Jelly donuts are on the menu in Book recipe, and we are going to teach you how to make this delicious recipe from scratch!
Follow along with the 📝 recipes below👇🏾👇🏾
Ingredients
Brioche Dough
Instructions
Claire Fact: The yeast needs water in order to convert sugar into carbon dioxide (therefore making the dough rise) but the salt will pull water away from the yeast and slow this process.
Claire Fact: Add more flour a tablespoon at a time until the dough no longer clings to the sides and is gathered around the hook in a ball.
Claire Fact: If the dough seems still quite sticky, it may need to be mixed longer. Mix it until it is soft and supple and does not stick to the work surface.
0:06 Intro to Jelly Donuts
0:25 Dessert Person Jingle
0:42 How To Make Jelly Donuts
1:27 Ingredients & Special Equipment
3:02 Mix The Ingredients
7:55 Let The Brioche Dough Rise
9:19 Roll & Punch Out Dough
11:47 Husband Harris Debut
12:00 More Donuts
12:58 Prepare The Oil
15:35 Fry The Donuts
17:39 Fill Donuts With Jelly
19:30 Serve & Outro
20:47 Archie Snooze
i am using as a base for the jelly donut my brioche recipe from dessert person so brioche is a very eggy very buttery light bread and it makes a fantastic donut so it’s a yeasted donut and we’re going to fill them with some jelly and cover it with a little flavored sugar and it’s just going to be a really i think well balanced incredibly delicious soft pillowy fried piece of dough with jelly in it so
We eat fried foods at hanukkah to celebrate the miracle of the oil that lasted for eight days i mean it could be really anything fried but it’s a great opportunity to use up some like jam that’s been sitting in the back of your fridge and you can like do all different flavors and customize but i’m just gonna show you starting with the dough so you have a really solid base for any kind of donut you want to make
i have made brioche by hand you can do it by hand but it is tedious because you will be mixing for a long time so it’s just something that’s much easier to do in a stand mixer where you can just turn the mixer on low walk away come back it’s really hands off it’s not hard it just takes a little bit of time and is you’ll just be much happier to let the mixer do it so in addition to the mixer i have a deep fry or candy thermometer
You don’t need this you can also just use an incident re thermometer and kind of be monitoring the oil but this is just so we know what temperature the oil is for frying the donuts so for filling the donuts it’s useful to have a star pastry chip like this to help you poke into the donut and fill the center with the jelly so that’s really helpful a pastry bag as well you could use like a ziploc bag or something like that a big wide pot or dutch oven for frying oh
And a cutter you need one of these for cutting out the donuts if you don’t have a cutter you can just use a glass you cut down because we’re not making holes in the donuts they’re just gonna be these little delicious pillows so for the brioche i have two sticks of butter room temp active dry yeast six large eggs four cups of flour a quarter cup of granulated sugar quarter cup of milk two
Teaspoons kosher salt then for frying i have vegetable oil and for finishing the donuts i have some jam i decided to use sour cherry preserves i love cherry preserves and then for coating the donuts i was going to do a sugar coating and so i have some granulated sugar and i was going to make a little cardamom sugar so i have ground cardamom because i thought the cherry and cardamom combination would be really nice i know this yeast is alive i use this
Jar i do not have to do this step of proofing the yeast which is dissolving in some warm liquid and looking for bubbling so i’m just really confident about it and it’s a perfectly acceptable step to skip and just add it right to the dough and i’ll talk about why i know i can do that move this off to the side so i’m going to start with a teaspoon of active dry yeast
Right in the mixing bowl then i’m going to add my flour i have a little bit of excess flour right here this is what we call bench flour just because i might have to add a little bit so when you’re making anything with yeast and bread dough you always need to sort of make some slight adjustments it’s never exactly the right proportion you know it depends on like your flour and hydration and everything
So i always keep a little flour to adjust if needed then i’m going to add my salt it’s actually helpful to add your salt in a way that it’s not touching the yeast because the salt will inhibit the yeast action then the sugar it makes it very lightly sweet but it is not an overly sweet dough and what’s great about brioche is it’s super versatile so it can go sweet and savory so mix that together then i’m going to make a well in the center meaning like a
Little hole so then into the well i add my liquid ingredients which are my six eggs and my quarter cup of milk so everything is room temp but if your ingredients are slightly cold that’s actually a good thing and i’ll explain why i would say cold room temp is ideal once you add all your liquid ingredients you’re going to start to mix so i’m going to turn the mixer on the lowest speed
