly like the Ghostbusters Stay Puft Man had invaded my kitchen.

Adorable, but EVIL.

I’m not sure why my yeast was so active during this bake, but it may have been because it was an unusually hot weekend here in LA, and my kitchen was pretty warm, which is conducive to yeast activity. (Do I sound like I know what I’m talking about yet?) Regardless, I had now devoted over two hours of my life to these doughnuts, and I was determined to see this thing through the end. So I whipped out my candy thermometer, dumped a ton of oil in the Dutch oven, and started heating.

Looks pretty professional!

At first, the temperature on the thermometer rose steadily, but around 300 degrees, I couldn’t help but notice that the heating seemed to have stopped. Why couldn’t I get my oil hotter than 300 degrees, I wondered? Well, when I pulled the thermometer out of the oil to investigate, I discovered this…

A crack in the thermometer just below the 300 degree mark.

So my thermometer was busted, and there was no way to tell how much higher than 300 degrees my oil had gotten. But in the spirit of the competition, I decided to make do with what I had. It was time to fry. As I attempted to separate my giant dough blobs and drop them into the oil, I understood why overproofing dough is problematic: My dough collapsed on itself the moment I tried to move it. Still, maybe it would re-puff back in the oil? I had no choice but to try.

They did in fact regain some of their volume in the fryer, thankfully.

As you can see from this picture, my doughnuts were quite brown, and that happened well before the 5 minutes on each side time limit suggested by Paul’s recipe. This leads me to believe that my oil was in fact much hotter than 350 degrees. In the hopes of not burning my doughnuts, I pulled this batch out quickly, after about 3 minutes. I then rolled them in sugar, which I hoped might hide the most egregious sins of my haphazard frying process.

I’ve seen rounder doughnuts…

For my second batch, I pulled them out of the fryer the moment they turned a perfect golden brown. I was feeling pretty good about myself until a thought arose in my head – what if these doughnuts are perfect on the outside, but undercooked on the inside? I cut one open, and sure enough, it was COMPLETELY RAW. I’m talking dough oozing out all over the counter. I neglected to take a photo because I was immediately overwhelmed with panic – this batch of doughnuts was already covered in sugar and resting from the fryer. How was I going to fix this? I decided to throw them back into the (now slightly cooler) fryer for a second fry, in the hopes that at the very least they wouldn’t be completely raw. I then pulled the mangled doughnuts back out and re-rolled them in sugar, only able to hope and pray that they would be somewhat edible.

Doughnut DISASTER.

Trying to put that particular crisis behind me, I moved on to the filling. I put some strawberry jam in a piping bag, which at least looked somewhat professional.

Ready for a jam transfusion.

But my woes were far from over. What is the logical point from which to fill a doughnut – the top, the bottom, or the side? If you answered “The side, obviously, why would you even consider any other options?” you are a smarter person than I. In my semi-frantic state, I decided to cut small holes in the BOTTOM of my doughnuts through which to pipe in jam, completely forgetting that gravity exists and would cause a significant portion of the jam to fall right back out again.

This was SO. DUMB.

By some miracle, some of the jam managed to stay inside the doughnuts, and I finally had something somewhat worthy of presenting to my judges. But first, would any of the bakers fare as poorly as I did for this challenge?

John clearly feels about the same way I do about this challenge.

The face of pure excitement.

Ryan declares himself to be a doughnut expert – in that he eats a lot of doughnuts.

Good one, Ryan.

James, meanwhile, actually IS a doughnut expert. Apparently, he makes doughnuts all the time.

That makes one of us, James.

Most of the bakers are surprised by how sticky the dough is, as I was.

SLIME.

The bakers meticulously measure out their dough using a scale.

This looks far more methodical than my dough-portioning step…

Then the doughnuts go into the proving drawer for their final proof.

Hope they don’t stick together!

And finally, it’s time for the “oily plunge”, as Cathryn calls it.

