WELCOME TO OUR KITCHEN: We're talking about donuts and the debates they provoke!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast cooking with Bruce and Mark, and I'm Mark Scarbrough, his husband And this is our food and cooking podcast a podcast that has come out of our 36 cookbooks Our years as contributing editors to magazines such as cooking light and eating well our years years as columnists on Weight Watchers, at Eating Well, at Cooking Light, our years doing way so much in our lives. Over 20, 000 original copywritten recipes so far in our career and it's ongoing.

We appreciate your being here with us for, as usual, our one minute cooking tip. We've got an entire Tire podcast dedicated to doughnuts, doughnuts. Oh, indeed. And we'll tell you what's making us happy and food this week. So let's get

started. Our one minute cooking tip, simple syrup is the perfect way to sweeten Cold and iced drinks. It is. If you put sugar into an iced coffee or an iced tea, it's mostly gonna fall to the bottom. And then you gotta get a super long spoon to try and stir it up. What? You don't have iced teaspoons? What? And, come on. Make a simple syrup. Equal parts water and sugar. Bring it to a boil. Cool it, and you're done.

Yeah, um, We all know, from those of us in the South, the thing of, you know, our great uncle, or aunt, or whoever, who put so much sugar in the iced tea that it was like an inch layer at the bottom of the glass that never dissolved. Because, of course, it was a super saturated solution now. And it's cold. Nothing dissolves in Cold and simple syrups are the right way. And again, what is the ratio to make a simple syrup? Equal parts water and sugar. And what do you do?

You bring it to a boil, you cool it, and you're done. Yeah, you bring it to a boil, turn it off, and then Well, you can't cool it if you don't turn it off. You have to be clear. The writer wants to be clear. And then you're done, and you can store it in the fridge, and it's a much better way to sweeten coffee, um, iced coffee, iced tea, in fact, hot coffee. And look, if Coke's not sweet enough for you, add it to your coffee. Oh, my gosh.

Okay, we're going to go on to more diabetic topics with donuts. But before we get there, let's say that we would appreciate a rating or review for this podcast. If you can do that, you can find a way to leave it stars on whatever platform you're listening to this on audible. Yeah, on I heart radio, on on Apple podcasts, any place that you find this, what's, what's the big streaming services? I can't think. Uh, Spotify. Thank you. Spotify. Wow. I'm getting old. Spotify.

You can find a way to give it a stars. And many of those platforms allow you to write reviews. If you could even just say nice podcast, that would be a way that you can support our otherwise unsupported podcast. Let's move on to donuts.

I thought it was time for us to have the great donut debate. I didn't know there was a debate. What's the debate? Well, because we are a house divided. We are. I am a yeast raised donut fan, and you are a cake donut fan. It's true. I like cake donuts. I'll tell you why in a bit. But let's just get the definitions down first, in case you don't know. There are two kinds of donuts. There are. You probably know this, but, uh, there are cake donuts, and mostly they're made with. baking powder.

That's how they rise. There are some yeast made cake doughnuts that often also include baking powder. It all has to do with the ratio of butter and sugar and eggs and flour and all that stuff that get a cake batter even thicker than a cake batter like consistency. It's a, it's a batter. You end up with a batter that either gets dropped out into the deep fryer from a doughnut machine, or it's a It's a thicker batter, one that can actually even be rolled and can be cut like a knife.

When I've made them, I've always done the, not even a pastry bag, I put it in a plastic bag and snipped the corner off and then, you know, squirted it into the oil. Oh, nice. Well, it's kind of almost like making churros. Yeah, kind of like churros. Mine were never really good. great. They didn't look, I'm not a professional baker. I'm a writer. And so they never looked great. But, you know, what can I say? They are kind of fried quick bread.

Yeah, exactly what I think of a cake doughnut is fried quick bread. Unlike yeast doughnuts, which are lighter, they get their rise from the yeast. They're fluffy, they're light, they're It's a, it's a flour dough and sugar and you get eggs in it and melted butter because it's basically an enriched dough. It's almost the same kind of dough. If you're making a hollow bread or a Bopko or something like that, you have to sweet enriched dough. When you fry it, it becomes very light. It's doughnut.

That is the foundation. for cream filled and jelly doughnuts. Yes, that's right. And it's the doughnut often people think of if you're not from the U. S. when they think about U. S. doughnuts, they think about what are indeed yeast doughnuts or what we called them when I was a kid, glazed doughnuts. And I know this is ridiculous because you're going to tell me that there were jelly doughnuts at Greenville, but we refer to all of those as various kinds of glazed doughnuts.

