The BEST Crab Stuffed Beignets | Savory Louisiana Donuts

What's up world, my name is Chef Jean-Paul Bourgeois and I'm in the Louisiana cooking test kitchen, your authority for all things great out the Bayou State. Today we're going to be making a little duo recipe that can go even sweet or savory and that's beignets. Now typically, you may know beignets as like a little late night snack with some coffee or a dessert or just a treat in the morning and it's usually sweet. It's pretty much a fried dough or our version of donuts here in Louisiana. But today I'm going to show you how I like to make them savory and leave the powdered sugar off and then stuff them with this crab meat cream cheese filling. Let's get to work. The first thing we need to do is create a sponge for our beignets, which is really consists of bread flour, which we're using in this recipe, a pack of dry yeast and some warm water. The first thing we do is just combine that warm water and dry yeast together. So all we want to do is just add that in to create that sponge, get a whisk and just gently combine that. You can see that already starting to come together and make sure that sponge is just well incorporated. So that yeast is kind of throughout and we want to let that yeast activate for about 20 minutes before we add it to our KitchenAid mixer. Now you will need a KitchenAid mixer or some type of mixer with a paddle and a dough hook. And from here we can move on to our next step. So we have bread flour, whole milk, butter, one egg, salt and sugar. We can combine all that in to the bowl. We're going to add our paddle attachment here. We're going to start with a paddle attachment and then move into a bread, excuse me, a dough hook. The butter will go in, sugar, salt, milk and then one egg, like so. Now beignets are eaten all around Louisiana. For those who have traveled to New Orleans, you've probably gone to Cafe du Monde or maybe visited some other cafes or bakeries or so on that are serving beignets and typically they're all the same. They're typically light, very pillowy. Sometimes they'll stuff them with other sweet things. I haven't had a lot of savory ones and to be honest with you, this is the first time I'm kind of making this stuffing inside of a beignet. I've made similar things with crab, green onions, cream cheese and garlic, but this will be the first time in a beignet, so I'm excited just to see how that turns out. I got to believe it's going to be pretty darn good. So we're going to start this just on a stir right here until it's just incorporated. We don't want to work it too much with the paddle. I just want to get it until it's incorporated. I'm going to scrape down that bowl. Just make sure that bread flour is off the sides so I get a good homogenous mixture. Get it back on stir. That butter is softened and I would recommend you, you know, leaving that butter out at room temperature to soften a bit so it doesn't have to work that hard to get in that. Let's go ahead and lock it down. I'm just going to take this off of the paddle enough to about to give it one more spin. Just want to make sure that's all incorporated. I can still see a couple little chunks of butter in there. Scrape that down. Make sure we're all off the sides. It's looking pretty good. Our little sponge, you can see how he's activated. You can see, you know, those air bubbles coming up. He's almost, you know, increased in size. He's a lot lighter than he was when we first made him. Let's go ahead and just get him out. We still have the paddle attachment here. I'm going to give it a couple more spins to incorporate the sponge into the dough. He's just real sticky, isn't he? All right. I'm going to scrape him down again and redo it just because I can see that sponge really needing to get a little more incorporated before we get him in the dough hook. There it is. All right. I'm calling it. Calling it right there. And we're going to switch over to a dough hook here. You know what? Thankfully, Vanessa reminded me that this dough is really sticky. I'm just going to flour my hands a little bit before I start messing with all this because I know it will want to stick. All right, scrape him off. I keep calling the dough a male. I'm not sure why. Why he's a he or him. But you can see how sticky this dough is. That's where we want it. Now, we need to get like a very elastic dough ball out of this. We're going to spin it on one first with the dough hook and then kick it up to two. We don't want to go any higher than two. It's going to take about six minutes or so for that dough ball to be made. Dough hook on. Lock it in place. Start on one first. Let it get going. That dough hook is just going to cut into this dough very gently. It's already starting to form a ball, but we want it to be nice and smooth. I'm going to kick it up to two and really just going to let that dough ball work its way around that dough hook for about five or six minutes until we see that smooth elastic ball starting to form in that bowl. All right, about halfway through, if you like, which