“Oh my great giddy aunt,” she says as she drops her doughnuts into the fryer.

Notoriously technical challenge-adverse Sarah Jane’s doughnuts are actually looking pretty good.

Look at that golden brown!

Ryan, however, is having issues. His doughnuts seem to have deflated slightly and are no longer looking beautifully spherical.

These look kind of familiar…

Finally, it’s time to fill the doughnuts with jam, which all the bakers do from the side, because they are not idiots like me.

That jam syringe does look very handy though.

However, even with the trick of piping the jam in through the side, most of the bakers find their doughnuts hemorrhaging jam. Guess I wasn’t so dumb after all!

The producers really went wild with a plethora of jam oozing shots like this one.

When asked to describe her progress this technical challenge, Cathryn goes with “doughnut doom,” which makes me feel slightly better about my own performance.

Been there, girl.

When the time comes for judging, Paul is far from impressed by Ryan’s doughnuts. He utters the word I am most afraid of during this challenge: “overproved.”

My fears have come to pass.

And yet, Ryan and his overproved doughnuts fare better than Sarah-Jane’s, which looked deliciously golden-brown but are in fact completely raw inside.

This is about what my second batch of doughnuts looked like before I put them back in the fryer.

In the end, resident doughnut expert James takes home the gold, preserving his reputation for frying excellence.

These look like they could be sold at Dunkin’ Donuts.

But now, it was time to see how much of a doughnut disaster had occurred in my own kitchen. First, let’s take a look at Paul’s batch:

Sheer perfection, as Mary would say.

And now, the moment of truth…

Not quite picture perfect.

Okay, so my doughnut isn’t quite a perfect circle, and it’s definitely a few shades darker than a perfectly toasty golden brown. Still, it looks… better than expected? Edible? Not like a complete abomination? But the real test would be feeding them to my esteemed judges.

***

Matt’s Review: This is one sticky pastry. Personally, I’m into it. I’d always prefer ooey-gooey syrup to hardened frosting, and this delivered in spades. I will say, there wasn’t as much nuance to the flavor, and it tasted pretty much the same throughout. But having said that… I went to take a quick nibble before taking the donut upstairs to dig in and ended up just standing in the middle of my kitchen stuffing my face like a monster. My roommate saw the whole thing. I’m not proud. Overall, I’d say this one wasn’t my favorite of the bunch. It didn’t have a perfect texture and the flavor wasn’t next level. But if you put another one in front of me right now I’d down it in about thirty seconds. There WAS a soggy bottom. I think I'm contractually obligated to comment.

Wilson’s Review: Outside is brown, with a nice glaze. Nice and crisp, but color makes me think it’s a bit overdone? Could be the donuts were in the fryer for a smidge too long. Cutting it open, crumb appears a bit compressed. Not as airy as one would hope. Texture and taste are good, but there seems to be a slight problem with the fill - It’s not evenly distributed, which changes the whole experience. Overall, has potential, but you really need to watch that fryer.

***

So in the interest of full disclosure, I will say that the doughnuts I gave the judges came from my first batch, which was fried through the center the first time and were not subjected to a second dunk in the oil. I’m not really sure what the second frying did to the texture of my other batch, but they weren’t raw anymore, and I fed them to my parents and my friend Amanda who seemed to find them somewhat pleasant to eat. So I’ll consider that a good save on my part. This was not my most successful challenge to date – in fact, I’d say it was one of my worst bakes yet. However, given all the difficulties I encountered on this bake, from rapid-proofing dough to a broken thermometer to my own jam-filling stupidity, I’m pleased that I ended up with anything at all to serve, and that it vaguely resembled a jam doughnut. I guess I’ll have to just try again until I end up with a doughnut that is Paul Hollywood-worthy, but at least I’ll be somewhat confident that I can eat the rejects in the meantime.

#jam doughnut #gbbo #paul hollywood #great british bake off