Home › Recipes › Chocolate Doughnuts
Chocolate Doughnuts
1/4 cup butter, 1 1/4 cups sugar, 2 eggs, 1 1/2 squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1 cup sour milk, 4 cups flour, 1 teaspoonful soda, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoonful salt, 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls vanilla. Cream butter and add sugar gradually, while beating constantly; then add eggs well beaten, chocolate, melted, sour milk and flour mixed and sifted with soda, cinnamon and salt. Add vanilla and more flour, if necessary, to handle the mixture. Toss on a slightly floured board, knead slightly, and pat and roll to one-fourth inch in thickness. Shape with a doughnut cutter, first dipped in flour, fry in deep fat and drain on brown paper.
A cake-style doughnut from Walter Baker's promotional booklet, dependent on two things the original assumes you know: what a "square" of chocolate weighs and how hot the fat should be. Both are worth pinning down before you begin.
- The squaresPremium No. 1 was unsweetened chocolate, moulded in one-ounce squares. Use 1 1/2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and cooled slightly so it does not seize against the cold eggs.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe leaves this to judgement; modern practice for cake doughnuts is roughly 365-375F. Below that the rings soak up grease and split; above it the outside colours before the centre sets. A thermometer is the whole difference between good and greasy.
- Sour milkThis meant genuinely soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Substitute 1 cup buttermilk, or 1 cup whole milk with 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left to stand ten minutes.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is soft and the instruction to add "more flour, if necessary" tempts you into a tough doughnut. Refrigerate it an hour instead; cold dough rolls and cuts cleanly with no extra flour.
- The thicknessA quarter inch sounds thin for a doughnut, but cake doughnuts swell considerably in hot fat. Rolled thicker, the centre stays raw while the outside darkens. Keep to 1/4 to 3/8 inch.
- DrainingBrown paper meant grocery-bag paper, which is now often recycled and printed. Drain on a wire rack over a sheet pan; paper towels underneath catch the drips without steaming the undersides.
- YieldAbout two dozen doughnuts plus holes, from roughly 4 cups of flour. Fry the holes too, in the same fat, for about a minute.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, was among the oldest chocolate concerns in the United States, and this reads like one of the company's giveaway booklets in the standard turn-of-the-century mould: recipes solicited from well-known domestic-science writers, each one specifying the company's product by name. Fannie Farmer and Maria Parloa are both credited in Baker's booklets, and the phrasing here -- "sugar gradually, while beating constantly" -- echoes Boston Cooking School method. The sour-milk-and-soda leavening marks the recipe as older in technique than in flavour, a farmhouse doughnut recruited to sell a city product.