They may be more popular in Hawaii than anywhere else. It became a tradition there to use up sugar and lard (and sometimes it said eggs as well) on Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras) before Lent. Here in RI and MA there have been Portuguese people settling the area for hundreds of years. In Hawaii the practice started with Portuguese laborers in the late 19th century. If I’d ever heard of them before moving here to RI I didn’t recall it. I can tell you they are a popular treat that everyone likes slogging down.
Around here they are often just a triangular shape that forms as you get the sticky dough off your fingers and into the oil. The Hawaiian versions I’ve heard of are more roundish, and I have heard of making a depression in the center of a ball of dough, not quite a donut hole but enough to get the center cooked a little faster.
Naah, I gotta draw the line at baked choux anything being a doughnut. In fact, I’m also opposed to any baked doughnuts being real doughnuts. Beignets are choux doughnuts, though.
In Cape Town, even though we have the other kinds (ring, jam, crunchy plaited racist ones), I grew up thinking of this as the default doughnut.
There is a wide range of doughnuts in my country. They differ from one another (or from the American ones) not only in shape but also in method of preparation, taste, and texture. Here are some examples:
He’s referring specifically to the American version of apple fritters, which are common in American doughnut shops. I personally don’t consider them doughnuts, nor do I consider bear claws, eclairs or cinnamon rolls to be dougnuts. But all are ubiquitous in American doughnut shops, so I get why some might .
I can readily agree some fritters are doughnuts - if they’re deep-fried, sure, I’m not a batter vs dough purist. I have a lovely recipe for medieval apple fritters in a cider batter, where you reconstitute the apple out of the rings you battered and fried…I’d call those a kind of doughnut.
My local cuisine’s signature fritter, the pumpkin fritter, is more of a pancake.
Doughnuts have existed here in the UK, commonly in several forms; all of these have been around as long as I have been alive (and certainly longer) including: Ring doughnuts - rings of fried batter, usually served hot, dredged in granulated sugar. Traditionally a fairground type of food Jam doughnuts - flattened spheres of batter rolled in caster sugar (finer grains than granulated, but not as fine as powder) - usually less crisp and more bread/cake-like than the above, injected with jam - usually oversweet (seedless) raspberry flavour. Custard is a popular alternative filling. Apple doughnuts - usually flattish, oblong versions of the jam doughnut, filled with apple sauce and glazed with sticky sugar icing Filled doughnuts - imagine a hot dog bun, made of sweet, greasy cake; the hot dog replaced by a long piped ruffle of cream on top of a piped line of jam. Custard varieties also exist.
Ring doughnuts with icing and sprinkles are, I think, a fairly recent introduction, compared to the other types
In the case of bagels, I thought the shape was to make them easier to hook out of the water bath (I guess the same could be true of doughnuts frying in oil actually)
I guess, growing up in the UK in the 70s, jam filled doughnuts were the standard. But I also remember we used to go to a remote village in Wales for our holidays, where there was a shop selling sugar-coated ring doughnuts hot, as they popped out of the contraption. They were a distinct highlight of the trip, so perhaps they were a rarity? I was too young to know.
Certainly for as long as I can remember, in the UK and back to early 70’s, “doughnuts” have applied equally to the filled and the ringed sugary types. Fried dough of various types.
Forget thee not churros. The Latin semi-equivalent. Certainly not a “donut” proper in the US, but fulfilling a similar need.
Ya got yer fried dough; ya got yer sugar outside; ya got yer sweet goopy filling inside. A donut by any other name would spike your blood sugar just the same.
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