But you also referred to Sprite and Fanta Orange as Coke. So, you know, it's all Coke. So, yeah, I get it. Okay, so, donuts, listen, there's a long tradition, just to say a bit about the history here. There's a long tradition of frying dough. If you've been out in the American Southwest, you know about Navajo fry bread. You know about indigenous people frying dough. Romans fried dough. I mean, this is Middle Eastern cultures. Ancient Greeks fried dough. Yeah, and, uh, Islamic culture.

Caliphates fried dough back in the 700s common era. There is a long tradition of frying dough in various ways. But according to Michael Krundle, who is the author of The Donut History, Recipes and Lore, donuts are supposed to be communal food. Well, that kind of makes sense, right? Cause as he says, they're not hard to make, but the thing is, you can't wait. They're not hard to make. Only a cookbook writer would make that claim. Donuts are hard to make. They are definitely hard.

It's just fried dough. No, it's not just fried dough. But the problem is, you can't just make one donut. I mean, Well, you can, but why? How do you just make one donut? What is it, like a teaspoon of egg? And, so you have to make And so they're not good the next day. You need a big group of people, a nice community, to make it all together, fry them up, and get greasy and fat together over doughnuts.

Yeah, I mean, you know that doughnuts are the tradition, for some people, at the end of Hanukkah or during Hanukkah, because of the oil. Of course, they occur at the end of Ramadan in Islamic culture. There's all kinds of traditions of doughnuts on Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, in Christian cultures.

And Otherwise, I mean, to me, when I grew up, donuts were communal food because they were celebratory because, and I grew up in, just to say, if you don't know this from this podcast, I grew up with a grandmother, my maternal grandmother, who was a professional baker. And that's what she did for a living. And I never saw my grandmother make a donut. So they were communal food because we had to get somebody had to get up early. My grandmother, grandfather got up early and went and got them.

Donuts and brought them back. And it was this big treat for breakfast to have donuts. And it wasn't like your grandmother was afraid of frying. She made fried chicken all the time. Now, she baked in an elementary school. I wonder if she ever made donuts in that elementary school. I don't think so. I honestly never saw her make a donut. And we would, oh, I'll tell you this story. So we would, there was this place in Oklahoma City called Frankie's Donuts. And it was, we're talking the sixties now.

No, Frankie's Donuts.

And with an IE, Frankie's Donuts, and, um, it was this place, I mean, this is really back in the day, I'm old, and it had a, a screen door that you entered and it flapped shut, you know, bang, bang, bang, the screen door, so we were headed, oh, now it's gonna get really sad, we were headed to Arkansas to see the fall foliage once, I was a little kid, I know, it's now getting really tragic, and we were headed to Eureka Springs, before Eureka Springs was anything, well, we were We would go to

Eureka Springs when it was like a motel and to see the tree. No, no, no. I have plenty of pictures of lots of trees turned and, but it wasn't the tourist destination. There was no Branson. There was no Lake of the Ozarks. It wasn't anything like that yet. So we were going and we would leave really early in the morning to make it. Oh yeah. There's a whole. The amount of the story is getting bad. It's getting long.

We had to leave early because my grandfather wanted to eat at a diner in Choctaw, Oklahoma. So we had to leave early so we could get to Choctaw for lunch. Anyway, we stopped at this place, Frankie's, to make donuts that we loved and were such a treat. And they didn't appear to be open. And my grandmother got out and banged on the door to ask if they were open. And they came out and they weren't really truly open yet, but they had made donuts.

And so, she brought this box of really hot, fresh doughnuts to the car. And let's just say we did not stop in Choctaw for lunch, which that instead we just ate doughnuts all day. Probably were sick as dogs. Hey, that time you and I went up to Newfoundland. We were on what this 14 hour ferry ride up. to Newfoundland, and I stopped at Tim Hortons and got a box of glazed doughnuts, a dozen, and I think you had one, maybe two, and the box was empty when we got there.

Yeah, let's say that this was supposed to be a nine hour ferry and from Porterbosch to Nova Scotia, and we got in a bad storm and it ended up being like a 12 hour ferry ride, and you don't want to be on a surging ferry, only eating sugary doughnuts. I remember getting my seat and going to the gift shop and standing in the gift shop going, Oh God, don't barf on the trinkets. Don't barf on the, on the decorative spoon collection. You only had two of them. Oh, it was disgusting.

