Black Pepper and Strawberry Jam Doughnuts

Remember my Summer Bucket List?  (How is your list coming along, BTW?)  

Well… I’m ticking them off.  I’m super close to meeting my running goal of 7 miles AND to celebrate, I’ve decided to cross another goal off my list:  making jelly filled doughnuts!  

To-do lists that include making and eating doughnuts… pretty smart on my part.  Life goals that include making and eating doughnuts… I feel like I’m doing a pretty great job at life.  Get in on this with me.   

Doughnuts, luscious and buttery dough from scratch.  Sweet strawberry jam and spicy black pepper for flair.  Why not show off a little?    

We’re making doughnuts!  

I think this recipe is most successfully made with a stand mixer and dough hook.  The dough is soft, wet, and a bit sticky so it’s a little tough to wrestle by hand.  

Into the bowl with flour, very soft butter, egg yolks, a sugar/salt/cinnamon mixture, milk, and yeast mixture.  It may seem strange to just toss it all together, but this is the way of the doughnut.  

I used a spatula to first incorporate the ingredients by hand, just to roughly bring them together.  Once the ingredients form a shaggy ball, I place the bowl on the stand mixer and fit it with the dough hook for many minutes of kneading.  

Doughnut dough is supposed to be soft and loose.  The trick is finding the balance between soft and loosely structured.  I found that I needed to add an additional 1/2 cup of flour to the dough.  It was still soft and stuck to the bowl a bit during kneading, but had enough structure to still relax into a dough ball.  

After about 10 minutes of kneading on the machine, the dough is dusted with flour, the bowl covered in plastic wrap, and left to rest for a few good hours to rise and reflect.  

The risen dough… it really does get big and poofy, in dumped onto a clean counter and kneaded, just slightly, into a taut ball.  

Next:  rolling.  

Well-floured counter.  Well-floured rolling pin.  We’re rolling the dough into a 1/3-inch thickness for slicing and rising.  

A round, about 2-inch, biscuit cutter to make doughnut rounds.  No hole this time around.  We’re going to keep the dough and fill these puppies with jam.  

Deep frying takes some preparation.  We don’t go into this without planning.  

•  Doughnut rounds are placed on a lightly floured, lined baking sheet.  Towel draped over the rounds and left to rest and rise for 30 minutes.  

•  Oil is heated to a hot hot 350 degrees F.  We need a fry/candy thermometer to ensure we’re maintaining 350 degrees.  If the oil is too hot, the doughnuts will brown too quickly and not cook through.  If the oil is not hot enough, the dough will absorb oil as it cooks and that’s pretty gross.  

•  On a rimmed baking sheet we’ll mix our sugar topping:  lots of granulated sugar, a little salt, and a good dose of fresh cracked black pepper.  If you have a pepper grinder, now is the time to use it.  If you don’t have a pepper grinder, you gotta treat yourself.

•  Strawberry jam for filling.  I placed mine in a thick, freezer-safe ziplock bag, cut off a small piece of a corner, and placed a wide pastry top through the small corner hole.  Ready for filling! 

The trick to generously sugar-coated doughnuts?  Straight from the fryer to the pan of sugar.  The hot oil will help the sugar and pepper stick! 

Fresh fried.  Sugar dredged.  Ready for strawberry. 

I used a small knife to make a 1/2-inch slice in the top center of each doughnut.  This is where our jam will go.  Rocket science… I know.  

Get that makeshift, jam-filled plastic bag going and fill these darlings.

Each doughnut will get about 1 heaping tablespoon of jam.  

Sweet and doughy.  I mean… these doughnuts are perfectly doughy.  The egg yolk and butter make for the most luscious, bouncy, delicious doughnut dough.  

The sweetness of strawberry jam is highlighted by the tiny bite-y spice of black pepper.  

They’re doughnut perfection and totally crossed off the list (until the next time I need a doughnut fix… likely Sunday morning).  

Print