Sue's Doughnuts

Good luck, anyone?

I've heard tell that it's good luck to fry something on New Year's Day. I don't know if that's true, but it has been a good excuse to break out the hot oil once a year. This year, I set my sights on making one of the two recipes in Grandma's box for doughnuts, but, as usual, there were problems. 

First problem: both recipes made an insanely large amount of the treats. The recipe for Spudnuts proclaimed that it made 100, which was waaaayyy too much for the five of us who had stuck close to home for the holidays. Scaling down a recipe isn't usually hard to do . . . unless that recipe calls for "2 1/2 to 3 1/2 sieves of flour." 

What? 

Okay, it looked like we weren't trying Spudnuts.  Turning my attention to Sue's Doughnuts, I found it to be much more scalable, even if it did call for cakes of yeast instead of dry yeast. I could figure that out. The problem came when the directions started talking about heating the milk and no milk was listed in the ingredients.  

Okay. Maybe we weren't frying doughnuts after all. 

In a last-ditch attempt to save the day, I looked in the recipe box Grandma gave me many years ago, where I remembered seeing a recipe for Raised Doughnuts. Sure enough, there it was.   

And it was very close to one-third of Sue's Doughnuts except it had the milk listed. It didn't have the same flavorings as Sue's Doughnuts, namely nutmeg and lemon zest, but it could still guide me in doing a smaller version of Sue's. (By the way, I have no idea who Sue was.) 

How to Make Sue's Doughnuts

I started out by warming the milk and water and adding them to the shortening, salt, and sugar I'd placed in the bowl of a stand mixer.    

Once that cooled a little, I began adding the rest of the ingredients and found that I needed more milk than the typed recipe said. Once I got the dough to the right consistency, I let the machine knead it well, about 5-7 minutes. As you can see, it just cleaned the sides of the bowl. 

I moved the dough to a large bowl to let it rise. The ball was nicely smooth and supple. 

The recipe for Sue's Doughnuts said to let it rise twice but didn't say how long each rise should be. Thinking fast, I copied the rising time for my mother's bread recipe and set the timer for an hour. When the hour was up, I punched it down and let it rise for another 30 minutes.  Here it is at the end of the second rise. 

The next task was to roll out the dough and cut it into doughnuts. I didn't have a "salad dressing lid" on hand to use as a cutter, so I got out my circular cookie cutters. These two seemed about the right size for creating the doughnut and the hole. 

I had second thoughts after I cut them--the hole looked gigantic--but it was too late to go back. 

Forging ahead, I placed the cut doughnuts on a cookie sheet and let them rise for 30 minutes while the oil heated to 375 degrees (and we ate dinner). They looked much less skeletal after that.  

Then the frying fun began!

Once they'd turned a beautiful golden brown on each side, I took them out and let them sit on a paper towel for a few seconds to absorb some of the oil. They were then dunked in a bowl of glaze. 

It was helpful to have an assembly line, one of us frying, one glazing, and another plopping the doughnuts in the oil. Frying things can be a fun family affair, but we are all adults, so use caution if children are involved. The finished doughnuts weren't as perfect as those in the bakery down the street, but I thought they looked lovely. 

The doughnut holes were a little trickier to fry, but after they were dusted in cinnamon sugar, no one would have ever known how hard they were to wrangle in the oil.  

Attractiveness aside, the important quality was their taste. 

The verdict

Sue, whoever you are, bless you for coming up with the lightest, fluffiest homemade doughnuts that have ever passed my lips. The rest of the family agreed that they were something special. They were even good the next day, and that's saying something for a day-old fried good. One thing to note: the lemon zest and nutmeg were hard to detect when the doughnuts were fresh, but those flavors came through on day two and might have been one of the reasons they were still drawing takers twenty-four hours later. I highly recommend this recipe, and you would be lucky if you tried it too.