And the key to a brioche that is extremely light but also bready and has that kind of like pull apart texture with a silkiness to it is a very long slow mix and that’s because we have a lot of ingredients that are adding richness but we also need to develop a lot of gluten and that’s going to give us this very airy kind of texture this mixes for so long but the friction of the dough against the side of the bowl and the hook actually warms it up so we
Just keep it on low and let it go and then i’ll come back and check on it every few minutes to see how it’s developing and then we’ll add the butter so let’s take a look at the dough so far you can see that it’s come together and it’s it’s getting smooth it’s a little bit tacky and it’s still clinging to the sides of the bowl so i’m going to take this opportunity to scrape it down we’re probably halfway through mixing at this point and i’m just scraping down the
Sides and i’m going to add some additional flour because the dough is quite loose and it does need to come together a little bit more so that it’s fully pulling away from the sides and i don’t want it to be quite so tacky i’ll start with maybe two tablespoons of flour and then i’ll continue to add as needed and what i want to see is the dough gathered around the hook and it might still be clinging to the very
Bottom of the bowl but it will pull away from the sides so here’s my little extra flour and you can just eyeball this so that was probably two tablespoons this probably needs another five minutes but the dough is pulling away from the sides and just is a little bit stuck on the bottom and i haven’t gone above a two on my mixer so it’s still at this point on like low medium low but
It’s looking good and i’ll show you an example sort of what we’re looking for so if you pinch off a piece for anyone that’s familiar with sourdough bread baking you might unders you might know this um sort of concept or term called window pane for dough and basically what you want to do is be able to stretch the dough in a way that it creates like a thin film through which light can pass and that is an indication that you have developed
Strength in the dough so you don’t want to stretch quickly you want to let the dope use its own weight to thin out and there’s sort of different degrees of window pain but we are basically at a window pane right now so it’s not tearing but you can see like if i do this see that yeah we’re getting this really thin sheet of dough
That has sort of a little bit of it’s a little bit translucent so i have my two sticks of butter that i cut each into four so it’s like two tablespoon size pieces and i’m going to start by just adding them one piece at a time to the mixer and i’m still going to keep it on low and this part just takes time and i want to just let it mix until i see the butter fully
Incorporate into the dough and i’m just going to wait until each portion absorbs before i add the next one this part could take you 10 minutes or so especially when you’re just on a low speed like this this is why you want a mixer this part is not that fun to do by hand at all i am ready to add my last portion of butter so in it goes i am now going to let this dough
Continue to mix keeping it on low the whole time and i’m just going to wait until it completely comes together gathered around the hook not sticking to the sides and you can give it a scrape periodically but the whole thing just needs a little bit of time to develop and then i’ll show you how to set it up for the first rise then we’ll move into forming our jelly donuts
i’m going to scrape the dough out onto the work surface you don’t need any flour or anything so go ahead and either use a separate clean bowl or clean out the mixing bowl so to form something into a ball it’s helpful to have this tool you could just kind of use your hands and really what you’re doing is dragging the dough
Across the surface and tucking the sides underneath and that is kind of stretching the very surface of the dough around itself and you get this sort of nice smooth ball and this brioche looks great you can almost like see the gluten strands it’s not sticky at all so this has to rise and then we chill brioche it’s always recommended to handle brioche dough cold it’s just so much easier to form into whatever you’re making whether it’s loaves or donuts or
Whatever so i’m going to put this back into the bowl just lift it up to the scraper put it in rounded side up i’m going to cover it let it rise stick it in the fridge and then i actually have a swap from last night and sometimes what you can do if you want to make it ahead of time this dough is pretty cool to the touch if you feel like your dough is getting a
Little warm maybe it’s warm in your kitchen or you just think it was in the mixer for so long that it started to warm up you can just put it directly in the fridge and the dough will have enough heat in it to sort of rise in the fridge as it cools down so that’s what i did last night i have one that did an overnight rise i have a brioche dough that i made last night it rose very beautifully in the fridge and it’s cold so i’m ready to
Start forming the donuts and then they go for a second rise after i form them and i think what i’m going to do is very lightly grease the parchment just to prevent any sticking it shouldn’t it really should not stick because there’s butter in the dough they’re going into oil but just to make sure i’m just going to brush a very very thin layer of oil and then for forming the donuts
