Stephen Collucci - Glazed, Filled, Sugared & Dipped: Easy Doughnut Recipes to Fry or Bake at Home

Copyright 2013 by Stephen Collucci
Photographs copyright 2013 by Iain Bagwell

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collucci, Stephen.
Glazed, filled, sugared & dipped / Stephen Collucci with Liz Gunnison.
pages cm
Includes index.
1. Doughnuts. 2. Cookbooks. lcgft I. Gunnison, Liz. II. Title.
TX770.D67C65 2013
641.8653dc23 2012035677

ISBN 978-0-7704-3357-4
eISBN 978-0-7704-3358-1

Book and cover design by Rae Ann Spitzenberger
Cover photography by Iain Bagwell
Author photograph by Brent Herrig

v3.1

Once youve been running kitchens for as long as I have, youve employed pretty much every kind of restaurant industry character in the book. There have been weak cooks, strong cooks, erratic genius types, shirkers, fame-seekers, guys who are talented but mutinous, and diligent workers who communicate only in grunts. What you dream about is a kitchen full of Stephen Colluccis.

Stephen first came to work for me as a young kid not long out of culinary school. We had him baking bread for us at Craftsteak in New York, which went so well that we asked him to move out West to help open Craft Los Angeles. By the time Stephen returned to New York less than a year later, he had wowed everyone sufficiently to be offered the companys top pastry position: running the sweet side of the kitchen at my flagship restaurant, Craft.

This was a tall order for a twenty-four-year-olda job that required striking a careful balance between expressing his own creativity and respecting the overall DNA of the restaurant, which was then in its eighth year. Stephen slowly but surely transformed the pastry menu, putting out dishes that reflected his own tastes but built upon what his predecessors had begun. Without any guidance from anybody, he had managed the tricky maneuver of finding his own voice without putting any noses out of joint.

A lot of the time pastry chefs toil in the shadow of a chef de cuisine, who serves as the restaurants figurehead and sets the tone for the kitchen. But more than anybody, Stephen represents what it is that Im trying to build at Colicchio & Sons and at all of my restaurants. Its not just his superhuman work ethic, his underdeveloped ego, or his incredible, unstoppable positivity in the face of grueling seven-day workweeks and gluten-avoiding diners. Its his willingness to put so much of himself into the dishes he creates. The work we do in this business is so repetitive that its easy for it to become drudgery. With Stephen, you can tell that the job is about more than making widgets or punching a clock.

That love of the craft shows up on the plate. It shows in desserts that, in addition to being technically masterful, have a visceral, undeniable sense of joy to them. It shows in the wide smiles of diners as theyre transported to a different place and time by a single, powerfully suggestive flavor.

When Stephen told me that he was planning to write a doughnut cookbook, I wasnt surprised. His fried desserts are some of the best in the businesssomehow light and rich at the same time. Doughnuts also seem to capture, maybe better than any other confection, a sense of nostalgia, humor, and delight. Stephen makes the most of the medium.

What he has created in this cookbook is a thoughtful collection of his personal recipes that show just how easy it is to make doughnuts at home, even for those who consider themselves novice bakers. This is a book that was made to be usedto be grease-marked and jelly-stainednot to sit out on a coffee table or up on a shelf. As you cook from its pages, I hope you do it Stephens way: have fun with the thing, taking as much enjoyment in the process of creating these doughnuts, sauces, glazes, and such as you do in serving and eating them.

Try as I might, I dont remember the first doughnut that I ever fried. It could have been as a kid of three or four, helping my mother as she tore up bits of extra pizza dough and tossed them in hot oil to make traditional zeppole, a favorite Italian fried treat. Or maybe as a teenager, when my aunt taught me to make her wonderful apple cider cake versiongreat right out of the fryer, epic the next day dunked into a cup of coffeewhich she sometimes brings to our familys big, heaving Sunday dinners.

It was years later that doughnuts came into my life in a major way, once I was cooking professionally and had just become the pastry chef at Tom Colicchios Craft in New York City. This was at the end of 2008; the economy had just collapsed, and New Yorkers were feeling defeated. As I set out to design my menu, I remember thinking that what people were looking for was indulgence and nostalgia, something that lightened the mood. I could think of no better comfort food than a fried dessert. Who isnt happy when eating a doughnut? So I put one on the menu. It was a . The dish sold like wildfire, and guests enthusiasm for it came through in comment cards and feedback from our servers. I knew that I had hit on something that worked.

When Tom asked me to become the opening pastry chef at Colicchio & Sons, his new restaurant on Manhattans West Side, it was an opportunity to dream up my own menu from scratch. From day one, guests at Colicchio & Sons have shown their appetite for doughnuts to be insatiable. On our opening menu I included a panna cotta dessert served with beignets as a garnish; before long, the dish became a beignet dessert with a panna cotta garnish. Frying here is almost an art, Andrea Thompson wrote in her review of the restaurant for The New Yorker. Greaseless, tender beignets, coconut-cream doughnuts, and nearly bite-size zeppole, folded into a napkin, which come with smooth lemon curd for dipping. Diners seemed to have a boundless enthusiasm for doughnuts, so I made it a habit to keep at least one fried option on the menu at all times. It didnt take long before my colleagues christened me with the teasing nickname Mr. Doughnut.