But for donuts to get all the way through Canada, they had to come to the new world and they supposedly came to New York through the Dutch who were the first founders down in New York and kicked the Indians out and took over Manhattan. And they had these. Ali Cox, and I don't know if I'm saying that right, but it translates to oily cakes, and that was supposedly the original donut in New York. Although we can really claim that what we sell as modern donuts started with Russian immigrants.

Oh, everything did. In New York City, in about 1920, in which a Russian immigrant, Adolf Levitt, started selling fried donuts. And I think this is one of the earliest. This place is what we can say, wow, this really was early doughnuts. And he also, Adolf Leavitt, invented what we know as a doughnut machine. Yeah, these machines, they're still very kind of futuristic and cool looking.

And the machines by the 1934 World's Fair in Chicago were being used to sell doughnuts there and they were billed as the first. Food hit of the century of progress. No, the century of progress is a donut. Homer Simpson would be so happy. So that tells you everything you need to know about the 20th century. Um, so Donuts. Yeah, donuts and atomic bombs. And that was the century of progress.

So, uh, Yeah, it was a huge, big moment of progress and mechanization back in the day when people were instantly mechanizing what they did in the kitchen of the future. And of course, donut chains began to flash across at least the North American landscape. Now, again, I grew up going to small little donut shops. Even when we moved to Dallas when I was really little, we always frequented an independent donut shop. My father, you were lucky to have them. My father didn't like chains.

Oh. He didn't like He wanted a hamburger from a local restaurant, not a fast food hamburger. He wanted donuts from a local shop, not some chain, but yes, Krispy Kremes were coming in. Dunkin Donuts were coming in. Tim Hortons, of course, was all across Canada, but didn't come to the US until Fairly recent. Yeah. When I was growing up, all we had was Dunkin Donuts. I think our little local, our local Italian bakery made some donuts.

I think it's so did the kosher bakery, but they weren't anything to write home about. And I loved when my dad, when Morty would get up on a Sunday morning and go to Dunkin Donuts and just get a giant box of donuts or that always made me. Yeah. Um, and you know, we, Bruce and I still love the treat of donuts.

We, uh, sometimes when we go to the airport near us in New England, well near us an hour away, the closest airport to us in New England, we stop at a place called Mrs. Murphy's over the border in Massachusetts and we get donuts. I mean, this place is so old fashioned. Let me tell you this, that there's a counter and it's like, imagine a line Running straight across right but then put to use in that line now imagine chairs all around these use and Like a snake.

Yeah, and the waiter the woman it's a woman Of course walks into the middle of the you from the inside and fills everybody's coffee cups around the you It's like something in 1930. It is no ridiculous. Maybe she was there at the World's Fair with the original Maybe so we landed in Portland one night and And, um, we had a nice dinner at a restaurant in Portland, Oregon, one night. And we had a nice dinner, and then we had to go to Voodoo Donuts, right? And you had to get a Voodoo Donut.

I wanted the maple glaze with the bacon on it. Yeah, and we did. And then, um, well, let's just say that I had a donut after a flight all day and a big meal out. You had a donut accident. I threw out a pair of jeans and a pair of underwear. Let's just leave it at that. That's a good place to leave it. No, let's, let's actually, let's not leave it there and let's talk about what makes a good donut because I think we're very different on this. I think it should be not too sweet.

I want it to still taste like dough, like the fried bread it's made of. It should taste like yeast. I should taste the flour. I don't want to just taste sugar. That was always my problem. When Krispy Kreme first came to Manhattan, we were still living in the city. People lined up for miles and it was just little grease balls. You could squeeze them down into nothing like that. I'm not a fan of Krispy Kreme. So you can all write me and tell me how I'm an idiot, but I'm just not a fan.

And here's why I'm really not a fan of Krispy Kreme is because in our house, I'm the guy that likes cake doughnuts and I will tell you why I like cake doughnuts and it's this time in New England. So there are apple cider cake. Donuts running around everywhere right now. And the reason I like them is because for me, a donut is a dunking mechanism, a dunking vehicle. I don't know. You dunk it in coffee.

And so I like to have a cake donut because I dunk it in coffee and it's really delicious that dunk a yeast donut. It dissolves. It just dissolves in your mouth. It dissolves in your mouth. I actually think my, the favorite yeast donut I have ever had is one that I made and created for our book, Vegetarian Dinner Parties, and it's a, it is a delicious fried pillowy soft yeast raised dough without eggs and it is stuffed with a vegan lemon cream made with tofu.