Besides the cutter i have a little bit of bench flower and a rolling pin this is about doubled in size so and now it’s super cold you can see how firm it is and it’s filled with air so i’m going to lightly flower my surface and go ahead and scrape the dough out of the bowl so now i’m going to give a dust of flour on top and then just
Roll it out this is going to knock out some of the gas that has built up and what happens with active dry yeast and the two rises is that the forming process whether you’re making a loaf or donuts is you are bringing the yeast into contact with like new parts of the flower and so you’re kind of re-feeding it and reactivating it and then it goes into a second rise so i think i’m going to go for something
That’s like about maybe three quarters of an inch thick it’s cool in here which is great for working with brioche in a warm kitchen you’re going to want to roll pretty quickly before it starts to really get too sticky to handle whenever you’re cutting anything out of a dough you always want to space the cutouts as close together as possible because it just doesn’t really work very well to like re-roll
Especially for donuts and a yeasted dough like this i’m gonna just try to get them as close together as possible so i’m sort of planning out my configuration i hate when you like get to the end and you have a space that’s almost big enough but not quite big enough it’s very satisfying when you can fit really like the maximum number you’re going to cut straight down sometimes i give it a little wiggle
Just to loosen everything and then lift back up and then transfer whether it sticks to the surface or the cutter you’re just going to transfer one at a time to the grease parchment and i used very little flour that’s important here if you have any excess flour you want to brush it off yeah what this is
Oh this is my intro what i gotta live i live here i’m going to take some of the larger pieces and just kind of re-roll try to get two more donuts out of here you can see that this dough see how it’s kind of shrinking and like contracting that’s just because we’ve worked this dough and we developed a lot of gluten to sort of give this
Brioche structure and so it just becomes a little bit harder the second time around to get something even and looking as good as the first so can i fit two on there we’ll see these might they’ll turn out they’re just not gonna be they’re maybe gonna be a little harder to fill i’m gonna cover this tray and these are going to proof at room temperature until
They’re puffed and we’re going to do something called the poke test to see if they have filled with enough gas to then be ready to fry so while these are proofing i’m going to show you how to set up your fry station with your thermometer and your oil and everything and i’m going to get my cardamom sugar ready and my jelly ready for filling i’m just going to basically coat one side of the donut that’s going to be
Like the top and a little bit of cardamom sugar so i have probably like a half cup of granulated sugar here and i’ll do cardamom is really strong so maybe i’ll do a half teaspoon caramel is just like really floral and can be kind of overpowering so stir that up and then this will be basically when the donuts are hot out of the fryer i’ll turn them over and just coat them on one side
You know directly in the container before i fill them and then a little pinch of salt doesn’t hurt so that’s that then i’m going to fill my pastry bag with the jam i have two different types of star tips here it kind of depends on if you have like big pieces of whole fruit in your jam or jelly and jelly there’s no whole pieces so you can use something a little bit smaller like this
So i might go a little larger let’s see what we got in here so i have some pieces of fruit so i’m going to do a slightly larger pastry tip and just go ahead and snip the corner off of the bag go ahead and put the tip inside and then you want to really work the pastry tip into the very bottom of the
Bag so that like the tension of the end of the pastry bag holds it in place [Applause] sometimes you need two hands to fill a pastry bag so you can kind of stand it up in a pint container or pint glass you could do multiple flavors obviously you could fill the bag side by side with two different flavors if you wanted now what i’m seeing a lot more of in stores are like fruit spreads so things that have
Lower sugar content than jam and jelly which would also be really nice you could do like any kind of compote apple butter pear butter that kind of thing i’m gonna go ahead and leave that in my glass i have my dutch oven over here so i’ll fill it up maybe a third of the way and this is just vegetable oil i’m going to heat the oil to 350 for
Frying and i’m going to turn this on and i’ll just keep an eye on the thermometer sometimes i like give it a stir with a wooden spoon or heat proof spatula just to sort of equalize the temp and make sure that the thermometer is accurate right now i have it on high but what i’ll do is as it climbs up i’ll turn it down and try to get it right at the point where we can maintain that 350.
