The ebb and flow of customers has confounded me for 10 years.
For most of those ten years I have looked for and explored uses for unsold doughnuts.
We started with doughnut bread pudding. That was the simplest and most straight forward use.
Since our early days of doughnuts and the aforementioned bread pudding I have dabbled and dived into day old doughnut developments.
My uses for doughnuts are a rendition of the famous shrimp scene from Forest Gump. Doughnuts are my fruit of the sea.
The underlying obstacle when creating with doughnuts, particularly sweet preparations, is they have to compete against doughnuts. If I sell bread pudding, gooey butter cake or an array of doughnut cookies, I am not then selling doughnuts. Which leads to more unsold doughnuts.
The creations can be amazing, but when the day is done, if there is leftover inventory the creative effort becomes futile.
About 7 years ago I started work on what I called a Doughnut-Doughnut. It was a doughnut with other doughnuts kneaded into the dough. I worked through many variations and developed a few that, at the time, were amazing to me and made the menu. Unfortunately, for the repurposing of unsold doughnuts, my want for improvement eventually cast this doughnut into the shadows and out of production.
When I look at making pasta, particularly fresh extruded pasta, I see endless opportunities of what can be flour and what can be water. This openness has allowed us to explore wonderful flavors in the land of noodles. It also influenced the flavor forward side of our doughnut making. It gave me the excuse to try multiple flavors, with the use of fruit purees, in our yeasted doughnuts. Somehow, I did not make the leap from a fruit puree to a doughnut puree until recently.
The idea of a doughnut puree has existed in my head for sometime. Except it existed as a mistake, not an opportunity. Years ago we had a cook that when assembling the base for the doughnut bread pudding pureed everything together, doughnuts, eggs, milk, cream, sugar. I could hear the blender screaming please stop at the top of its lungs from across the store. I sprinted from our kiosk to the kitchen and turned off the machine before the motor went up in smoke. I explained the process for the bread pudding again to the cook and reserved the experience as a comedic cautionary tale.
This fall and early winter have not been the greatest for overall doughnut sales. Weather, holidays and who knows what else have had us with days of excessive doughnut inventory. I grew tired of making bread pudding, gooey butter cake other doughnut adjacent creations. I wanted a simple use for processing doughnuts and allowing the result to be functional and financially sound. I revisited pureeing doughnuts.
I let doughnuts and water soak together for about 5 minutes. I then put the mixture into the blender and let it rip for about 2 minutes until the mixture was smooth and homogeneous. I avoided killing the blender by starting with a small amount of doughnuts in water and increasing the amount until I achieved a consistency I was happy with. I tinkered to the finish line. (1000 grams doughnuts, 1000 grams water) I put the doughnut puree into zip top bags and refrigerated some and froze the rest for doughnut development.
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