The devil’s in the doughnuts
30 Jan 2006 
around lunchtime 
Matt Winckler
Saturday afternoon rolled around to find a Matt with doughnuts on the brain. And so it was that I began casting about the notion of trying a yeasty doughnut recipe. Mystie reminded me of something I had forgotten, and that is that I actually have tried making yeast doughnuts before. The result of the previous experiment was the “Doughy Doughnut Disaster of Doom”, or “The Doughnuts that Never Were”, because all I got out of the deal was an oven full of gooey and sticky doughnut dough. The stuff expanded to something like five times its previous size and spilled out over the oven until it looked like a Zerg Greater Spire (while mutating). It was at that point that I placed a hearty curse on the matter and turned to cake doughnuts, which resulted in doughnut-sized rings of deep-fried canola oil. Eating two of those nasty things was enough to turn me off of homemade doughnuts for life, or so I thought.
Then last week the fit took me again (it’s like open source software - every now and again I feel compelled to install the latest and greatest, but it nearly always results in a deep and lasting personal pain that causes me to swear off upgrading anything ever again), and I ventured into my first successful cake doughnut episode. Bolstered by success, on Saturday I set about making some fluffy yeast doughnuts.
Mystie found a recipe which I duly followed but am now unsure of. For one thing, it made the dubious claim that I’d have to knead the dough for five minutes to achieve smoothness and elasticity. Twenty-five minutes of kneading later, the dough was approaching what an optimistic (or naïve) person might refer to as “smooth and elastic”, and, wiping profuse rivers of sweat from my forehead, my quivering arms chucked the lot of it into a greased bowl and tossed it into the warm oven to rise. As of today, I still have muscles that ache from all the blasted kneading. During the process, Mystie feared that the island counter in our kitchen would collapse in some way under the beating it was taking. Evidently it was swaying or bending or something, but I was too preoccupied with dealing out primeval fury on the dough to take notice.
The dough didn’t rise quite so much as advertised, but I rolled it out and cut doughnuts out of it anyway. I then covered them to let them rise further, which they didn’t, and so I heated up about a quart of oil to 350 degrees and made to fry the blighters for their insolence. The frying went well, as did the glazing, and when all was said and done I had about 2 dozen doughnuts and somewhat more doughnut holes.
As it turned out, the pastries were delicious, if a little bland. I suspect this may be related to the fact that I use canola oil instead of something good and unhealthy, and maybe the recipe needs adjustment to compensate. Anyway, all was well…until I went to bed.
I only ate three doughnuts over the course of the evening, but I woke up about an hour after going to bed with the pernicious stench of fried canola oil clinging to everything. All I could remember of my past was fried canola oil. The present was dominated by the deathlike grip of fried canola oil. The future held nothing for me but fried canola oil. I had gone to sleep in the blessed earthly realm and awakened in some hellish dimension where everything was made of fried canola oil. I narrowly managed, through sheer willpower, to avoid the gastrointestinal equivalent of a cold boot, but even so, it was a harrowing experience. I feared that I might never eat a doughnut again, and most certainly never deep-fry anything in canola oil again. I returned to my fried canola oil bed and desperately sought escape from the nightmarish land of fried canola oil. At long last, my brain, floating in a jar of fried canola oil, slipped into a dreamless slumber, and when I awoke, I was once more in the land of the living. I spent a day feeling ill, but I think that is because I was dehydrated. Swimming in lakes of fried canola oil will do that to a man.
At this point, my future as a master doughnut fryer is uncertain, but one thing is for sure: next time I fry anything, the kitchen fan will be on, the windows will be open, and the house ventilation will be running, even if it’s twenty degrees outside. I believe my experience was probably due in part to dehydration and also to not taking a shower to rid myself of any residual vaporized canola oil before going to bed, though adequate (nay, superfluous) ventilation is ever going to be at the forefront of my mind in the future.
However, I might not make doughnuts again except for when we have special company, and here is why: the following morning, the whole lot of doughnuts were stale, bland, and sticky with melted glaze. In short, they were day-old doughnuts. It’s just not worth hours of gruelling work to churn out a couple dozen doughnuts, when realistically, the human digestive system can only handle a couple of the little devils before reacting violently. The cost-benefit analysis thus far, particularly when you consider the immediate negative health effects and trans-dimensional travel expenses, is simply not coming out in my favor.