GBBO Translation: Jam Doughnuts

Good morning (afternoon/evening/dusk), my lovelies! We've almost made it though winter! Spring is almost here! The days are getting longer, early flowers are popping up! Let's celebrate, shall we? Let's celebrate with doughnuts!

You don't have to say it; I already know that was a pretty weak introduction. If you'd be so gracious, I'll give you my best excuse: Words are hard. Normally, if I may say so myself, I'm a pretty decent writer. Many who make this claim will also claim, as I am doing, that talking is much more difficult than writing. This presents itself differently for different people, but my sudden failing of words is more than just not finding the right words. Most of the time, if I don't have something to say, I just don't talk.

Fellow introverts can attest that this often unfairly paints one with a brush of coldness. Just because I don't want to make small talk with you doesn't mean I don't like you. (In fairness, if I don't like someone, I especially won't make small talk with them, but that's beside the point). I'm just not afraid of silence.  And even though I need plenty of space from people after a time, I do still want people to like me. I have found that baked goods can make up for lot of silence in this respect. But all of that just to say the following: This post two weeks late (according to my own made up and self-imposed schedule) because I didn't have much to say. So I'm sorry for the mindless jabbering. Feel free to skip ahead to the doughnuts.

Of course, today's treat is not technically a baked good, because it's deep fried. I have seen in the last couple of years a fad of making baked doughnuts using a special doughnut pan. I even have one of these pans. Baked doughnuts are pretty good, and I like that they're not soaked in oil. But, I hate to break it to you, baked doughnuts are basically tiny bundt cakes. They're shaped like doughnuts, sure, and they're sweet and delicious, but they don't actually taste like doughnuts because they taste like cake, which they actually are.

Whew. Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. That one has been bothering me for a while, and I feel better having shared that with someone.

The recipe I'm trying for you today does taste like doughnuts because it is doughnuts. I tried my hand at the Jam Doughnuts from Series 3, which aired on PBS as Season 5, and is available on Netflix under "Great British Baking Show: The Beginnings" on week 7, Sweet Dough. Unlike a lot of the recipes on the Great British Baking Show/Bake Off, this is one that probably most American viewers have tasted at some point, although here we tend to call them Jelly Donuts rather than Jam Doughnuts, which seems like a technicality until you learn that to the British "jelly" is what we call jell-o. Maybe it's just my anti-gelatin bias, but a doughnut filled with jell-o sounds like an abomination, sort of "too American" in the same vein as fried baloney sandwiches, deep fried butter, and casseroles filled with mayonnaise and topped with ketchup. It probably does actually exist in one of those terrifying cook books full of jello salads and aspics from the 1950's. (I actually got a little nauseated doing just the research to verify that it was indeed the 50's that committed such atrocities; search it yourself at your own risk).

But today's doughnuts are not filled with horrible things. They are lovely and delicious and full of strawberry preserves, or jam, if you will. There are technical differences between what Americans deem to be jam, jelly, marmalade, and preserves. I don't want to get into it, but it mostly depends on how much of the sweet stuff is juice versus sugar versus actual fruit chunks or citrus rind. I've gotten into the habit (likely from watching the Great British Baking Show on repeat) of just calling it all jam.

I found today's recipe on BBC Food website and have copied it below for your convenience with my conversions and notes in dark teal (which it turns out is more visible on some computer screens than others. I'm sorry for any inconvenience, but it's going to be a lot of work to change it now, so you can deal with it I guess).

For the dough

500g/1lb 2oz/3.25 cups strong white flour (bread flour)

50g/2oz/0.25 cups caster sugar (extra fine or bakers' sugar)

40g/1½oz/3 Tablespoons unsalted butter

2 free-range eggs

2 x 7g sachets/2.5 teaspoons instant yeast

10g/¼oz/0.5 Tablespoon salt

150ml/5fl oz/0.5 cup + 2 Tablespoons warm milk (heated in microwave for about 30 seconds)

130ml/4½fl oz/0.5 cup + 1 Tablespoon water

For the filling

2 x jars strawberry jam

For the dough, place all ingredients into a large bowl, holding back a quarter of the water.

