I love churros, but another Latin donut-adjacent food is sopapillas.
Are doughnut holes doughnuts?
FTR, I’m not seriously suggesting the US term donut (however spelled) legitimately encompasses churros.
I’m just being multiculturally inclusive. Pretty much everybody has some sort of sweet fired dough/batter concoction. e.g. Strangelove’s funnel cakes.
If jelly-filled pastries are doughnuts (I’m skeptical of that myself), then certainly so are Hamantaschen.
Jelly-filled fried items may be considered donuts. Hammantaschen are baked, not fried. They are a kind of cookie, not a donut.
Take a stand! Tacos are sandwiches! Breakfast cereal is soup!
Well, actually it’s one of these things, high in complex carbohydrates.
Donuts can be baked. Most of the pre-packaged donuts are baked and all of Dunkin Donuts donuts are baked.
In addition, the hammantaschen pastry is much harder than donuts, more cookielike. Hammantaschen could be considered a kind of tart as well as a cookie, but no one would call them donuts.
I agree on that aspect. Donuts have a cake-like quality not found in hammantaschen. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to find them sold side by side with donuts, without causing confusion.
That’s where we differ. To me a real doughnut must be fried in oil. If it’s baked, they can call it a doughnut, but it’s not a real doughnut. It’s a doughnut-shaped cake.
Yes, this.
Then I have a correction to make. I’ve seen them. But I didn’t realize those were jelly donuts. I assumed that, like the other things you mentioned, they had a different name.
And, yes, I’m aware of people calling the whole group “donuts”, but I assumed that was just synecdoche (using the name of part of a group for the whole).
I just always thought jelly donuts were ring shaped, since I’ve seen ring shaped donuts with filling. I also had no idea that it counted if they included other fillings.
It’s an odd hole in my knowledge, I guess.
Is knowledge with a hole in it a doughnut?
I don’t disagree. But it’s not the only way that most of the rest of the world and I diverge. This is the difficulty in defining what a donut is, there are too many different varieties of treats known as donuts, and other foods that share the same characteristics. Even if you and I don’t see those things as donuts we can’t stop others from identifying them as such. Donuts should just be considered their own food group like vegetables or dairy, and of course sharing their rightful place on the top of the food pyramid along with bacon.
The traditional basic food groups are caffeine (or was it chocolate?), cigarettes, red meat, and booze, right? Doughnuts you could stick in the pyramid somewhere under the category of “sweetmeats.”
Funny you should mention breakfast cereal. Here’s a coincidence about breakfast cereal being stretched in a different direction than soup.
A couple days ago I was at the groc store hunting for cereal for wife. While staring at the giant wall-o-products I came upon these two new (to me at least) horrors. I had to snap pix & send them to her. Her response was they come with a lifetime-but-far-from-free subscription to Metformin.
Surprisingly, Kellogg’s own website doesn’t find that flavor; they only admit to making strawberry pop tarts cereal. Which is oh so much healthier.
Their competitor General Mills is not to be outdone in the diabetes-o-genic sweepstakes:
https://www.target.com/p/hershey-39-s-kisses-breakfast-cereal-19-8-oz-general-mills/-/A-78364611
And interestingly, the General Mills website also doesn’t admit to making this product either.
The five basic food groups are salt, sugar, grease, carbohydrates, and alcohol. (Caffeine, nicotine, and chocolate are varieties of vitamins.)
Hence the name “cake doughnut”.
Compared to those, “Super Sugar Crisps” are health food.