nutella beignet

For the big game today I decided to (finally!) make my own nutella beignets, or donuts. I have been thinking about doing this since I was in Paris last year. I started with the filling. I used a recipe from the most recent issue of La Cucina Italiana which called for combining toasted hazelnuts, milk chocolate, grapeseed oil, sugar in the raw and a dash of salt in a food processor and blending until combined. This is Nutella, but on STEROIDS.


Next I made the dough. I used a recipe from work that Chef uses for bomboloni, which are small Italian donuts that are usually served filled with a pastry cream. The recipe is similar to a brioche dough which has butter added to the dough once it has been kneaded enough to be fairly elastic. I let the dough sit overnight before shaping it this morning. Letting the dough sit overnight helps the butter firm up inside the dough and helps the dough relax so that it is easier to shape. I formed the dough into 65 gram balls and let them rise on the counter for a few hours.


I haven't fried anything since I was in school so this was an adventure. I fried the donuts at 350 degrees for roughly 5 minutes total, flipping them fairly often to prevent a white line of dough from forming around the middle of the donuts.


Once they cooled, I rolled them in sugar and pumped them full of my hazelnut mix. I have to give a shout out to Luis from work. I originally planned to just use a piping tip to poke a hole in the donut to pipe the filling into. Luis recommended that I enlarge the insides of the hole with a skewer so that I could get more filling inside. It's all about the filling you know...