I think is a good idea, you can work that dough back down the hook because it will creep up. You can see it's kind of stuck down right here. Let's just, with a nice floured hand, pull that from the top and just move that down. Get it centered back down the bottom. Then carry on for the next two or three minutes. Okay, our dough looks nice and smooth. It's pulled away from the bowl of this KitchenAid. Next thing we want to do is just get a lightly greased bowl. You can use Pam, you can use just grapeseed oil like I have here. Just wipe it down. All right, and now this needs to proof, you know, on your counter somewhere that's not too warm. It's got some humidity. You know, just regular room temp works well. I'm going to cover it with some plastic. Probably need to spray this with a little Pam on top, huh? Do I have some Pam? You want to throw me a Pam? Yeah, we could just turn it. Yeah. There you go, because that bowl is greased. Good call, Vanessa. Thank you. And then hit it with some plastic wrap. Let's see. Plastic wrap here. All right. Let this sit for about two hours right on the counter here, then we'll be ready for our next step. Our dough is proofing, and while that does that, we're going to go ahead and make our crab and cream cheese filling. Now very simply, we're going to need, we have a half a pound of crab, a half pound of cream cheese, some green onions, some garlic, some Cajun seasoning, olive oil, and lemon zest. You might see this big old block of butter here. We're going to throw this in that pot right there. What we're making here is just some clarified butter, also known as drawn butter. We'll add some lemon juice to that towards the end, but that's going to act as a dipping sauce or dipping butter for our crab beignets. Let's crank this skillet on high. Liberal amount of olive oil. We want to coat that bottom of the pan really nicely. I have some whole green onions. We're going to use the whole green onion, whites to greens. Thank you, Laura, for this knife. Put that in the cut, bro. So I'm just getting these nice and thin. This filling is super easy. We want to just bring some nice flavor to a very fresh, tasty crab without overdoing it, without overcomplicating it. You know, a lot of ways I kind of think about this recipe is like crab rangoons. If you had it at your local Chinese joint, almost like a Cajun style or Louisiana style crab rangoon. You can put all kind of stuff in your filling. Sure. I mean, if you had crawfish or shrimp, that could be other seafood options to go in there. If you wanted to make it sweet instead, maybe you pipe in raspberry jam or cane syrup butter. At a restaurant I used to work at, we used to make a coffee creme anglaise as a dip. That kind of ties in the whole experience around beignets in Louisiana because typically you're eating those powder beignets with coffee. So having some type of coffee dip or eating them with coffee ice cream could be a good way to bring forth that nostalgicness and authenticity to the dish. The beignet is a vessel for whatever you want to put in it or put on top of it or dip it or dip into. I mean, it's literally a yeasty, fried, fluffy, pillowy dough, and it can take all kind of applications, both stuffed inside, dipped, or just covered. Our olive oil is hot. We're going to add our green onions. We'll add our garlic as well. Let's turn our butter pot on. You can add just a little touch of salt here to start bringing out that moisture. Bloom a little black pepper in there as well. Good little chef trick, if you're looking to sweat something, if you see recipes that say to sweat, it means to not necessarily caramelize or to have any browning. If you add a little pinch of salt, that salt will help draw out the moisture of whatever you're trying to sweat and it will aid in that sweating kind of action without causing too much brownness. That's kind of what I'm doing. I'm sauteing on high right here, but I'm moving it around so I don't get an excessive amount of caramelization or brown in this sauce. I want to keep it nice and fresh and green. Now when I say drawn butter or clarified butter, what I need to do is I need to melt the entirety of the butter down. What will happen is the solids will separate from the fats, and I want to skim the solids from the top and leave the solids on the bottom. What I want is that golden fat of butter right in the center, and that's what I'm going to be looking to collect. At this point, that's looking pretty good. I'm going to add my crab, and I don't want to saute this much. I really just want to get it all mixed in together, get it warmed through. I don't want to break the crab up too much. Try to leave it as lumpy as possible. You won't hear me say that very often. Just getting it nice and mixed. Let's go ahead and add our cream cheese to that, and that's about all I want out of that. Just like that. That's looking pretty good. I do want to use a zest of a half a lemon, so for those unfamiliar, this is a great little tool. If you haven't got a microplane in your kitchen, I suggest you