Please, I'm desperate for help with these chewy donuts.
I had a chewy donut in Asia created with tapioca starch. It was delicious. A few months back, my friend and I quit our full-time jobs to try and start a shop selling. We thought it would be easy. I learned all about donuts, but I still have no idea how to create them.
Some things I know about the donuts...
1) They're cake-type donuts, made with a cake donut depositor.
2) The consistency of the dough in the machine is like a normal dough. In many of my test recipes, I've added a lot of starch, so it becomes more like a non-newtonian fluid (cornstarch + water) than like an actual, elastic dough.
3) The chewiness comes primarily from tapioca starch, not glutinous rice flour.
4) Xanthan gum, potato flour, and tofu make the insides a little too dense, almost like a gummy bear. The donut is supposed to taste almost like a super glutinous, chewy bread, but not tough like bread is tough.
5) We've already used several different flours and starches, including low gluten flour, all purpose flour, high gluten flour, potato flour, potato starch, soy flour, corn starch, corn flour, glutinous rice flour, cassava/manioc flour, tapioca starch, and a few others.
Can anyone give me any hints on how to make these please? Any ideas? Anything you guys can throw out would be useful. I will try to answer questions about what we've already tried to the best of my knowledge. I'm very grateful for any kind of help I can get. Thanks.
I would be searching for gluten-free bread formulations and modifying the hydration to get it to extrude the way you want it to.
Tapioca flour + potato starch + xanthan gum (I wonder what that phase diagram looks like) might be a place to go but the response to hot fat is not something I have enough experience to predict.
yucca flour donuts, cassava flour donuts, tapioca flour donuts, manioc flour donuts recipes online
you're using a machine.... how does it work? What leavening is involved? Does it drop the dough into hot oil? I know nothing about donut machines (can you tell?) but that doesn't mean I couldn't come up with ideas. :)
use it to translate 'tapioca donut recipe' into the language of whatever country you were visiting's language. Then visit that page and untranslate it into English. Asia is a rather huge place with many different languages, you know. So it is kind of difficult to pinpoint a recipe based on the clues you gave here. I do know that some non-gluten breads use very hot water to swell the starch and make a dough, so that may be part of the technique — or not.
Thank you everyone for the responses!
I've already tried tapioca starch/flour with xanthan gum (about 1/4tsp per cup), and the results are usually off of what I'm looking for. For whatever reason, the tiny 1/4tsp makes the finished product very dense, almost like those fried sesame balls you can order from dim sum. The donut I'm talking about is chewy, but it's also airy and stretchy, very reminiscent of moist sourdough bread (probably not an apt description) or krispy kremes.
Here's a picture of the donuts I'm talking about, being ripped apart: http://iphoto.ipeen.com.tw/photo/comment/200905/cgmb1da3f18c6a293e1ab0f1ed1263b8f19324.jpg
I'm not really using a machine; all I have is a small "professional grade" deep fryer that I bought. I've received quotes from the Belshaw donut company for donut equipment that pumps out the donuts (called pon de ring) into oil, but have yet to purchase anything. The donut depositor pretty much takes a batter and drops the dough into oil. Here's a youtube video of the exact machine making the donuts I'm talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZZznsxepRY
So far, I've used a few different types of leavening. Mostly, it's baking powder and eggs. I've also tried the "choux" method, using boiling water to cook the dough and leaven it with steam. I haven't tried baking soda, as the recipe doesn't have any kind of acid in it, which brings me to my next point..
I have used hot water to swell the starch, but the insides turn out a little too airy, like cream puffs. Maybe I should let it cool a bit? The batter also comes out with lots of lumps in it, even if I mix for a long time and sift the dry ingredients beforehand. The recipe for brazilian cheese bread, pao de queijo, requires hot water to swell the starch as well. I ended up making the chewy cheese puffs several dozen times with good results, but the main difference between the cheese bread and my donuts is that the donuts need to be a thick, viscous batter.
I've already tried all the recipes I've found online, including the ones translated from Japanese and Chinese, and even a few from foreign cookbooks and cooking shows. There's a huge degree of variance with all of them; some include glutinous rice flour (mochiko) instead of tapioca starch, and some contain tofu.
Thank you again, everyone, for the responses. They are very appreciated!
I have no idea on how to reproduce that, but hey, if you've quit your day job to do this, maybe a business trip back there is in order to apprentice at the donut shop for a day!
We actually did take a short trip back to Taiwan and Thailand to try and get some information, but couldn't get anything. The employees actually don't know very much about the donuts at all; it's just a premix that they use.
