Emboldened by my recent success with pretzels and with the fabulously successful Monkey Bread, I set out to try my hand at another tasty treat -- raised doughnuts. I set my sights high on this one. Since my mother loved doughnuts, and since we had some really good bakeries back in the old neighborhood, I have been eating doughnuts since I can remember. And although not all doughnut shops can crank out really good ones, there are enough doughnut shops in this country that the odds are you can find a good one no matter where you live. I have had a few really, really good sources of doughnuts in my life. The bakery at the Giant Supermarket in Lewistown, Pa. was one of these. This is the old store down on Dorcas St., not the new one in Burnham. Whoever baked at that store had a special relationship with raised doughnuts. They were so good that they got a mention in a book I read, one of the author's fond memories of growing up in that area. There is another shop out here in California. It's in Livermore, and was dangerously on my route home (if I went just a wee bit out of my way) from work. Since I got off of work at 2 or 3 a.m., I could get to the doughnut shop just as all the drunks got out of the bars and headed there for a cup of coffee, but more importantly, just as the bakers were working on the day's supply of the tasty morsels. The doughnuts would be so soft, so fresh, they would collapse in upon themselves as you bit into them.
That's what I had in mind when I made mine, and, well, I didn't quite get there. I had some difficulty with the texture of the dough that made it hard to work with, and while Sand was able to rescue me, neither of us figured out a good way to get the nice raised, puffy dough-nuts of the sheet and into the hot oil without some major falling of the dough and distortion of the shapes. Still, we got doughnuts, but not exactly pretty ones. There was also some issue with the texture of the finished product. Instead of airy, fluffy, melt in your mouth delicacies, these doughnuts had more the feel of funnel cake -- a texture somewhere between a cake doughnut and a proper raised doughnut.
Understand, I would and did eat these, and would do so again, especially when they are still fresh and warm, but they did not quite match up to my lofty expectations.
This is why you retire -- to have the time to reinvent the wheel, to master new skills. Important skills. Survival skills.
In my olden days of working in bakery there were two or three things they did differently than most folks do at home. The gluten in the flour was specific for various baking issues (higher or lower depending on what was being created), the sugar used was the bakers sugar (extremely fine) and also back in the day donuts were fried in lard. Yup.
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