Flour on the Floor: Buttermilk Doughnuts

Despite my southern roots, I do not know my way around a deep-fat fryer. About 10 years ago during one Vidalia season, my husband and I went into a frying frenzy for a few weeks and gorged ourselves silly on onion rings. His grandmother got wind of this and a brand new Fry Daddy showed up on our door-step. This was all it took to squelch our frying enthusiasm. We asked ourselves: “Have we become the type of people who need to own actual kitchen equipment to facilitate our gluttony?” Fingers crossed, we answered no. We sold the Fry Daddy--new in box--in a garage sale a couple of years later. Now, smack in the middle of swimsuit season, I have proceeded in the Baking Illustrated book to the recipe for Buttermilk Doughnuts; ditch the onions, we’re just deep frying batter here people.    

I spent large swaths of my childhood near the city that gave us Krispy Kreme--all hail Winston Salem, North Carolina. There is a location close to my mom’s house in Greensboro and when I spy the flickering, promising neon of their “Hot Doughnuts Now” sign, my heart still jumps. Granted that might be my heart’s means of protest.  My husband is convinced that the sign is always on and that the urgency it implies is a “crock” but I don’t care. When the doughnuts are fresh and I’ve watched the hair-netted, lab-coated woman fish them off of the icing-caked rollers of the assembly line and drop them into a box just for me, I am twitching even before the onset of the sugar/grease high that follows. When hot, they seem to melt, disappearing before I’ve registered what I’ve eaten. That’s why, I tell myself, I have to eat so many--to really taste them. I can down six of those airy confections without a breath. Then comes the low: the bloated stomach, the full-but-still-hungry feeling, the complaining. But like childbirth, the bad parts are quickly forgotten when I hold that sweet little bundle.       

The prospect of making my own hot doughnuts (now) is exciting and little daunting. First, I need a candy thermometer (to monitor the oil heat) and a half-gallon of Crisco. I marvel that Crisco is still being produced but there it is on the supermarket baking shelf its label urging me to use it instead of butter or margarine for baking and proclaiming its health-conscious status of “0g  trans fats per serving.” I later share my disbelief with a friend, “I thought the stuff was exclusively trans fat; I mean its first ingredient starts with ‘hydrogenated.’” She warns me to beware the trick that is the serving size and explains that sometimes products scale down their sizes to take advantage of the FDA rule that 0.5 grams of trans fat or fewer per serving can be listed as “zero per serving.” My recipe calls for 40 ounces of vegetable shortening--80 servings of Crisco.     

I haven’t seen Crisco since I was a child and I’m eager to peel off its tin top and feast my eyes on the impossible whiteness of it. It is perfect--containing ripples betraying its once-a-liquid status while staring back at me defiantly solid. When I plop spoonfuls of it from the can into the cast-iron pot we’ll use for frying, my daughter gets excited. “Is it ice cream?” she wonders. No. “Whipped cream?” she asks hopefully. No, and don’t eat it. I have trouble explaining to her how we can add something seemingly inedible to a recipe and, when done, it will magically be okay to eat. Crisco itself has had to wage campaigns to convince its consumers that, in fact, "it's digestible!" 

For the most part, the recipe is pretty standard stuff--mixing the baking twins of soda and powder with flour, sugar, and such. My daughter and I have fallen into an easy pattern. I am still eager to move things along and anxious about the mess but am learning to relax a little. She is growing more confident in her abilities and has started to do more of the measuring and pouring by herself. This week, she even grabbed the camera and took a few shots of the mixer. I wonder if her confidence will eventually carry past our kitchen. At the Glencoe public library, the librarian recently asked her to describe the book she just read to earn a prize in the summer reading program. My daughter held tight to my leg; she looked down and remained silent; she wouldn’t even name the book. I broke in and asked her a silly question: “Was that a monkey living with the polar bear in the Arctic?”  No, she smiled, “It was a walrus!” She opened like a flower then, blooming with information-- talking about the cupcakes the penguin liked and how silly the polar bear was. In the kitchen my daughter isn’t shy; she chats, laughs, and bosses.

Doughnut batter turns out to be the most hateful, sticky dough we’ve ever worked with. It’s on our hands, our clothes, the rolling pin--pretty much everywhere but in neat, open-at-the-middle circles. We keep throwing flour at the problem and re-rolling.  The dough ends up too thin but we measure and shrug and say our mantra: No big deal. I adopted this phrase as a verbal way of re-assuring the kids that it doesn’t matter when they [spill milk on the new couch, draw with permanent marker on the white board, cut their own hair] while inside I am using all of the foul language my son’s “no bad words” sign on the fridge has forbade.

Once we’ve bullied and cut the dough, I throw four of our thin doughnuts in as the oil temperature hits 175 degrees. It turns out that is 200 degrees too early. No big deal. They promptly sink and stick to the bottom of the pan. The temperature finally rises, roiling with now-liquid Crisco, and the doughnuts are puffing up and browning just right. I dredge them, still hot, in a cinnamon-sugar mix while my daughter “cleans” the overflow off the counter with her licked finger. The doughnuts look impressive, and decidedly homemade, all lined up on a plate. My daughter and I pick the ugliest ones and gobble them up. They are crispy on the outside and cake-like in the middle and we are both left with sugar and  cinnamon mustaches.

We take them to a neighborhood BBQ and are promptly swarmed like the Beatles. One friend suggests dipping them in chocolate next time. My daughter pipes in that she’d like them in sprinkles. The platter of doughnuts--though it sits among goodies like Cheetos and hot dogs--is empty in under seven minutes (my husband times it). Then the kids launch themselves back into the rented bounce house, their lips coated with sugar and their bellies full of trans fats.

I love summer.