Stir with your hands until a dough is formed. Slowly add the remaining water and knead the dough in the bowl for four minutes. (Alternatively, you could mix with a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook).

Tip dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead well for 10 minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic.

Place the dough into a clean bowl, cover with a damp tea towel and leave to rise for an hour.

Tip the dough out onto a very lightly floured surface, and knock it back by kneading it a few times.

Divide the dough into 10 equal portions and shape each portion into a ball.

Place all balls onto a floured baking tray and allow to rise for an hour.

Preheat a deep fat fryer, filled with sunflower oil, to 180C/350F.

Lower each doughnut into the fryer, cooking each side for about five minutes or until golden brown. Remove the doughnuts from the oil with a slotted spoon and immediately roll in caster sugar so that the hot fat makes the sugar stick to the sides.

Set aside and leave to cool.

When completely cool, using a small, sharp, knife make a cut into the side of the doughnut, reaching to the centre.

Spoon some smooth or sieved strawberry jam into a piping bag, or piping syringe.

Pipe, or syringe, the jam generously inside.

On Your Marks, Get Set, Bake!

This recipe starts off pretty simply by just dumping the ingredients in a bowl and mixing, and because the dough shown in the episode being handled by the bakers looked like a sticky mess, I opted to let my stand mixer and dough hook do the dirty work. It mixed and kneaded for a while, humming away, while the bowl full of gloop turned into a smooth and stretchy dough.

Next I poured/scraped the dough into a clean bowl and popped it into my makeshift proving box (microwave oven, not in use, with the nightlight function on). I could have proved the dough on the counter but, as with the baguettes, it's winter and the house is cold, so I didn't want to spend a ton of extra time waiting for the dough to rise when that time could be better spent by eating doughnuts.

After an hour, the dough had risen nicely, so I floured the counter and tipped the bowl over onto it. The dough got a couple of quick kneads, as instructed, and I grabbed my bench scraper to divide up the dough. It did have a tendency to stick a bit to the counter if it ventured past the flouring, so I was hesitant to weigh the dough balls, but I decided that I wasn't good enough at estimating and that I would have to weigh them in the end if I wanted my doughnuts to be even remotely similar in size. What this means in practical terms: I didn't weigh the original, whole ball of dough. I cut it roughly in half and divided each half into five, and weighed the individual little balls, picking off and resticking bits of dough until they were all fairly close to 100 grams (give or take about 5 grams). They weren't perfect, but I was ready to be eating doughnuts and I knew I still had better than an hour until that could be happening.

I rolled the portions into neat little balls and placed them on a cookie sheet which I had lined with a silicone liner and lightly floured for good measure, and stuck the whole thing back into my microwave proving drawer for another hour and killed time by stuffing my face with Thai food eating lunch.

When I was out of delicious Asian food to eat the timer for the second prove was up, I checked on the dough balls (nicely puffy, but not overly so) and prepared to fry 'em up. Friends, here is where things got a little hairy. Not literally; I vacuumed thoroughly and told Pippin he would have to wait for butt scratches until the cooking was finished. But figuratively, things were hairy. I prepared a pan with oil. The recipe called for sunflower oil, but I went with canola oil. Any neutral flavored oil with a relatively high smoke point should be fine for this, and canola oil is cheap and readily available. I started heating the oil and monitored its temperature with a thermometer.

If you have a deep fryer (particularly one that regulates temperature), use that, but I don't have one because I don't fry a lot of things. (If I'm going to eat junk food, I don't want it to be the kind that gives me horrible indigestion all night long. I make this exception for doughnuts.) So I used a pan and a candy thermometer. When the thermometer said the oil was up to temperature I began frying the doughnuts.