go on Amazon or your local, you know, food shop. Get you a microplane. They are perfect for zesting lemons, of course, but I also like grating garlic, horseradish, grating ginger, stuff like that. You can see just by, I'm keeping my microplane static, and I'm using the lemon to move across. All I'm doing is zesting that yellow part right on top of the rind, and that's really floral. That yellow right there, that's really floral, nice essence of lemon. It's where all the oils in the lemon kind of excrete from, and then once you get to that white or that pith, if you will, it starts getting a little bitter, so you don't want to go really past that yellow. All I want is about a half a lemon. Obviously, if you want to double this recipe, you want to use a whole lemon. I'm just going to add that in like that, like so. A little bit of Creole seasoning or Cajun seasoning to kind of doctor that up. Couple hits of Tabasco. I'm going to chop some parsley here. You need about a couple tablespoons of chopped parsley. You see me do this a lot when I go and rough chop herbs. I create that nice, tight wad of parsley, and then I stay really close to my knuckle to get me a good, thin chiffonade. Chiffonade just means strings or threads, and just like that, you're good. It's going to go right into the bowl, and let's give this a mix. Now, I know my crab's going to get a little beat up when I mix this cream cheese into it because we want to make sure that mixture is homogeneous, meaning all the way mixed and have kind of just one single mixture, not clumps of anything, but what really helps is have that cream cheese at room temp, even overnight sitting out, and that'll help just to where I can just fold the crab into that cream cheese instead of really being too aggressive and breaking it up too much. Again, I want to keep the crab as lumpy as possible because that's just nice, beautiful lump crab, you know, really preserving that. Our butter's melting away. It needs to get completely melted before we can really skim the solids from the fat. Oh yeah. I mean, that's going to be pretty darn delicious stuffed in that beignet, I guarantee that. While our stuff rises, while our dough rises, we're in good shape to take this filling, just add it to, you know, get it cooled down. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, you kind of want to just get it cold enough to where it's at room temp because when we pipe it into a warm beignet, we don't want to pipe in cold crab into a warm beignet. We want that, we want this filling to be room temp so when it gets into that warm beignet, it doesn't cool it down and so on. So I think that's what we'll do. We'll just cool it down enough to where we take that heat off of it and then set out room temp for when we're ready to fry beignets, it's at room temp, waiting on the beignets. You can see how much our dough has proofed. It's looking really good. Nice and fluffy. I'm just going to remove that plastic wrap. Alright, looking good. Now before I get that onto my rolling surface, I need to make sure that is well floured because if you remember, that dough is a sticky dough so we want to just get a good floured surface. Gently get that guy out. Now what we want to do is punch down, looking good right there. Then, with a rolling pin, again I'm going to flour even that rolling pin. Just give it a good roll out. We're looking to be about half inch to a quarter inch thick here on the dough. Don't want to get too thin. I mean just the weight of my rolling pin is getting a good surface, getting a good height on that. Now if I was in a restaurant, I might square this off so I can get nice even trapezoids if you will. Maybe I will anyway because who knows, you can save that dough for something else as well so I'm just going to square these sides off. Try to get a good, I don't know, maybe we'll try a second roll on it, doubtful. Square that off. We'll move that dough to the side and then using, see I'm using a pizza cutter. I like a pizza cutter. If you use a knife, you might drag through that dough and it might become kind of, it might pull because it is sticky. These will like double, triple in size once they fry, once that yeast activates so I'm just thinking about how big I want. Just cutting strips. Let's get you a strip. This one might be a little bigger. What do y'all think? You want to make them into squares? I think we'll make them into squares. Squares look good. I like squares. Alright. Really, I guess you can make them any shape you want guys, you know, I'm just going at it. This is a recipe I haven't made in a few years and luckily we've been kind of playing with it over the last couple days so I'm excited to get back seeing these in the fryer. Now they're ready to go at that point. I'm just going to dust your sheet tray with more flour. Now I want these to rest for like 10-15 minutes covered at room temperature before I fry them. Well, if you put them in the fridge, they won't continue to proof and rise. So if you are going to hold them for an hour, two hours or so, wrap