Conquering my fear of frying

Before we got together, my hubby's standard "breakfast" was a couple of doughnuts and a can of Pepsi. Happily, it didn't take me long to exert my influence...within a couple of months of spending mornings with me, he'd gotten accustomed to a healthy breakfast first thing and his students would complain that he was crabby if he skipped it.

It's not just doughnuts; many of my hubby's favorite foods are deep-fried.

This is one area where we are just not compatible. I do not like eating fried foods, but more than that, I hate hate hate the smell of deep fried cooking. The smell of oil frying just pervades every surface, every scrap of cloth, every inch of a house. {shudder}

As I started cooking more over the past couple of years, I tried a lot of things I never thought I would. I'm someone who spent most of her life unable to look at a piece of meat with bones in it, unable to deal with the smell of peppers or anything spicy, unable to stomach the look or taste of red meat. I can now easily rip the insides out of a Thanksgiving turkey, can cook and cut bone-in chicken, can whip up a Sunday potroast with my eyes closed, can slice and dice a dozen jalapenos. But I told my hubby: even with my expanded food horizons, don't ever expect me to fry anything in my house!

Even so, when Di posted a recipe for doughnuts nearly a year ago, I bookmarked it. My hubby loves doughnuts, and I love being able to make his favorite things. I looked at the recipe periodically, but just could not bring myself to try it. I hate the smell of frying foods!

And then, a couple of months ago, Cooks Country had a recipe for homemade apple fritters. My hubby and my dad love apple fritters. And I just had to try it. So I bought a bottle of peanut oil, bought a candy/deep fry thermometer, dragged out my cast iron dutch oven, and gave it a try.

My hubby was thrilled that I deep fried, and he loved these apple fritters. I have to admit that even I ate a few bites the day I made them. My kiddos didn't really like them, and my dad said they were way too greasy. Success? So-so.

I went back to Di's recipe. I knew that Andrea was also nervous about deep frying, but had had success following Di.

So I bought a gigantic tin of crisco (I'd remembered reading a post from America's Test Kitchen that solid vegetable shortening was the best vehicle for frying doughnuts, although when I went back to confirm, I couldn't find where I'd read it) and whipped up a batch of all-purpose sweet dough from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. You're supposed to let the dough rise overnight, but I made it first thing in the morning, and when we returned home in the afternoon, the dough had already more than doubled, so I pulled it out.

I grabbed about 440 g of dough and rolled it out to about 1/2 inch. I used my 2 1/2 inch biscuit cutter to cut out circles. Unfortunately I don't have a tiny cutter for the centers, so I actually used the wide end of my turkey baster. I ended up with 10 doughnuts and about 15 doughnut holes. I let them rise on a parchment-lined sheet pan for a little over an hour until they were getting puffy.

Then I dumped 6 cups of crisco (gross!) into a pot and heated it over medium to 375F. I cooked them for 45 seconds per side, and only did a few at a time so I could carefully monitor the temperature and keep it right at 375. I removed the cooked doughnuts to a paper towel-lined cooling rack, and then coated half in a cinnamon sugar mixture (3 tbps white sugar with 3/4 tsp Vietnamese cinnamon) and dunked the other half into a chocolate glaze (1 ounce of semi-sweet chocolate chips mixed melted with 2 tbsp of half-and-half, a drop of light corn syrup, and a little over 1 cup of powdered sugar, sifted).

The 15 doughnut holes were completely gone by the time I'd finished dipping and glazing the whole doughnuts (and by the time I got the camera working).

Hubby said he considered it a sign of personal growth that there were four doughnuts left when we went to bed last night.

These were so good, not greasy at all. The little guy loved the cinnamon sugar ones and single-handedly ate an entire one for breakfast this morning. (Breakfast was with Daddy; I never would've let him eat an entire doughnut!) The little girl loved the chocolate-covered ones, especially the little holes that I remembered to dip in sprinkles just for her. Here's a chocolate-loving face: