Beer and Baking's Jessica Rice used Palmero, a Belgian dubbel from Hangar 24 Craft Brewery to add flavors of dates, rum, spice, caramel and raisins to these perfect doughnut holes.
Put the two cups oil in a skinny and tall pot for frying. You want your doughnuts to float and not touch the bottom. Heat to around 350-375°F. If you don’t have a thermometer, you can put a wooden spoon in the oil and it if bubbles, it’s ready.
Mix the dry ingredients and pour in all the wet ingredients. It’s okay for the batter to be lumpy, you don’t want to over-mix the dough, otherwise the doughnuts will be tough.
Using two spoons, put the batter into small balls and drop into the hot oil. Fry until golden brown. It should take 2-3 minutes. You want the balls to be small, the size of a quarter. Otherwise if you make the balls too big, the outside will cook faster than the inside and no one wants that.
Once the doughnuts are ready, remove them from the hot oil and place on a plate with paper towels for draining and cooling.
After the doughnuts have had a chance to cool down, about 5-10 minutes, you can roll them in powdered sugar or a sugar/cinnamon mixture. I did both options, just for fun.
The beer gave these doughnuts a wonderful flavor. Not overly sweet and not too savory. Palmero is a Belgian-style dubbel from Hangar 24 Craft BreweryOpens in new window with flavors of dates, rum, spice, caramel and raisins. Perfect to integrate into baking. The dubbel added a fantastic spice character to the doughnuts, which played off the added cinnamon nicely. The outside was ultra crunchy while the inside was cakey and moist. I would totally make these again. They would be so perfect for entertaining a late-night crowd!
Jessica Rice enjoys taking photos, reviewing beer events, bars and restaurants and loves making baked goods and various deserts. She also just so happens to be a huge fan of craft beer. All of her passions combine on her blog Beer and Baking.
In the Smylie Brothers kitchen we primarily use our flagship beers in our dishes. We use the Cali common in the braising liquid for the pork belly in addition to chicken stock, then after the bellies are tender we add more beer and thicken the liquid to create a rich gravy. As we make everything from scratch, we treat our raw ingredients with a lot of care and respect. The pork belly that we get from George Rasmussen at Swan Creek Farm in Colon, Michigan, is a good example of this. George takes our spent grain from the brewing process back to feed his pigs and we buy that pork from him.
I usually go for red onions over white or yellow for these thin, crispy, beer-battered onion rings. I love the extra sweet-pungent wallop of acid that red onions carry. I also find that they hold their form better when heated, becoming tender-crisp instead of watery or limp. Naturally, keep some extra chilled pilsner or helles on hand for serving alongside.
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