The photo looks like it has wheat flour in it. It doesn't stretch like a gel.
How do you know?
Yes, the donut is definitely not gluten-free. It just has tapioca starch in it, although I'm not too sure how much. The website (misterdonut.jp) says that the donut is based off the pao de queijo, which is the tapioca-based brazilian cheese puff. The allergen information says it contains milk, eggs, and wheat.
The recipes I've tried also include some vital wheat gluten and other things. I've tried altering my recipe to try and match the nutritional information as well:
or water diluted coconut milk? The idea of heating and making a gel, then beating in eggs one by one into the dough to get the right consistency.
Thank you! I'm going to try making a gel. I've looked up some articles that say 68C is the proper gelatinization temperature of tapioca starch, but I don't even know if they were referencing food, or if they were doing lab experiments with the gel..
I haven't tried cream puff recipes with coconut milk yet. What is the end result?
I would track down the company that manufacters or distributes the machine and ask someone there how the donuts are made, etc. They might be able to help you out or provide you with a juicy lead or two. Good luck.
Thank you!
1. If you're trying to duplicate a franchised donut (like Mr. Donut's doughnuts), then perhaps you should buy into the franchise. Often times when you buy the equipment (like with Lil' Orbits doughnuts), you get the recipe along with all of the matching smallwares and paper goods.
2. If you're trying to duplicate an authentic Asian doughnut, what is the Asian name for it, and in what country did it originate?
-Mark
Oh, and one more thing. If it is something that is mass produced (like it looks like in the YT video), it's probably just a complete mix that is bought, then mixed with water to make a batter. If that is the case, then rather than trying to duplicate it yourself, you just need to find the source for the mix.
Unfortunately, the Mister Donut franchise is (I believe) $300,000, and I'm not sure they'd be willing to do things overseas. On top of that, there are a lot of things that my business partner and I want to do differently, including the interor decor, the flavors, etc. From our trip to Asia, we've learned that the individual shopkeepers know nothing about the ingredients inside the donut and just use a premix that they add eggs, milk, and water to.
The donut is just the pon de ring from Mister Donut (asian name Pon De Ringu). It originated in Japan. Unfortunately, the premix is only available through Mister Donut, and I doubt they would sell us the raw mix without us franchising. Unfortunately, that's not an option for us. Furthermore, they don't have any chains in the US, so they probably wouldn't be open to doing business here.
The manual cranked donut machine has been around for at least 60 years. The one that makes a lumpy version is just a variation on the theme (though I have not seen that particular variety previously).
I'm not worried about the equipment, as I have already contacted the donut manufacturers and they know what attachments I need. Thanks! :)
Since we have established that the recipe contains wheat flour, I now suspect that it is mostly wheat flour with some tapioca and lots of sugar. It might be just a slightly modified commercial donut mix with the chewiness determined by the mixing process (more mixing than a regular cake donut would be subected to to develop some gluten). Perhaps there is an autolyse stage as well to allow the tapioca to fully absorb the necessary moisture either before or after incorporation of the leavening agent. You might look into a model that is based on the Portugese malasada which might be the origin of the cheese puff as well.
In the video they were dropping crullers in the oil, could it be cruller the interior looked a little dense for that but who knows. Éclair (choux pastry) is what the cruller is based on could it be something like that? It has a texture totally different from cake type or yeast raised donuts and doesn't have the short texture associated with most donuts.
Gerhard
Crullers with tapioca flour in place of some of the wheat flour might get the texture. It should reduce the tendency for hole formation if the flour/tapioca ratio is right. Don't know whether the tapioca should be the first thing or the last thing to get wet. If first, you might get the gel to form early after which the flour could be incorporated. I think I would try that as an initial approach. Another option might be to cold soak the tapioca to pre-form the gel and combine it with the cooked flour before adding the eggs. Lots of degrees of freedom to explore in the process.
I made a few more batches tonight, but they all seemed a little off.
For my first batch, I tried making french crullers with a little tapioca starh in addition to the wheat flour. This was very unsuccessful, since the tapioca immediately become a sticky glob that I couldn't beat eggs into. I tried for maybe 10 minutes, and I ended up with beaten eggs with tiny chunks of the sticky tapioca/flour mixture. If you can imagine it, it was almost like beating boba (the chewy pearl balls in asian milk tea drinks) in eggs. They just wouldn't combine. I tossed that one out before I fried anything.