them, put them in the fridge and they won't rise and kind of rise into each other. But I'm just going to spend about 10-15 minutes with them at room temperature. And so I think this space apart is appropriate. Alright, from here, like I said, give it 10-15 minutes before you're going to fry. If you're going to do it from this section, you can see they're already starting to rise a little bit. So maybe just 10 minutes to let them relax. If you want to hold them in your fridge for 24 hours, which we used to do at the restaurant, go ahead and cover them, put them in the fridge. But before you fry them, take them out and let them come up to room temp for 20 minutes before you fry them. So that's what we're doing right now. We're just going to fry them fresh, let them rest for 10-15 minutes and get that grease hot. Alright, our grease is hot, our beignets are cut, our crab is out. The last thing we want to do before we start frying is just make sure we get that clarified butter ready to go. And you can see that white accumulated on top, that's a full pound that's been melted. I'm just going to gently scoop that off. And I was thinking about what sauce to make for these beignets. Although they don't need a sauce, I don't think, that filling is going to be so tasty. It's always fun to dip, especially if you're making these things for an hors d'oeuvre, a cocktail party, for college game day, tailgating or so on. Everybody loves a good dip, but I didn't want to overcomplicate it. And from here, I just want to be careful and just try to get, essentially there's that white that I skimmed off the top just now, there's that on the bottom as well. So what I'm trying to get is all that liquid gold right in the center by just taking a little ladle like so and just going, using the surface area of that butter. Before we get our beignets fried, what you'll need to do is get a piping bag, alright, this little guy. And if you have a piping tip, just get that piping, alright, so like so, and get that filling in there ready to go. So when we're ready to get that into the beignet, a hot beignet, it'll be okay. We'll come back for more if we need it. As you can see, that's just about ready. Alright, our beignets have kind of been hanging out for 15-20 minutes. There they are, looking beautiful. Our fryer's at 375 degrees and just maybe four or five of these at a time go right into the fryer. Excuse me, give them some space to kind of fry and expand, so I'm only going to do four right now because I know they're going to puff up pretty significantly. And we're going to fry until they're golden brown on each side. Now that does mean we will need to kind of give them a little flip, but right now they're looking really good. You can see how much they're already getting pillowy-like, beautiful. Not your Café Du Monde style beignet for sure, these are so much better. Let's throw a few more in there. So what I want to do is I want to let these cool just enough to where, so I'm going to take a little paring knife and just kind of make a little incision on the back, so where I can stuff that crab inside. I want to let these cool just a little bit so they don't deflate so much when I do puncture them because there's all kind of steam in there that's activated this yeast and causing them to really leaven so much and it's a good thing. If you want, you can hit them with like a little salt out the fryer because this is a savory application. If you wanted to just go in and do the kind of the classic powdered sugar style, leave the salt off and just have some powdered sugar in a sifter or like a basket strainer and just hit them like that and then you're ready to go and cook them, you know, eat them like that or eat them with your coffee, stuff them with more stuff, create a little dip, but really that's your classic beignet minus the powdered sugar. We're going the savory route and so I'm going to take just like a pair of scissors, just create a little hole, I can get it in there, it's looking pretty dope, right? I think so. Remember that drawn butter, that clarified butter, just give it a nice squeeze of lemon right in there. I've salted it already because that's unsalted butter and then also you can hit it with some cracks of black pepper right on top and that's ready to go. You can make these beignets smaller and be more bite size if you want, but I'm always hesitant to make the beignets too much smaller because I like the ratio of crispy exterior to puffy, delicate interior and I feel like if I make them too small, that ratio goes off and you get too much crusty kind of exterior, but to each his own. That's just my idea and you know, that's a good, you know, two, three, four biter, if you will. Wow. That is a pile of crab filled pillows that I cannot wait to dig into. Let's give one of these, I mean, it's almost like, like a lobster roll or crab roll kind of filled beignet right into that drawn butter. Mmm. No. For the first time doing that, I can't believe it took me that long. That is incredible. Mmm. My name's Chef Jean-Paul and I am out.