How To Make Homemade Donuts

I tested making doughnuts at home every way imaginable and there is one method that gives you those perfect bakery quality doughnuts every single time. We'll begin our doughnuts by activating our yeast which starts with some warm milk into the bowl of a stand mixer along with some sugar, that's going to be the food for our yeast, as well as one packet of active dry yeast. Give this a quick mix to make sure everything is fully combined and let it sit for 15 minutes to let the yeast wake up. Once your yeast looks nice and bubbly and alive you're ready to keep moving but if it doesn't do that process over again because if you don't have live yeast your doughnuts aren't going to work out. Into our bowl now we're going to add some butter that I've melted and then cooled back down to room temperature along with a few eggs, some vanilla extract, and a sprinkle of salt. Now attach your dough hook, turn your mixer on medium, and mix for about one minute or until everything is mostly mixed and feel free to scrape down the sides of your bowl if you need. Next while mixing again on medium add in a third of your flour and make sure that's fully combined scraping down the sides of your bowl once again as needed, then repeat the same process with half the remaining flour, scraping down the sides of your mixing bowl again, and then finally add in the rest of your flour. At this point we'll let the mixer continue on medium until it forms a sticky and tacky dough. That looks pretty sticky tacky to me. I don't know why I just did that, that just made a completely unnecessary mess. Just when I'm talking about how sticky it is. Well anyways when it looks like that we're now going to turn our mixer up even higher and let this continue for seven to ten minutes. You'll know that your donut dough is the right consistency if you listen closely and hear sort of a beat, a song that it's making in the background, but it's only going to play that song for so long until it pulls away from the sides of the mixture and becomes a uniform dough like this. See that? All by itself it's now completely separate from the bowl. At this point we're done with our mixer so we'll lightly flour our work surface and begin kneading our dough. Like I said the mixer already did most of the work so all you need to do here is knead until the dough is no longer sticky on your hands or work surface. Just a minute or two. Once you're happy with your dough do your best to shape it into a nice ball like this one here, then grab a bowl, butter it all up so nothing sticks. You can use your hands, you can use a paper towel, do this however you want and then gently lay down that dough ball, cover it with plastic wrap and add a little smiley face if you want and then let this rest at room temperature in a nice warm place for one hour. Fast forward to our risen dough and this is what it should look like. What this means is that our dough has been very very active and now we get to do perhaps the most exciting part of making donuts. Besides eating them, punch down our dough. Oh yeah, watch that thing deflate. I know it sounds like you'd want to keep all the air in there but we need it deflated just enough to be able to roll it out and then cut it into donut portions. Once again lightly flour your work surface. I always need to blow some off since I like to do extra because it looks cool. And then lightly flour your hands so that you can press your dough out by hand into an 11 by 14 inch rectangle which should end up being about a half an inch thick in height. As you press and stretch, do your best to keep things as even as possible or else you'll probably end up with some sideways donuts. You also want to make sure not to fold the dough over itself. Once you've gotten your dough as even and flat as you possibly can, grab some flour along with a ring mold or a donut cutter like this one here, then dip the mold into the flour to make sure it's been lightly coated and press, spinning if you like to make sure everything's fully detached and then right away move that donut to a pre-cut sheet of parchment. If you want to cook your donut holes or munchkins as we call them here in Boston, feel free to set those off to the side as well and then just continue cutting out all your donuts following that exact same process, doing your very best to cut out as many as you possibly can from the dough that you pressed out. It's best if you handle the donuts as minimally as possible. That'll ensure you get nice clean and even shapes like this for baking. As a final step we'll cover our donuts lightly with some plastic wrap and let them proof for an hour and after that we'll be ready to bake. Oh and look at that, I already made some donuts that are risen so you don't have to wait, but actually I am going to make you wait for two seconds while I clean up my workstation. The way this happens is really cool, we're going to pick up our donuts on this parchment, as you can see they're all nice and puffed up, then we're going to drop them into our frying oil, be patient here just give them a second to release and when I can I'm just going to lift away that parchment and