Donuts - With Yeast, Without Holes

Mmmm, donuts. They're delicious, they're available on every street corner in Massachusetts, and they're actually not tough to make.

This dough is in some ways very similar to other doughs we've made in the past year. In other ways, it's very different. It is a yeast dough, with the main components being water, yeast, and flour. But we've also got a lot of fat, some egg, and the dough is fried, instead of being baked.

Being by putting your yeast in warm water. Then melt your some shortening. It's pretty easy to do this in in the milk you'll be using later. It won't mix with the milk, but it will make it easier to pour into the dough.

Once it's melted, let it cool off a little, so as not to kill the yeast. Pour the milk-shortening into the yeast and water, in the bowl of a stand mixer. Add in 1/2 of the flour, an egg, sugar, salt, and nutmeg. Beat until everything is well combined. Add the rest of the flour and keep on beating. Once it starts to thicken, switch to the dough hook and knead until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. It will be a soft dough.

Cover the dough, and let it double in size.

Turn out the dough on a floured surface, roll it out and cut out the donuts.

Feel free to make center holes. I didn't have a cookie cutter that was small enough.

Fry the donuts, a couple at a time, a minute per side.

Move the donuts to a drying rack to drain off any excess oil, and top with a little powdered sugar.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup milk

1/6 cup vegetable shortening

1 package instant yeast

1 egg, beaten

1/3 cup warm water

1/4 c sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

12 ounces AP flour

Frying oil

Procedure:

1. Let the yeast dissolve in the warm water

2. Melt the shortening in the milk, then let cool.

3. Mix everything but half the flour in a stand mixer, and beat until well mixed.

4. Add the other half of the flour and mix well again.

5. Switch to the dough hook and knead until the dough pulls away from the side of the bowl.

6. Transfer to an oiled bowl, cover, and let double in size.

7. Roll out the dough and cut your donuts out.

8. Fry in 360F oil for 1 minute on each size.

9. Drain of oil and cover with confectioner's sugar, or glaze.

Dry Rub Ribs

One of the least appreciated ways to prepare rubs is the dry rub. You treat the ribs with a dry mixture of spices and seasoning, and cook, adding sauce, if any, later. Another great thing about dry rubs is that there's no one right way to make it.

In this mixture we've got salt, pepper, chili powder, cumin, and garlic powder. Paprika and mustard powder are also very common ingredients in a dry rub.

I mixed up the spices and seasonings, and added brown sugar and espresso salt. The brown sugar is normal in dry rubs, the espresso salt was to give some added depth.

Apply the dry rub to ribs or spare ribs, and cook via your favorite method. Due to a stunning lack of both spare time and slow cooker, I threw it in the oven for about 90 minutes at 300 F.

The result was one of the best spare ribs I've ever had. It was bananas.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons kosher salt

1 tablespoon cumin

1 tablespoon ground pepper

1 tablespoon powdered garlic

1 tablespoon chili powder

1 tablespoon brown sugar

1/2 tablespoon espresso salt

Procedure:

1. Mix all the seasonings and spices, and apply to meat.

2. Cook meat.

Raw Cookie Dough

Oh, raw cookie dough. Friend to the impatient and recently-heartbroken, cookie dough traditionally carries a bit of a risk. Cookies generally have raw eggs in them, and improperly handled eggs can carry salmonella. If the dough is made with the expectation of being cooked, or if accidents happen, then the cookie dough can be contaminated. Some people like the element of danger, but most people would prefer to enjoy their snacks without risking disease and illness.

Fortunately, you can make cookie dough without the eggs, thus saving yourself from potential doom. And even though it's not a name-brand, you can totally get the Pillsbury Cookie Dough Theme (note: not an official jingle, but all kinds of awesome) stuck in your head while you're making and eating it.

Now, we've covered raw cookie dough before in the post on Ice Cream, but I had a couple of things I wanted to try, so I figured I'd revisit it.

By and large, making the cookie dough is easy. Melted butter, sugar, brown sugar, salt, flour, vanilla, and milk. Mix the sugars and butter, add in the liquids and salt, and sift in some flour. Very simple. Still, why stop there? We need some more flavor in this, and I decided to go with three modifications to the basic recipe, which I adapted from the Cupcake Friday Project's Cookie Dough Cupcakes.