And before you go, we had them out on the set and after we shot that platter, the crew And you've since made those for Pesach, I think you've made them or maybe Hanukkah, not Pesach, because they have flour. Yo, that's true, they have flour. I think I made them for Hanukkah. That's right. Some holiday, maybe Rosh Hashanah, you made those doughnuts once, and again, they were pretty well scarfed down even after. brisket or whatever else we were eating that night.

I could make them to break fast for Yom Kippur this year. Oh, well, I'm for it. I'm up for it. Bagels and donuts. It depends on how many people we have, because we got three toilets. So, you do the math on this one. Um, anyway, I, well, there's a lot of talk about that with donuts. Like, why? Does that indicate our age? Um, maybe that's how old we are. Well, anyway, we both love donuts. We both think they're a grand treat.

I I tend to not like commercially produced doughnuts because I think they're too sweet. I don't think they taste like anything except sugar. And I don't like the doughnuts that are pre packaged in the supermarket like the Drake's doughnuts. It just tastes like coffee cake and doughnut form. They're often hard. And I don't like them covered in powdered sugar. There's too much powdered sugar. Too much. I don't like a little powdered sugar, but too much is gross.

Like when it's a cloud around, like, you know, hold me onto the cloud of powdered sugar. It's like, I just can't deal with all that going on. So that's our banter and talk about the history of doughnuts and our own personal thoughts about doughnuts. We'd love to hear yours. If you'd like to talk about doughnuts, you can go to the Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and we will post. post a picture of donuts and ask you for your favorite donuts.

So please follow us there and we will talk much more about donuts. All right. As is traditional, what's making us happy in food this week.

For me, what's making me happy in food this week is corn. And, um, it is that time of year in new England, late, late summer, early fall, right end of August into early September when our corn comes in. I know we're really late for most people. Most people, corn is like months and months before us. But our corn is in, and we had an exceptionally rainy summer, which can produce bad corn, but it actually produced corn that is very corny.

It has a lot of corn flavor to it, and it's not terribly watery. So the corn we're getting right now is really fresh. Fantastic. And I, I absolutely love this moment when the corn comes into our local farmers markets and places like that, because there's nothing like corn that just comes out of the field. No, and Mark and I both love corn like we like our doughnuts. Not too sweet. We like it to taste of the grain. That it is. And we don't want it to be too sweet.

What's making me happy is another produce in the season. The end of tomatoes are here, which means I get to stock up on everybody's ends and make homemade marinara. Let's say that end is here in New England. Yeah. A lot of people are going to be having tomatoes through November, but we are at the end of our tomatoes.

We went out to lunch with some friends yesterday, and my friend Rich, who's an avid vegetable gardener, brought me, among the box of potatoes and the braids of onions and garlic, he brought me 12 eggs. pounds of the end of his plum tomatoes. There's a, I should tell you, I have to tell you a story. There's this little, um, snotty, uh, up in tourist town, not very far from us in New England. And it's not snotty. I mean, we go there a lot. It's where the nicest grocery store is closest to us.

And, um, there's a nice ice cream shop that's open there. And there is very pretentious, uh, cheese shop in this town. And he's got a little sandwich window and time was, I think it's down now, but time. was he had a sign on the sandwich window that said don't even think about ordering tomato on a sandwich outside of August. So, that tells you about tomatoes in New England. That tells you everything you need to know. That is the only time you get them in. I did.

We got home from lunch and I turned those tomatoes into a giant pot of marinara. You did. And that will get bottled and put in the freezer for a week. Yeah, and notice when he says bottle and put in the freezer, he's not talking about canning it. No. He's going to put it in containers, and then we're going to drop it in the chest freezer. There you go, in the freezer. And, uh, right, and then you can, uh, we can pull it out whenever we want.

Hey, I got a great, uh, tip for you, and it should be a one minute quick tip, but I'm going to throw it here anyway. Um, if you have a chest freezer, get yourself some of that contact paper that you can write on with, uh, with a marker, with like a whiteboard marker, and. Just spread it across the top of your freezer and stick it on there. And then you can always have an inventory right on the lid of your freezer.

He said that because I just made him put a whiteboard on top of our freezer to give me an inventory. I just did it. So we've got a great inventory and that's a great tip for you. Okay, that's the podcast for this week. Thanks for being a part of this podcast journey with us. Thanks for tuning in. Taking the time out to listen to this podcast. We certainly appreciate your support and we certainly appreciate your being here. Thank you for that.

And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food. So please go to our Facebook group and tell us what's making you happy in food this week, and we want to know about it. We want to try it and talk about it here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.