Oly Koek and Doughty Doughnut recipes | Sleepy Hollow | InLiterature (2024)

FAQs

How do you hollow out a donut? ›

Using a chopstick, poke a hole in the doughnut. Gently shimmy the chopstick inside of the doughnut a little ways, gently rotating from the initial opening but not widening it too much. This will open up a little more space inside of your doughnut for the filling.

Old-Fashioned Doughnuts are basically cake doughnuts that have been fried. This gives them a slightly crunchy outer shell, that's usually lacquered with glaze or dusted with sugar. The inside tends to be less dense than the cake of your typical powdered doughnut and less airy than a Krispy Kreme-style glazed.

The history of the doughnut itself is generally traced to Dutch immigrants in 17th- and 18th-century New York, then New Netherland, who prepared fried dough balls called olie koeken or olykoeks, which means “oil cakes.” They were similar to modern doughnuts, although they did not yet have the iconic ring shape.

In truth, though, many donuts with holes don't actually have any dough cut out of them to make their shape. Instead, special machines spray dough into a fryer in a circular pattern. The donut holes you buy at the bakery or grocery store are usually made out of dough simply cut into small squares!

Jelly Doughnut

These classic doughnuts are typically round without a hole in the middle, and generally leavened with yeast. The center is stuffed with jelly, jam, or preserves (and sometimes chocolate!), giving you a burst of flavor with each bite.

Use real cake flour – not DIY cake flour!

DIY substitutions don't really cut it, and AP flour will not create doughnuts with that same soft texture. Also, bleached cake flour will work best. Unbleached (like King Arthur Baking) won't absorb as much moisture, and you may end up with doughnuts that crumble while frying.

Dutch settlers brought olykoek ("oil(y) cake") to New York (or New Amsterdam) in the early 18th century. These doughnuts closely resembled later ones but did not yet have their current ring shape.

The Obvious Difference

Yeast doughnuts, as the name clearly spells out, are made from dough leavened with yeast (think brioche), whereas cake doughnuts are traditionally made from a kind of cake batter that uses a chemical leavener (i.e. baking powder or baking soda).

It is commonly used to represent real and metaphorical doughnuts, breakfast, bakeries and baked foods, snacks, coffee breaks, The Simpsons, and negative stereotypes of police officers.

Although the outsides and the edges were crisp, the centres of the donuts were always greasy and doughy. Gregory suggested punching a hole in the middle of the fried cakes, so that the insides of the cakes would cook as evenly as the outsides.

What can I use to cut out donut holes? ›

Just make sure that the edge of whatever you use is thin enough to cut through the dough rather than smashing it. For the donut hole, grab the cap of a soda, wine, or liquor bottle and press it into the center of your dough circle.

Drain the donuts properly

Draining the donuts on a bed of paper towels will keep them from getting greasy. A cooling rack seems like a good idea, but paper towels actually pull the oil out of the donut and wick it away. A cooling rack lets the oil pool in the bottom of the donut, and that's just no good.

Use a chopstick to poke a hole in one side of each doughnut to make a little space inside.

Today donuts can be baked without holes. But in the past it wasn't practical. That's because when bakers added egg yokes to the recipe the dough became unusually rich and it was not easy to cook the donut evenly. That meant the center was gooey and sometimes raw while the edges were crisp.