First, we brown the butter. Because why use normal butter when we can brown the milk solids. I could have gone farther with this and added in some more milk solids, but I decided to go with the base. To brown the butter, start with the basic step of melting the butter.

Then you keep it going, until the milk solids brown.

One of the side effects of this is that you're losing the water from the butter, as the water will boil out before the solids brown. So we get to add a bit more liquid to the recipe.

The second change I made is that I did not want to use normal brown sugar. Instead, I used all regular sugar and added in some sorghum molasses, cause I could. If you don't have fancy molasses, feel free to use regular brown sugar. But I figure, why not go all out?

Finally, instead of using a little bit of regular vanilla extract, I used a lot of my AYFS Spiced Rum Vanilla Extract. After combining as described above, then adding in some chocolate chips, you get cookie dough.

Overall, the changes all contributed to better flavor. I'm not sure it's quite as good as dangerous cookie dough, but it's pretty close. Maybe the element of danger is part of the enjoyment, or maybe eggs are vital to the flavoring. Maybe there's not enough salt. I haven't decided. Next time, I'm going to take half of the butter and, instead of browning the butter, I'm going to make a roux. out of it. This will eliminate much of the raw flour flavor and add some extra depth. Or we could use toasted flour as these Squeeze Cookies from Chocolate & Zucchini do. Toasting the flour limits gluten formation, but we're not really concerned about gluten, so we can probably get by.

Of course, you could just make the Nestle Toll-House Cookie recipe using pasteurized eggs, and you'll have a perfectly lovely and reasonably safe raw cookie dough, but if you are immune compromised or are very young or very old, you might want to play it safe and use a recipe like this. And, if you're not going to cook the dough, I think the changes I've made will improve the raw cookie dough even so.

Raw Cookie Dough

Ingredients

1/2 cup unsalted butter, browned

1/4 tsp. salt

3/4 cup sugar

1/3 cup molasses

3 Tbl. milk

1 Tbl. vanilla extract

1 cup flour

1/2 cup chocolate chips

Directions

Combine the butter, sugar, and molasses, and stir to combine.

Add in the liquids and salt, and stir to combine.

Slowly add in the flour, stirring.

Stir in the chocolate chips.

Instant Oatmeal

The words, "hearty breakfast," were first employed as a phrase centuries ago by Shakespeare to describe oatmeal. Well, that's a lie: the words were first employed by one of Shakespeare's lesser known contemporaries, and then he used it and everyone thought, "If Shakespeare says it, it must be true."

For my youth, oatmeal had always meant brown packets of a pre-made mix that I pour water over, put in the microwave, and eat. It was serviceable then, it's a bit disappointing now. The mixes are never quite what I want, and it all just seems a bit dull. But you can fix that, because it is trivial to make a packet of oatmeal of your very own devising.

There are three ways to get a pouch of microwavable oatmeal mixed with sugars, spices, and potentially dried fruits: you can buy the packet pre-made (the way Shakespeare did), you can make it packet-by-packet, or you can make it in a big batch and divvy it up.

If you're making packet-by-packet, which is fine for up to 10 or so packets, then you can use volume measurements for everything. You get a little assembly going, measure out each ingredient, put it in the bag, seal (not the aquatic kind), and you're done.

If you're making in a big batch, then you want to weigh all of your ingredients, mix thoroughly in a big bowl, then divvy with a measuring cup into bags. The first time you make a batch, it's probably worthwhile to scoop out a 1/4 cup and fix that up before you divvy everything so you can taste it and adjust things if necessary. You don't want to adjust every morning because you had too little sugar; that defeats the purpose.

A note on oats: old-fashioned rolled oats are fine. They take 3-4 minutes to microwave, and are much tastier and heartier than the instant kind. Plus, they're useful for granola, in case you decide that you've had enough oatmeal for a while. All you get from instant oats are a couple of minutes shaved off the microwaving time and suckier oatmeal.

Store the oatmeal in a small zip-top bag.