these look proofed i’m going to test them and show you how to know if your donuts are ready for frying these two little wonky ones those were the re-roll so i’m not surprised but they look really good they’re puffed i see some separation where the cutter kind of made that line like the little waist so i’m going to go ahead and poke them this is called the poke test and what i
Want to see is the dough spring back and leave a very slight indentation so that’s how i know that they have built up enough gas for frying so i see i poke it springs back and leaves a slight imitation so i’m ready for frying and conveniently my oil just passed 3 40. so i think i’m at a good place to start frying so i’m going to leave my donuts right here i have my oil
Then right here i have a little kind of resting spot for the donuts when they come off i just have a rack set over some paper towels this is a danish dough hook that my mom gave me um that i never use but is weirdly like a great thing for turning donuts so my oil is at a good point so i’m going to start adding them to the oil and you want to leave some room for them to bob around so i think i’ll probably be able to comfortably fit
Maybe four at a time i’m going to put them in one by one they’re going to fry for a couple minutes on each side and when they’re really golden brown i let them go pretty dark because i like a really flavorful donut turn them over fry the second side then let them drain on the rack and then repeat until you fry to all of them okay so this is what i really want to see i think that the the sign of a really well proofed doughnut
Is that you get this like saturn’s rings kind of waste around the sides because if you get a darker ring around the sides that means it’s been sitting it’s like heavy and it’s been sitting in the oil and it hasn’t proofed long enough so that’s what i want to see so this is really just taking a minute or two on each side just let them drain so while these finish i’m going to coat the still warm
Donuts in my cardamom sugar the equator of the donuts is a little bit soft you just don’t want to squish them because they’re really light i just took the last donuts out i did three batches to fry all twelve and i want to just go these these crazy ones okay i’m gonna just coat the last donuts while they’re still hot in
The cardamom sugar these look great i’m really happy with proof and the amount of color on the donuts not exactly round but that’s okay they look really good and now i’m going to go ahead and fill them with the jelly generally how you fill a jelly doughnut is you go in from the side so you see i have my little pale equator i’m just going to just puncture in and then
Squeeze and you kind of have to go by feel for how much you’re filling i think i hit a blockage uh oh hold please what happened uh something’s i think it’s a piece of cherry stuck in the piping bag gross sorry okay maybe that’s why they’re jelly doughnuts not jammed donuts because you got those pieces of fruit
Kinda in the way there we go i like when you can see the little like little keyhole of jelly it’s kind of hard to tell like how much jam you’re really putting inside so you kind of want to keep an eye on the pastry bag and have a sense of how much you know maybe you want like a couple a tablespoon or two in the inside i don’t want it to be
Like overfilled you don’t have to do jelly either you could do pastry cream and then you have like a cream filled donut chocolate or vanilla coffee flavored and if you have big pieces of fruit like i do you could do what i did not do which is either strain the jam or you can also put a hand blender through it or a food processor or something to just kind of break it up
A little i’m just going to finish filling all of these and then we’re going to eat them because i really think that donuts should be eaten while they’re hot we’re going to kind of take a look and see how filled they are i’m going to tear this one apart and you can really see all of the like beautiful bready texture of the brioche it looks so good wow i really i think
It’s a good amount of jam it’s like definitely generously filled but not overwhelmed i’m gonna taste it i have to confess something i don’t love donuts donuts are not my favorite treat of all time truthfully i never had one that i liked i think that they’re overrated but this donut like warm with the jam which is now slightly warm from the donut and the sugar
It’s not too sweet which i think is really important with something as rich as a donut i love the cherry the cardamom is really great but of course you can customize make it with any filling that you like any flavor sugar do a glaze do a like cream filling totally up to you so good so fun to do with your family for hanukkah or just for any reason you don’t have to be celebrating connie couldn’t make Jelly donuts
Enjoy
Special Equipment
- Stand mixer
- Dutch oven (for frying)
- candy thermometer
- star pastry tip
- baking sheet
- round cutter