I understand the theory of how to fry things, but I'm not very good at it. I know that if the oil is too hot, the outside cooks too fast and burns before the inside is done. If the oil is not hot enough, the whole thing (whether it's a doughnut, a funnel cake, an oreo, french fries, a turkey, whatever) takes too long to cook and absorbs more oil, leaving you with a greasy mess that tastes like a truck stop. I also know that the more items you fry at once, the more those items will lower the temperature of the oil, potentially resulting in the greasy mess.  I understand how it works, but I can't ever quite make it happen how it's supposed to.

That being said, once my thermometer said my oil was at 350 degrees Fahrenheit, I plopped in a couple of doughnuts. My pan was able to accommodate three or four doughnuts at a time, but I was trying to keep my oil temperature fairly steady. Unfortunately, I am impatient, and heated the oil too quickly, so the temperature reached 350 and then kept going, so I had to try and cool it down, which probably took longer than if I had just heated it slowly in the first place. Long story short, my doughnuts were cooking a little too fast, getting a little bit darker than I expected a little too quickly and I feared that they weren't quite done all the way through. Nevertheless, I turned the heat on the oil down a little and fried on, removing doughnuts from the oil when both sides were evenly browned and rolling them in sugar before putting them on a wire rack to cool.

In this whole process of oily uncertainty, I did learn one trick that I'll pass on to you: If you let your doughnuts do their second rise on a silicone liner or parchment paper, the easiest way to pick them up without deforming them is to lift the liner with one hand and then sort of roll the doughnut off the liner into your other hand. I found that when I just picked them up (with hands or tongs) they often squished and then the heat of the oil made the uneven air bubbles exaggerate the deformities. Letting the doughnut gently fall off the liner into my hand let gravity do most of the work and the doughnuts stayed more round.

I also noticed something that I don't understand (and if it's something you do know about, please let me know! I'm sure I could Google it but, I'd love to actually connect with you and we can learn from each other!). As I was frying the doughnuts, the oil got foamy. It's not that it just bubbled more around the doughnuts (which it did), but it developed a foam that almost looked like soap suds and didn't rapidly dissipate when the doughnuts were removed. Even though I don't fry a lot of things myself, I have still spent my thirty years on this Earth eating far more fried things than I should have, and have watched my mom, grandmother, aunts, uncles, friends, neighbors, and state fair snack vendors fry a great variety of things and I don't ever remember seeing oil foam like this. My theory is that it was some reaction to a particular ingredient in the dough, but it's not like it was a particularly unique batter. I'd love to hear what you might know about the subject in the comments!

When the doughnuts were fried and sugared and cooling and the oil was set aside to cool, I began working on my jam dispensing apparatus. I was a little surprised to find that the recipe called for jarred jam and not fresh made, but sure enough, the bakers on the show didn't seem to be making their own jam. The recipe also said two jars of jam, but didn't say how big the jars were. I went with one 18 ounce jar (ounces being the weight), because I was only filling ten doughnuts. It did end up being enough jam, with some left over even. The recipe did however recommend sieving the jam to remove lumps and seeds. I happen to like lumps and seeds in my jam (and also didn't want to go to the trouble, because I'm lazy and I wanted doughnuts sooner rather than later). This proved to be a mistake.

Because I didn't sieve my jam, the lumps blocked (or, if you will, "jammed") the various piping tips I tried for filling the doughnuts, even when I tried my largest round tip. Do as I say, not as I do: Sieve your jam or make sure that the product you buy in an American store is labeled jelly, which is made from juice and shouldn't have any fruit chunks in it. Or just have a lot more patience than I had. Maybe all of that together, for best results.

Another mistake I made with the jam was going too fast. There's a meme that pops up every once in a while with the quote from some very skinny model that says, "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels," and then the response is a picture of Tina Fey as Liz Lemon on 30 Rock saying "I don't know, you ever put a donut in the microwave?" and my response to Tina/Liz is "Aww yeah! And even better than microwave is when they're still warm from being fried!" and then we high five and eat too much cheese while watching television in our pajamas.