The next batch, I made a thick tapioca gel and mixed it in with flour/eggs. This didn't turn out well either. I think a major problem was the water content, because the result was donuts that were wet and mushy inside, and not too chewy. The best way I can describe it is a smooth instant quaker oatmeal, fried into a ball. When I tried to make tapioca gel with less water, the tapioca turned into a very, very sticky ball, and not a gel. It didn't encorporate well with flour at all.
My third batch, I used mostly wheat flour and tapioca starch in a 3:1 wheat/tapioca ratio (1 cup total), and didn't heat anything beforehand. I did leave the batter to sit (I guess the autolyse stage?) and it got more glutinous/stretchy, but the end result wasn't chewy at all. In fact, it was a little too dense inside, and also quite moist.
My fourth batch, I tried using mostly tapioca starch and a little wheat flour in a 1:3 wheat/tapioca ratio (1 cup total). The problem with this was that it became a very, very liquidy and runny, not at all like a dough, so I added 2TBSP vital wheat gluten. It was much chewier, but it still didn't have the "stretchiness" like in this picture:
http://i.imgur.com/ygNwFIT.jpg
Also, the 2T vital wheat gluten is very inconsistent with the donut nutrition facts, which are mostly carbs and fat, and very little protein. The nutrition label on my package of vital wheat gluten says it's mostly protein. The only way I have been able to achieve the stretchiness in that picture is with the yeast recipes. Does anyone know why my yeast donut recipe can get stretchy like that, but my cake donut recipe can't? They contain the same ingredients..
@Doc.Dough, What effect would sugar have on the recipe? I haven't used any at all. The autolyse stage (floor time?) made the dough a lot less runny, which was particularly useful to prevent the starchier recipes from flowing everywhere. The portuguese malasadas are yeast-based, unfortunately, so they don't provide any clues to this batter-based donut recipe.
Sugar needs to be in there, it is a major component and dough will behave differently. Look at this recipe for example:
http://www.joepastry.com/category/pastry/doughnuts/cake-doughnuts/
a good basic recipe. Try it. Now make some substitutions with the flour
You could make a variety of flour combinations and use the mixed wet ingredients(with sugar & salt) to wet the various flour mixtures. Then drop into oil and cool to check the textures.
The flour mixtures might be calculated using triangulation with decreasing amounts.for example: wheat, tapioca flour and another flour or GF flour mixture.
I tried joepastry's donut recipe a few weeks back and they turned out exactly as he said, light and fluffy. They were like balls of sponge cake when I took them out of the fryer, and they got closer to pound bread after they had cooled. When I replaced some of the flour with tapioca starch, it got a little denser, but it wasn't chewy at all. When I replaced more of the flour with tapioca starch, it became too liquidy to drop into the oil.
I even emailed joepastry and asked for advice, but I didn't get a response, unfortunately. I'm not sure that the pon de ring is based off normal cake donuts at all.
Thanks for the idea though! I will gladly try any other ideas you have. :)
flour and then letting this cooled thin pudding work in your dough? More can be found under water roux or tangzhong. I think you did this but used too much flour to thicken.
In a cake donut recipe you avoid building gluten while the yeast type donut requires you to develop the gluten for the dough to rise. From past donut experience, it seems counter intuitive, when you decrease the water content you increase the cook time with cake donuts. We use to make a batter for extruding with the Belshaw hopper right over the oil and using the same dry ingredients we made a stiffer batter that could be rolled and hand cut into stick type donuts, i.e. honey sticks, walnut crunch. The hand cut ones took about 3 minutes to cook while the extruded variety (old fashion, chocolate glazed etc.) took a minute to minute and a half in the fryer. I think the moisture in the batter must facilitate the heat transfer to the centre of the doughnut.
Gerhard
P.S. sorry that the cruller idea was a flop
No problem! I'm glad you mentioned the idea, because now I have a better grasp of what works and what doesn't.
Right now, the main problem seems to be that I can't get enough tapioca starch into the recipe. The more tapioca starch there is, the more liquid there needs to be. If there's too much liquid, the batter becomes very runny and won't hold up. If there's too little liquid, the donuts (at least appear to) develop a thick crust on the outside, much like a hollow rock.
I welcome any other ideas you have! Thanks again.
You may be closer than you think. 3:1 wheat flour to tapioca may be too low. I am not surprised that at that ratio the tapioca overwhelms the wheat flour in terms of absorption. I might try 10:1 and see if you can detect the effect of the tapioca. Since this is a commercial mix that you are trying to replicate, it will have been adjusted to include as little of the more expensive ingredients as possible to get the desired effect. Adjusting the liquid will be necessary as well, since the tapioca ties up so much water. The sugar should tend to thin it out, and you may not need as much as a cake donut would dictate but 0.5-4T per cup of wheat flour would probably not be too much. It may also be the case that your flour is too strong, though there are so many variables in the mix at this point that to adjust the flour before you are close to what you want may just add complexity where you don't need it.