let them fry. Set a one minute timer for each side and then flip carefully and confidently. Oh yeah, oh they look so pretty! This is the great thing about cooking donuts, you can let them do most of the work. After the same amount of time on the second side, go ahead and transfer them to a wire rack lined baking sheet with a paper towel underneath to catch all that excess oil. And wow look at those donuts, perfect golden brown on either side with that iconic white line going right through the center, exactly what we're going for. I'm extremely happy with these ones here so let's move on now to fry our second batch. Here we go, two important things about this parchment method here. First be really careful that your fingers don't go into the hot oil, that's the most important thing. And second, it's important to explain that we do this to keep that iconic circular donut shape. As tempting as it may be to push the donuts down into the oil, don't do it. If you do that you're not going to get the iconic white stripe. These donuts are already done. While I fry this last batch, I'll tell you a fun fact about donuts. If you're lucky and I have enough time, maybe I'll tell you two fun facts about donuts. The first one is that the biggest donut ever made was bigger than a car and weighed over 3,000 pounds. The second one, which I almost forgot about, is that I actually hold the Guinness World Record for the world's largest donut cake. Let me flip these and then we'll do one more fun fact. And third, donuts have holes in the center like this because bakers always got mad that they were still raw after cooking. So ever since then they've had holes in the middle. I made enough donuts here to make a few different flavors so the last step now is to get them frosted. I'm gonna whip together three different frostings because I have a vision of basically making this but with better looking donuts and better looking frosting. For our chocolate frosting we'll add some cocoa powder to the confectioner's sugar along with a little bit of milk. Oh my gosh, have you seen the trick with the cocoa powder and milk? I'll show you that in just a second. Let me finish this first. And a little pinch of salt. Now all we do is whisk it up until we get that classic frosting consistency. You know, when you mix this, it's gonna look at first like it's not gonna come together. It's gonna look really, really dry. But the thing I've learned about frosting on donuts is that it always runs more than you think it will. Okay, let me show you the thing. Check this out. This has absolutely nothing to do with donuts. Milk into a bowl. Look, this is real milk. Nothing fancy happening here. Get a nice big spoonful of cocoa powder and watch carefully now. You dip that spoonful of cocoa powder into the bowl of milk and then when you pull it up it's got a whole layer there but watch. Boom. Magic. Pretty cool. All right, let's make the frosting. Stop messing around everybody. Our second glaze is going to be strawberry glaze. It also starts out with confectioner's sugar but then we add strawberry jam, then some milk and beet juice for color. Same thing again now. Just mix it all up. Oh and look at that beet juice already turning this a beautiful red color. We're going for pink though. By the end it should be a nice pink and you may notice that this time I'm stirring with a fork instead of a whisk. After stirring that chocolate one with the whisk, I realize it's much easier with a fork to push things in and really get all the clumps out of the confectioner's sugar. I find this here to be the perfect pink color but if you want to add a little more beet juice you certainly can. Our strawberry glaze is done so let's move on now to our last one which is vanilla. First we need a bit of lemon juice, then a little vanilla extract and just like the others, a little bit of milk. I'm not going to make you watch me stir this one up. We're going to dip in the order that we made our frostings. First with chocolate. Here we go. First donut. This is a big moment. Drop it in, then lift up and once most of the drips are done, flip it back right side up. Add those sprinkles right away and there's your first official donut. It's a great looking donut. Moving on, let's do strawberry. Remember to give your frosting a quick mix if you haven't stirred it in a while and then go ahead and dip again. I want to see some votes right now in the comments which of the three frostings is going to make our best looking donut. This one looks good. I just got to let that frosting settle for a minute and then on we go with our rainbow sprinkles. That one's going to be hard to beat. That's a classic Homer Simpson donut right there. Last one now, our vanilla which is also going to get the rainbow sprinkles. This one definitely needs a mix. Here we go. I don't know, is this one going to look better than the pink? Picking which donut to take the first bite of is not an easy decision but I think I'm going to go with the pink one. How could I not? Look at that donut, look how perfect it is. Only one thing left to do. Wow, if you've ever thought about making donuts at home, do it. I promise you won't regret it.