Anyway, I figured if I was frying doughnuts in my own kitchen, I wanted to eat hot 'n' fresh doughnuts and not turn on a giant neon light to tell everyone that they were available (because I am not Krispy Kreme; I do not make so many doughnuts that I can just give them away to strangers). So when the doughnuts were cool enough to pick up but not completely cool, I began the struggle of filling them with jam. I used a chopstick to make the hole, and that worked pretty well, so after trying several different piping tips and clearing out several strawberry blockages, I had ten sugary, slightly oozing, jam filled doughnuts, and they were still warm.

Judging

Now, before I plowed into these doughnuts with the appetite of the Fenris wolf, my expectations were not high. The doughnuts felt pretty heavy and I was pretty certain that they were not cooked all the way through. To be safe, I cut a doughnut in half for sampling.

The doughnuts were more done than I expected them to be but not as done and I hoped they would be. Here's the kicker, though: If I had waited and let the doughnuts cool completely, they might have finished cooking themselves all the way through. Of the three doughnuts I cut open immediately, all three only had raw dough immediately surrounding the jam. My theory is that the doughnuts, still hot from the oil, were finishing cooking on the rack as they cooled from the outside, and when I introduced the much cooler jam to the center of the doughnut, that cooking stopped.

I looked at the doughnut, cut neatly in half with a fluffy ring of fried bread, a small ring of sad, raw dough, and a generous pocket of strawberry jam and heard my first grade teacher's voice echo through my  mind: "Haste makes waste!"

And I ate it anyway. And then a second. But then I stopped because I didn't want to get a stomachache. I mean, I still got a stomachache, but it was just a little one.

The doughnuts were actually pretty good! The part that was actually cooked was soft and slightly sweet, and the sugar on the outside offered a nice crunch to contrast with the softness of everything else (although it does make a bit of a mess). They didn't taste too oily, and even though the outside was browner than I wanted, they didn't taste burned either.

The leftovers were even good the next morning heated in the microwave for about 20 seconds, although the oily taste was a little more noticeable with time (but that seems to be the case with most doughnuts). Another perk of microwaving them was that even just that short time seemed to help reduce the amount of underdone dough, but it also may have been that those doughnuts were just more done to begin with, because I did try to start with the ones I thought most likely to be raw.

So there you have it! Jam Doughnuts! Fun to make, more fun to eat. And while I'm sure I didn't get star baker, I did get to eat doughnuts, so I'm counting this as a win.

Jam Doughnuts:

For the dough

500g/1lb 2oz/3.25 cups bread flour

50g/2oz/0.25 cups extra fine or bakers' sugar

40g/1½oz/3 Tablespoons unsalted butter

2 free-range eggs

2 x 7g sachets/2.5 teaspoons instant yeast

10g/¼oz/0.5 Tablespoon salt

150ml/5fl oz/0.5 cup + 2 Tablespoons warm milk (heated in microwave for about 30 seconds)

130ml/4½fl oz/0.5 cup + 1 Tablespoon water

Filling

2 x jars strawberry jam

Place all dough ingredients into a large bowl, except for about one quarter of the water. Stir together until a dough is formed, slowly adding the remaining water and knead the dough in the bowl for four minutes. Transfer dough to a lightly floured surface and continue kneading for 10 minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic. (Alternatively,  mix with a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook until the same consistency is reached.)

Move the dough into a clean bowl, cover with a damp tea towel and leave to rise for an hour.

Tip the dough out onto a very lightly floured surface, and knock it back by kneading it a few times.

Divide the dough into 10 equal portions and shape each portion into a ball.

Place all balls onto a floured or lined baking tray and allow to rise for an hour.

Preheat a deep fat fryer or frying pan filled with sunflower or other neutral flavored oil, to 180C/350F.

Lower each doughnut into the fryer, cooking each side for about five minutes or until golden brown. Remove the doughnuts from the oil with a slotted spoon and immediately roll in caster sugar to coat.

Set aside and allow to cool.

When completely cool, using a small, sharp, knife, chopstick, or skewer make a cut into the side of the doughnut, reaching to the center. 

Spoon some smooth or sieved strawberry jam into a piping bag, or piping syringe. 

Pipe, or syringe, the jam generously inside.