From the experiments I've done in the past, having just a little tapioca flour inside the mix is barely detectable. It makes the insides just a teeny bit more moist, but it is not the slightest bit chewy. It's almost the same as using cornstarch. Something interesting though, is that I can use a 3:1 wheat flour to tapioca starch ratio and if I add xanthan gum or silken tofu, the inside suddenly becomes very chewy and densely wet. It actually tastes like the dim sum sesame balls at that point. Without adding xanthan gum or tofu, I need three parts tapioca starch to one part wheat flour to taste the chewiness, and even then, it's not nearly as chewy as the donut I'm thinking of.
When I say densely wet, I don't mean like a pound cake is moist, because pound cake can be airy at the same time, even though you might consider it 'dense.' Adding xanthan gum/tofu makes it feel very heavy and not airy at all. The pon de ring donuts are almost like chewing a super chewy sourdough bread. I realize that not all sourdough tastes the same, but I have a hard time describing the texture I'm thinking of, ha ha..
I don't think tapioca starch is actually too expensive. It costs a lot if you buy it from bob's red mill, but it's actually cheaper when you get it at the asian markets. Here is an article I read on the creation of the donuts: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ipeen.com.tw%2Fcomment%2F46242
However, they are clearly leaving ingredients out. They use tofu, soy flour, wheat flour, eggs, water, and sugar. I tried several different recipes involving tofu and soy flour, and got nothing close unless I used tapioca starch.
Thanks again for the response. I anxiously await your next idea to try! :)
Are pons similar to Chinese deep fried bread? That could be an angle (but I have no idea if it is!). Probably not, tho.
The long, fried bread that people eat for breakfast? Those are a lot more oily, airy, and less chewy. They are delicious, but nothing like these donuts. These are more like boba/pearls in milk tea combined with krispy kreme original yeast donuts. The chewiness is very pronounced.
How about adding some diastatic malt as it seems to leave varying amounts of moisture depending on the percetage used. It can also add some chewiness. Or some other type of dough conditioner. Just a thought.
I've never heard of that before, but google says it's used mainly for yeast recipes? I could try using it on the yeast version that I've tried to make it better, but that recipe doesn't have problems with texture.
Speaking of yeast recipes, does anyone know if I can make a yeast recipe that is slightly more watery, but run it through that cruller machine? Would that be odd?
The Belshaw machines are made to extrude cake batter and deposit it directly in the oil, when you make yeast raised donuts you need to let the donut rise after forming the shape. Most places put the formed doughnut on screens for rising, if the dough is too slack the dough will go through the screen then when put in the oil it won't seperate easily from the screen. The result is a donut that absorbs a lot of fat. With a proofer we let the doughnuts rise 30 to 45 minutes depending on dough temperature and ambient temperature.
Gerhard
http://www.sonia-portuguese.com/recipes/pqueijo.htm
Is it something like this only no cheese?
I like Mini's observation that the effect of tapioca plus soaking time is similar to pregelatinizing some of the flour (thanks Mini for another of your cool insights). But I don't think you are developing the gluten at all. In a batter (like a 90% hydration yeast bread) it can take 10 minutes of high energy mixing to get the gluten to really develop even with high gluten flour. Can you use a little tapioca and a lot of mixing to get the dough to develop? Then if you need to thin it out to get it to run through the machine, add enough liquid back to get the viscosity you need. Some people make ciabatta that way, developing the dough a little stiffer than they really want it just because it is faster to mix then adding back the water they need. The photo showed a very fine crumb texture that looks a lot like a tangzhong result. I am pretty sure that you should be able to develop the gluten in a soft (tangzhong-like) dough levened with baking powder. The gluten should give you the chewy texture, and you may be able to enhance it with xanthan gum and more tapioca (or not).
Ah, alright, I think I know where you guys are coming from now. One of the main problems, though, is that I don't have a mixer/bread machine at home. If I buy one this week, do you guys have a brand in mind that is good for using at home? I will try mini's water roux method and mix for ten minutes.
