If your “beignet” involves chemical leaveners, flour that has not been cooked onto roux with butter and water, or fewer than 4 eggs to a cup of flour…not beignet.
Ditto crullers.
Ignorance fought.
Great. Now I want beignets.
What about this?
enriched wheat flour, enriched barley flour, milk, buttermilk, salt, sugar, leavening (baking powder, baking soda, and/or yeast), natural and artificial flavoring.
Yegads, is that some kind of prepackaged abomination passing itself off as a beignet?
They are a cinch to make. If you started right now you could have one hot and fresh in 15-20 minutes.
edit: nm
With chicory coffee.
It’s what they use at Café du Monde. They’re kind of iconic.
Game, set, match to Johnny.
A good philly cheesesteak is a wonderful thing, but by all accounts the cheese is sacrilegious.
Café du Monde’s beignet’s may be spectacular, but I doubt they could be better than the ones in France, and they’re certainly an abomination.
Yes they are, and that explains why this confusion even exists. For whatever reason Cafe du Monde decided to make a yeast-risen doughnut (of no particular distinction, I might add, the damn things are chewy! Chewy!! Madness…) and call it a beignet, poisoning the culinary vocabulary.
I could quote and link and make the case, if anyone feels strongly about it, (have to go to my computer, quoting and styling is a fucking pain on an ipad) but I will say this: googling reveals that to the extent it is understood to be anything other than fried pate au choux, the writer says that it is “New Orleans Style”, or mentions Cafe du Monde directly, or states that either way is ok :smack: or otherwise indicates that yeast-risen is not traditional…and that last goes for Cafe Du Monde itself, which says on the beignets page:
But it should read “today, after a century of calling our doughnuts beignets, thats whata lot of people think a beignet is!”
It isn’t “either way”, either, as some people would have it. Because then it is a totally worthless word, since genuine choux beignets and the cafe versions are so radically unalike in every conceivable particular that it renders every kind of fried dough made from wheat a beignet. Navajo fry bread, churros, Krispy Kremes…all beignets.
For anyone who has only had Cafe Du Monde doughnuts, a genuine beignet is made from exactly the same dough that is used to make eclairs and profiteroles. It is called “choux”, meaning cabbage, because choux buns looked like heads of cabbage, as do beignets (cafe du monde doughnuts look like puffy blocks). It is leavened by eggs, nothing else. The end product is a puffy cabbagehead with a crisp exterior and a custardy interior.
If you have ever had the “fritters” at Disneyland, you have had a beignet.
I am a little confused…French beignets are the best abominations?
Also, unless your donut shop is weird, crullers. The pretty little swirly-lookin circles… I had never had one until just a few years ago. I bit into it, recognized the (genuinely iconic) eggy, tender interior and thought holy moly they’re makin’ beignets and calling them crullers! I double checked by looking up cruller recipes and sure enough…
They really are incredibly simple, yet marvelously delicate and delicious:
Boil 1 cup water with 1 stick butter, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 or 2 teaspoons sugar.
At a rolling boil, add 1 cup flour all at once, stir madly to combine, back on heat for a coiple of minutes to reduce moisture, always stirring.
Ideally in a mixer, add four eggs, ONE AT A TIME, until each in well incorporated.
You now should have more batter than a dough, much too loose and sticky to handle. You can drop by small spoonfuls or pipe ( a la crullers, which are piped into shape, then briefly frozen to allow them to be handled)… Just keep in mind that you don’t want them too big or they will end up uncooked or too dense. And depending on your preference, piping narrowly directly into the hot fat will cook them through, no custardy interior. Which has its own charm, of course, (think ultra light funnel cake) but the eggy center is what really sets beignets apart from any other fried bread thing I am familiar with.
The batter isn’t sweet, obviously, so you sprinkle powdered sugar, maybe use glaze…experiment.
It’s a non-restrictive relative clause. The section between commas can be removed without changing the general meaning of the sentence.
? At Cafe du Mond in New Orleans beignets are a yeast dough tinged with a light touch of sugar and nutmeg, rolled out flat and cut into squares, raised about 15 minutes and dropped in the hot oil then dredged in powdered sugar. That is a beignet. If it is choux paste it is a cruller and that is that [or formed into eclairs and cream puffs]
Keep reading, cafe du monde corruption of the word addressed.
Up here a cruller is plain cake donut batter shaped into a log as opposed to circle. It’s almost always rolled in either regular sugar or cinnamon sugar. It’s been years since I’ve made them at work. I know the type of cruller everyone else is talking about. We used to call those “French donuts”. They weren’t very popular.
[URL="http://www.roadfood.com/Restaurant/Overview/5359/donut-dip
ETA: I have no idea why the link above is wonky. So much for my cutting/pasting 
This is a weird blend of linguistic ignorance and gourmet pretensions. No, language doesn’t get corrupted. If I order a beignet, and the waiter brings me what I intended to be brought, what’s brought to me is a motherfucking beignet, I don’t care if you’d call it a stir-fried umbrella. Language only cares about what the speaker and audience mutually understand the words to mean. The idea of corrupt language is reactionary foolishness of the highest order.
I can think of foolishnesses of a much higher order.
True–regrettable hyperbole.