Churros, beignets, fritters, donuts - whatever you call them, everyone loves a doughnut. What's your take?
I am normally what could be classed as "a healthy eater", but I have one fatal weakness; doughnuts. I'm of the opinion that there are few problems in life that can't be solved with a steaming hot cup of tea and a sticky, sugary, jam-filled doughnut. Maybe it's my northern sensibilities, but I would plump for a doughnut any day of the week - plump being the operative word.
While cupcakes leave me cold, there is something about the bulk and sugary kick of a doughnut that really does it for me. When I was pregnant with my twins, I used to dream about doughnuts at night. The kind that I was fetishising, of course, were the stuff of my childhood; simple unpretentious fare eaten on the way home from school, generously dusted with sugar and filled to bursting with gloopy strawberry jam.
As a devotee I'm delighted that doughnuts are being taken to new heights. Only this week Heston Blumenthal cooked up some typically inventive exploding potato doughnuts as part of his current TV series.
The craze has come over from the US where you can feast on flavours such as apricot cardamom, molasses Guinness, grapefruit campari and chocolate star anise. Michael Caines at Abode in Exeter, Glasgow, Canterbury and Manchester and Nigel Haworth at Northcote Manor in Blackburn, Lancashire, have succumbed to the charms of the doughnut, while over at Asia de Cuba at St Martins Lane Hotel, London, you can fill your boots with brioche-style Mexican spiced ones with butterscotch sauce. Yotam Ottolenghi's churros at Nopi were sprinkled with hot chocolate and accompanied by fennel seed dipping sugar; I heard they were incredible, but tragically they were cut from the menu before I got a chance to try them.
Elsewhere, the acclaimed Harwood Arms in Fulham does a nice line in gourmet doughnuts - fig jam with ginger sugar and sour cream, vanilla sugar with bramley apple purée and lemon curd with sherbert and whipped cream. The Hawksmoor boys have been filling theirs with custard and plum jam, the filthy things.
I love the way these doughnuts mess with your mind, serving up what seems like a quintessentially British pudding but playing on its more cosmopolitan credentials. Doughnuts may seem as British as wet wellies and sand-in-your-sandwiches, but they are well-travelled little things, said to originate in the Netherlands before Dutch settlers brought them to America - although some claim that in 1847 an American ship's captain punched a hole in the centre of the deep-fried dough cakes his mother made so they could be stored at sea. Whatever the origins, and whether it's churros, beignets, fritters or Krispy Kremes, everyone speaks the universal language of doughnut.
One of my earliest food memories is of watching the doughnut man on Blackpool pier popping hunks of dough into the sizzling fryer, then eating them hot and fresh while strolling along the prom. Paul Ainsworth at Number 6 in Padstow, Cornwall, recreates the experience in his "taste of the fairground" dish, the winning dessert in the latest Great British Menu TV competition. Made with no yeast so they don't need to be proved and can be dropped straight into the oil and served crispy-hot and fluffy inside, these raspberry curd doughnuts are served with cinnamon sugar, honeycomb lollipops, coconut custard, peanut popcorn, toffee apples and marshmallow. It is a pudding I would happily shlep over to Cornwall to try.
Sadly my love of doughnuts has not yet extended into the kitchen. But for home cooks brave enough to face the fear of frying, Top Pot Doughnuts in Seattle, have recently published a recipe book called Top Pots Hand Forged Doughnuts.
So is there a secret to a good doughnut? "Use good quality ingredients, such as Tiptree jam," says Christopher Dunn, head baker at Dunn's Bakery in Crouch End, London, whose chocolate doughnuts my kids go mad for. Apparently too it is all in the proving - the time you allow the dough to rest and increase in size. Prove too long and the dough will fall apart in the fryer, underprove and the doughnut will turn out dense and chewy. At Pippin Doughnuts in Swindon they recommend getting the frying oil hot (190C) "to seal the crust and prevent oil soaking while it's cooking" and using good quality strong bread flour (they use Wessex Mill strong white bread flour) "Gluten is needed to hold the structure and give a good light texture."
When it comes to fillings and glazings, anything goes, and it doesn't even have to be sweet. Vadas are traditional Indian savoury doughnuts made from lentils or potatoes and enlivened with spices, while Jamie Oliver cooks smoked paprika hush-puppies, flavoursome salty doughnuts from the southern US made from cornmeal, cheese and spring onions.
"But tart is best," says Barry Fitzgerald at the Harwood Arms. "Sour cream and lemon curd complement the doughnut's sugariness perfectly." And if that doesn't have you drooling, you're made of sterner stuff than me.
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