Also, I'm sorry about the picture earlier: I think it was photoshopped to look stretchier than it actually is. Here is a video of someone breaking apart the balls and squeezing them. The quality isn't great, but you get a sense of what the donuts are like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=f54IOc_wg6s#t=136s
And another picture of a broken apart ball hi-resolution:
http://i.imgur.com/VIlTYVv.png
As for the pao de queijo/cruller recipe, I tried that again earlier in the day and it worked this time. I must have used too much water or omitted the oil or something, because the eggs did beat in this time. The result, however, was much like a french cruller: very airy and wet inside. Also, there was no hint of chewiness left, even though I used a 4:1 ratio of tapioca starch:wheat flour, probably because I used four eggs for just under one cup of flour.
I have been thinking about this are you running a donut business and want to add this as a variety to differentiate your store from the others or are you hoping to build a business around this product? I think these type of niche products take a long time to build a following.
In my experience we made almost 40 different donut varieties daily but the vast majority of sales were honey glazed, raised chocolate, apple fritters, dutchies, old fashion cake and chocolate glazed. All the remaining varieties probably only enjoyed around 20% of sales but required close to 50% of the time in the production schedule. If you ran out of the less popular varieties it seemed as if every other customers was ready to buy them. Over the years we launched lots of varieties and even though some enjoyed good initial sales non stuck around in our regular production schedule.
My point is you may enjoy these but unless you are filling an ethnic market demand you may never find a market large enough justify the effort.
Gerhard
Wow! Where do you live? Maybe we can meet up and see if we can work something out together. I'm from California, so there is definitely going to be some ethnic demand here. Also, we thought about doing these as a side thing with normal donuts as our main products, but we think it's a completely different market.
I am from Ontario, Canada so think a meet up isn't easily done. My donut years are long behind me, I think October 1997 was when I baked my last donut. We did all our baking at night and even though I tried to staff all the shifts it seemed that I always had to step in bake at the least opportune times.
I now have a business that allows us to work 9 to 5 for about 10 months of the year, the other two months have a lot of 12 hour days, and take a vacation without worrying if the baker will catch the flu or break an arm etc. The part of the donut business that I found least appealing was that you started every day with no inventory, long hours of operation which makes staffing a big challenge and then the market changed. When we first started in the late '70s we sold about 50% coffee and 50% donuts by the time I sold it donut sales were less than 15% of sales and it was hard to justify the expenses involved with baking donuts. Health concerns caused people to be less tempted by deep fried treats, to make up for lost donut sales we started to sell bagels and lunch items which were all lower margin making it a less attractive business. Sometimes I felt like the guy in the Duncan Donut comercial that only had time off to sleep and then back to making donuts.
http://youtu.be/petqFm94osQ
Gerhard
125g tapioca 85g powdered sugar 75g all purpose flour 3g kosher salt 3g yeast 160g milk 55g melted butter 1 egg
Combine ingredients,let it sit for 30-60 minutes drop by your method into hot oil....good luck
Thank you! I'l try this. I bought a gram scale and will try this as soon as I get it.
a scale
1 cup tapioca 3/4 cup powdered sugar ½ cup plus 2 tbsp. flour
1 tsp. kosher salt ½ tsp. yeast ¾ cup milk 4 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted 1egg
are we this?? Sucess or no??
I must have done something wrong, because the batter was very, very watery. I think I used too much milk/eggs? At any rate, I'm modifying to try and get it to work. Thank you :)
with all this experimenting, don't be afraid to pursue it and change tracks.
Memories.. Mr. Donuts were/are the craze in Taiwan too. (They were amazingly chewy/squishy.)
Me and my wife are trying to recreate the donuts as well.
Oh, that's great! Are you trying to start a business or are you just trying to replicate the donuts because you like to eat them?
Replicating and for a donut shop. (Their donut glazes are as amazing as their donuts.)
IIRC, their kitchen didn't have any specialized equipment for their donuts, but this is probably due to their usage of pre-mix powder. One location had an open kitchen, up until my last trip when they moved the window.
Oh, awesome. My business partner just went there. May I ask where you're opening your shop? Maybe we can meet up some time and discuss working together?
Thanks for the offer, but unfortunately relocation is going to be a far ways from California.
I have sights on Southern California as well, but that will be later on.
Good Luck! I know the payoff will be great if you succeed.
Have you tried sago? I was just reading an article about sago on The Salt. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/05/09/182614622/sago-an-ancient-chinese-starch-endures-in-asian-cooking
I have been begging the Amish guy at my local market to tell me what makes his donuts SO perfect and chewy and PERFECT and he just smiles and says "Oh, it's just an old recipe." I suspect it's potato flour, but that's neither here nor there... Best of luck to you!