In the morning, pour into a bowl, stir in the appropriate amount of water or milk, and microwave for 3-5 minutes, being sure to pause to stir halfway through.

If you want a slightly tastier treat, put a bit of butter on the top and stir it in. If you are trying to force yourself to eat oatmeal for the health benefits and think that a bit of butter will kill you, just put the butter on. Not a tablespoon or anything; maybe a teaspoon. It will make the flavor significantly better and won't kill you. The benefits of the oatmeal go beyond "not having any fat in it." That's how Shakespeare ate it. Shakespeare loved butter.

If you use milk instead of water, you probably won't even be tempted to add butter.

The recipe below is terribly basic, and is meant more of a starting point than a final recipe. It's a brown sugar and cinnamon recipe, because that's a version I'm fond of. You could use a range of spices, dried fruits, some nuts, or whatever strikes your fancy and can be stored in a plastic bag in the pantry.

Instant Oatmeal

Ingredients

The Mix (one packet)

• 1/2 cup (52g) Old-Fashioned Rolled Oats
• 1.5 Tbl (20g) Brown sugar
• 1/16 Tsp (pinch) salt
• 1/8 Tsp (dash) cinnamon

The Day of

• 1 Packet Oatmeal
• 1 Cup Milk or Water

To make the mix, measure out the ingredients into zip-top bags and set aside for a cold, rainy morning. Or just a morning when you're hungry.

To make the oatmeal, stir in a bowl the mix and the liquid and microwave for 3-6 minutes, stirring once or twice. Time to cook will depend on the microwave, how many bowls you're making at once, and the temperature of the liquid. Also probably the age of the oats, to some degree. Most of the liquid should be absorbed into the oats when it is done.

Graham Crackers (And S'Mores)

To make authentic graham crackers you should use graham flour. The trick there would be to find graham flour. Seriously, it's super hard. Whole wheat pastry flour will make a good substitute. All that being said, this was a great recipe and I just used regular run of the mill all-purpose flour.

Start out with 7 tablespoons of butter, frozen if you have a large food processor, or chilled if you don't.

Mix flour, brown sugar, salt, and baking soda in a bowl. 

If you've got a food processor you could just pulse that, and then throw in the butter, and continue to pulse until you've got a coarse mixture.

If you don't have a gigantic food processor, cut the butter into the mixture using your favorite method (knives, fingers, forks, pastry cutter, but please don't mix and match).

In a separate bowl, mix honey, milk and vanilla extract. It will look a little gross.

Add the mixture to the dough, and pulse or mix until it comes together. Form it into a disk and chill.

You may have to adjust the amounts (given below) to get the right consistency. My dough was a little on the dry side, but worked out in the end. 

Mix up some cinnamon sugar for a topping.

Halve the dough and roll it out to about 1/8" thick, and cut it into rectangles.

If you want to be authentic, you'd cut all the way through for some, and just go partly through others. This, it turns out, is a lot of work, and they don't always hold together when you try to take them off the counter top.

Place the soon-to-be crackers on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, cover with as much topping as you like, and bake for about 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

Once then come out, let them cool off, then sandwich some of last week's marshmallow and some chocolate between your homemade graham crackers.

Ingredients:

2.5 cups graham, whole wheat pastry, or all purpose flour

1 cup brown sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp kosher salt

7 tablespoons butter, cubed and chilled or frozen

1/3 cup honey

5 tablespoons of milk

2 tablespoons vanilla extract

3 tablespoons of sugar (for the topping)

1 teaspoon of cinnamon (also for the topping)

Procedure:

1. Mix the flour, salt, baking soda, and brown sugar (in a bowl or food processor)

2. Add the butter until you've got a coarse mixture (again, do it in a bowl or food processor)

3. In a separate bowl, mix the honey, milk, and vanilla extract.

4. Add the wet mixture to the dry (you guessed it, in a bowl or food processor)

5. Mix the dough until it comes together and form into a disk and chill.

6. Preheat the oven to 350.

7. Split the dough in two, and roll it out to 1/8" thick. Cut the crackers into the desired shape.

8. Place on parchment paper, top with the cinnamon sugar mixture and bake for 20 minutes.