Donut Fake News: Cronut Edition — Sugar Street Bakehouse

You’d think I would have learned my lesson after my biscuit donut debacle. One of my children just said to me this week, “Those biscuit things were SO BAD.”

But no. I did not. I trusted a shortcut recipe I saw on the internet again. This time it was fake cronuts made from puff pastry dough.

In my defense, I think this was a pretty reasonable error on my part!

First, packaged puff pastry dough is an awesome thing. It’s flaky, delicious, and using it is easy as can be.

Thaw. Unfold. Bake. The end.

Making puff pastry from scratch is a fairly laborious and skillful process, but packaged puff pastry does a good job approximating the results. I like to use it for savory tarts as well as baked empanada dough for dinner parties.

Second, a cronut is basically a donut made from croissant dough (although the original Cronut uses a proprietary recipe that takes three whole days to make and “is not to be mistaken as simply a croissant that has been fried”). Puff pastry dough and croissant dough are both examples of laminated dough, which has multiple extremely thin layers of dough and butter. Croissant dough has a few extra ingredients to add richness and lift. But close enough, right? Surely, if I fry puff pastry dough, it’ll be like a cronut, no? Or at least really tasty, right?

Wrong.

I tried two different techniques that I saw floating around on the Internets:

The results?

The cut and fry technique led to donuts and holes that puffed so much that they felt like eating air coated in sugar and glaze. All you could taste was sugar. (That actually is not as great as it sounds). There was no heft to these donuts, no density. They fell apart as you picked them up. The donut holes looked like some sort of insect exoskeleton when frying. So yeah: not terrible donuts but most definitely not good donuts.

The more involved brush/fold/freeze technique fared even worse. These donuts just did not cook through in the middle despite a consistent oil temperature of 350 and golden brown outsides. The dough in the middle was raw while the egg wash cooked and became bits of scrambled egg. Plus, while you got a whole batch of donuts from the first technique, one sheet of puff-pastry-using-technique-two yielded only 3 full size donuts. That is a whole lot of puff pastry to eat in one sitting. My verdict: not even close to good donuts. Actually, really bad donuts.

Puff Pastry Cronut Attempt #2: raw dough + scrambled egg. Even sugar couldn't save them.

Michael Pollan said that you can eat whatever you like as long as you cook it yourself. While I’m not sure I fully agree with him, I do understand his point. Manufactured food provides us with an easy way to overeat foods that taste delicious but should be time consuming to make (and therefore rarely made and eaten). These little puff pastry donuts were indeed very easy to make. And can you believe that my family actually ate the whole batch of the cut-and-fry puff pastry donuts? They weren’t even good, and we just kept popping them in our mouths! They were, well, there.

When I make a batch of my regular donuts, it’s a process. I have to devote a good amount of time to it, have to plan ahead. When I eat them, I’m aware of the time and energy they have taken me to make. You can taste the craft behind them. Is it strange that we are less likely to overeat these carefully crafted donuts than the easy puff pastry ones?

I don’t think so. I think that when we truly value what we’re eating, and the labor that went into it, we eat more intuitively. We pay attention. We don’t just shovel food into our mouths.

Lesson learned: cooking shortcuts found on the Internet are not the answer. Good donuts, donuts worth eating, require time and care and attention. Probably like most things in life.