The Vegan Chef Project: The Difficulty with Donuts

Sunday, June 12, 2011

The Difficulty with Donuts

As you may or may not know, ordering food from the internet is awesome but not always possible: difficult with timing of my presence for delivery, not to mention cost of shipping frozen and refridgerated foods. And vegan donuts are not widely available in this area...so I missed donuts. I decided it was a good idea to make a full batch of about 50 chocolate donut holes, and double a recipe for yeast-raised donuts so I could have some to freeze for later and plenty to share. I'm the kind of gal that figures, if you're going to go to the trouble of doing something, go all out. So I made the batters - chocolate (with extra goodness from pulverized vegan oreo-type cookies) had to chill while yeast batter rose. Then you have to carefully cut them out, making sure the cutter doesn't get sticky, let them raise again/chill again if needed, etc. After a couple hours of messing around, I finally heated the oil on the stovetop in a huge pot. They only take a couple minutes to fry, but you can only fry so many at a time or the oil temperature will lower, and things get crazy. It seemed like I was frying small batches of donuts and donut holes for well over an hour, but it was probably closer to 40 minutes. Halfway through or so, it started to get hot. And I started feeling the sensation of my eyes burning...I imagined it was from prolonged heat from the stove, and started to visualize terrible things happening to my eyes. Turned on the stove fan and eventually opened some windows and the doors. Spent several minutes directly in front of the air conditioner when I was finally done. So, I decided while these are some of the best donuts I've ever had, and I love eating donuts...it's just not worth it to make homemade all the time. Maybe every 5 years or so I'll make donuts.

I took these pictures right after I finished cooking them, "in case something destroyed them overnight."