Air Fryer Donuts Recipe

Hey, I'm John Kanell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making some easy, amazing air fryer donuts. So let's get started. First off, measure out one cup of whole milk, and we're gonna warm this to 105 to 110. Once your milk's warmed up, we're gonna mix in one teaspoon of sugar. This is some food to make our yeast nice and happy. And one packet of active dry yeast. This is two and a quarter teaspoons if you're measuring it out from a container. Give it a little mix. And we're gonna set this aside for about five minutes. If it's nice and foamy, we can go on to the next step. If it's not, please start over because your yeast isn't alive anymore, so you need to start over fresh. Otherwise, your donuts will not rise. While my yeast foams up, I'm gonna combine the rest of the wet ingredients in my stand mixer, starting with a quarter cup or 50 grams of granulated sugar. I'm also adding in six tablespoons or 85 grams of melted butter. One large egg, room temperature, please. Give that a quick whisk to combine. My yeast is beautifully puffed. You live, you're alive. We're gonna add this into our wet mixture now. Stir to combine. Now we can add three cups of all-purpose flour, but I'm gonna use my scale for the most accurate results. Let's add 360 grams, that's three cups. This recipe, by the way, is by popular request. I have a glazed donut recipe on the channel and the blog, and they're delicious, but sometimes you don't wanna deep fry something, and a lot of us have air fryers that we use constantly because they're so convenient. These are gonna be golden, fluffy, sweet, and delicious, but you're not deep frying them, so there's no oil cleanup. It's much more convenient and faster, too. All right, half a teaspoon of salt for some contrast. Remember, if you're making anything sweet, you have to have a little bit of salty, too. Otherwise, you're just getting a flat, sweet note, and it's not gonna be as delicious. Pop your dough hook on. We're gonna mix this on low until a shaggy dough forms, and you'll see what the mixture looks like. At this point, it's really just important to have the texture right, so shaggy at first will change the speed, and we're gonna look for a nice elastic dough. We need to develop the gluten a bit in this recipe, so if your dough's pulling apart and breaking, it's not ready yet, and by the way, you can definitely make this with a hand mixer. A lot of them come with those little dough hook attachments. It doesn't require you to stand over your bowl for a few minutes at a time. It's the only difference. So you saw the texture of the dough change. It's gone from shaggy. Now it's becoming a bit smoother. Just gonna scrape the bowl down because there's some flour hidden here and there. Increase your speed to medium-low, and we'll let our mixer mix away for about five minutes until it's smoother and more elastic, but you'll see what that looks like. There we go. Hmm, let's do some cleanup while that happens. Five minutes later, exactly, and you can see my dough is way more elastic, but feel like it is just got a bit of a ways to go. It's still falling apart after the stretch. If that's the case, go ahead and give your dough maybe two to three more minutes of mixing. It's fine. One thing, though, is this is not the same as a deep-fried donut. We're using a lot less flour because when you deep-fry donuts, everything's getting saturated and hydrated with the oil. These could be dry if you add too much flour, so we're taking it right to the limit of how little flour you can add. Your dough is gonna be stickier than normal, so don't panic and start adding flour. It's a different kind of recipe. All right, three minutes later. My dough is much more elastic. It is still, it's like on the tacky side, but it's actually not sticking to my fingers if my fingers are dry and clean. This is ready to go into an oiled bowl, and we're gonna let it rise for about an hour and a half. Whenever you have an enriched dough with butter and milk and delicious things, the rise is gonna be longer because the yeast has to work harder to push things up. This dough's sticky, so we are gonna oil our bowl. Just about a tablespoon or less. You can use your hands to work it up the side. Transfer your dough over. This is a very slack dough, look at that. Just get every last drop out because it's all gonna be delicious. I would turn it over once just to get a nice, even coating and make sure the top doesn't dry out. Cover it up and pop it into a nice, warm, cozy place for about 90 minutes. It'll double in size. An hour and a half later, and my dough has, whoa, it's doubled in size. It looks massive. I'm gonna give this a good punch down, and then we're gonna roll it out. So satisfying. Ooh, here we go. Set that aside. Flour your surface, and you could lightly flour it or well flour it. I'm gonna go with a little bit more flour than I would normally. Pop your dough out. Little more flour for the top. Little flour for your hands. And I'm gonna pat this into a rectangular shape. I have a little rolling to do. This is almost an inch right now. Roll it up, a little check, and that is exactly half an inch. I have a little bowl of flour at the ready because you wanna dip your one-inch and three-inch cutters in every time you cut. This dough is sticky, and you're gonna do everything you can to get a nice, clean cut. Cut your circle out. Lift your circle up. Gracefully lift that circle up. Place it onto a lined baking sheet. Get it back together. And now we're gonna cut the circle out in the middle for our donut hole. Like I said earlier, nobody wants a bready donut. If we added more flour, this dough would be strong and powerful, but dry and sad, so there's a little bit of extra work here happening, but it's totally worth it. The key to making this easy is just lifting up your rolled dough and scooting some flour underneath. This is a sticky dough. It will stick to your counter. No surprises there. We use our air fryer all the time at my house. It's actually a really convenient gadget, and in full transparency, the thing I do most is make crispy chicken pieces. There's a orange chicken, a lemon chicken, and a bourbon chicken recipe that my family loves, and the one thing I don't love is getting splattered by oil when it fries and doing all the cleanup, so the air fryer does a great job of giving you really crispy things without the oil burns. If you want some air fryer recipes on the channel, let me know, and I'd be happy to oblige because I actually use it all the time. I'm gonna re-roll all my scraps and make a second batch of slightly less pleasing donuts off-camera, but these guys are ready to rise. You wanna give them about 20 minutes just loosely covered so that they can puff up a little bit more. In the meantime, get your air fryer out if it's tucked away. To my powdered sugar, I'm adding two tablespoons of melted butter. Mm, this is the secret ingredient in having a delicious glaze. A little butter goes a long way. I'm also adding in half a cup of whole milk. I'm gonna add in most of the milk and save some for later because I really wanna be careful about the consistency of the glaze. And finally, half a teaspoon of vanilla for a little bit of flavor. Whisk this together until it's nice and smooth, and for the sake of consistency, you can add in a little bit of extra milk that we reserved if you need. Okay, look at that. It's not even done yet, but that looks really nice. Mm. Oh my gosh. It smells so good. I actually don't love a plain sugar glaze, but if you add in a little bit of butter, oh my gosh, it turns it into almost frosting. It's kind of magic. The donuts are puffed. My air fryer is warm. Grab some oil. I'm using coconut oil because I love the flavor, but any high heat oil that you enjoy will work. Gonna spray the basket just a little bit. And now we're going to get our donuts in order. I'm actually gonna spray the bottoms lightly first, and then plop them in and spray them all together. Cook the donuts and the donut holes separately because they have slightly different bake times. These ones will bake for eight minutes. The donut holes will air fry for six minutes. Close it up. And we're cooking these in batches. Depending on how big your air fryer is, you can fit four to five in each basket. I'm playing it safe and doing four. All right, ooh, look at these guys. They're perfectly browned and ready to dip in our glaze. Like any donut, best enjoyed warm. Mm. That is impossibly light, airy, delicate, and cakey on the inside. It is so soft and amazing. Mm. With that hit of glaze, it's just about perfect. I hope you get a chance to make this recipe, and if you like this video, check out my air fryer playlist.