Nothing tastes as good...
On guilt and perfect doughnuts
Hello and welcome to this week’s free edition of The Recovering Line Cook. My paid subscribers have recently started receiving my Diary of a Line Cook series, which gives bonus recipes and a behind the scenes look into my daily life as a restaurant cook. If you’d like to read that, upgrade below for the equivalent of $2.50 a month.
This week I have an essay and recipe for you which makes mention of my own, occasionally not entirely healthy, relationship with food and eating. I just wanted to give a heads up in case you’d rather not read that kind of thing.
Wil
If you are a child of 1980s England, or at least the south eastern-most corner of it, then chances are a place called Thorpe Park factored into your life to some degree. For those not from the British home counties, I’ll fill you in. Thorpe Park was our Disneyland. As you might guess, it was a little more “budget” than a full-fat US Disney resort. Smaller, too. The rides were more modest, and the characters hugging kids and posing for pictures around the park nothing so recognisable as beloved movie icons. Instead, they were an “own-brand” collection of anthropomorphised animals known as The Thorpe Park Rangers led by an officious-looking bear known as Chief Ranger. My favourite was his hyper-active underling Mr Rabbit.
Thorpe Park was a gentle place back then. It had its share of “thrill” rides, of course, rides for which my mother helped me pass the minimum height restrictions by slipping wads of tissue paper into my shoes. But my fondest memories are of the traditional working farm they had there. A farm on which piglets and lambs were born each spring. My sisters and I would wonder at the beauty of such beings. And we would despair at the news, the same news we’d hear most years, that a few of the litter had already perished by the time we came to visit.
Learning at such a young age that those piglets had met their end having been rolled on by their gargantuan mother did, I think, inform my fledgling but already distinctly morbid British sense of humour. Nor would I ever look at my own mother quite the same again either.
That farm no longer exists. Thorpe Park pivoted to a teenage/young adult demographic about two decades ago. A new roller-coaster, with increasingly threatening names such as Nemesis and Stealth and The Swarm, was built each year while the farm and the model village and the fluffy park rangers were retired one after the other. To visit that place now is to the sound of screams. The gentle world of Mr Rabbit and his calming rides, made joyous by the endless fried and sugary treats on offer, now a thing that exists only in the minds of aging British millennials like me.
I wrote an article for this newsletter a year ago listing things I disliked about food and the food world. Some of those things, such as my aversion to unrendered animal fat, I’d always considered particular points of shame. The fat is where the flavour is after all, right? But what I didn’t mention in that edition of The Recovering Line Cook, largely because I never anticipated being quite so honest with you, was the aspect of my eating life I’m most ashamed of. But I will today. And that one thing, the thing I’ve been guilty of too much in life, is succumbing to the thought that nothing, no French fry, no doughnut, no hot-smoked salmon served with buttery potatoes, tastes as good as being skinny feels.
Even writing those words to publish on a newsletter that strives to celebrate the joys and possibilities of food, feels like a profound betrayal. But that betrayal, that shame, is nothing compared to the betrayal of letting myself experience guilt at the consumption of food, for someone such as myself who takes so much joy from it.
Even before I was a teenager I felt how important being slim was. And, food being the mediator by which thinness might be undermined, the guilt of eating certain things was a feeling I knew well. As I got older I would deal with this guilt by forcing restrictions on myself. I can tell you from experience, being the one ordering salad when out with the boys for pizza is a social impropriety exceeding even that of not drinking alcohol.
Alternatively, I would hide from the guilt by over-indulging myself in the promise that “I’ll start the diet again Monday”. Occasionally this resulted in my moving my eating of such shameful things out of sight. Hidden in my bedroom, the bathroom. Even at 38, having developed a far healthier relationship with food, and married to a woman who doesn’t even judge me for farting in the sauna, I find myself finishing that chocolate I picked up from work before I get home so she doesn’t see me eat it.
That’s a lie.
She does judge me for the sauna farting.
It might be the only thing she judges me for though.
Knowing I learnt this habitual thinking somewhere, I now hope it isn’t something my own children ever come to feel. I know over-compensating by enthusiastically offering them all the treats they want isn’t the answer. The more I’ve considered such questions, the more I’m left thinking it’s a matter of having faith in the love I show them.
Love is only a means. It isn’t an end in itself. Love isn’t a static totem that can be relied on unchanged. Nor is it simply a verb, a doing thing. I choose to think of love as a process. The movement two people take together from the certainty of today toward nebulous tomorrow. And that which is done in love must be good. As a father figuring out how to do the job of creating happy little people, I need to believe this much is true.
A few weeks after starting my current job here in Finland, I was told I would need to visit a doctor for an employee health check up. This, I soon learned, would include a blood test, the first (I think) I’ve ever had. This fact elicited some surprise from my Finnish colleagues who are used to their blood being tested when they get a new job.
Something about employee insurance and healthcare, they tell me.
Unsurprisingly, I had no idea what the results would be. Nor had I ever much cared to find out. “Healthy” eating to me had never actually been about being healthy. It had only ever been about being slim. And it turns out, despite being in what I had considered “good enough” shape for a father of two pushing 40, my blood work currently leaves something to be desired. My cholesterol and blood sugar, I’ve learned, are too high.
The shame on being told this felt familiar. More surprising was the tinge of humiliation. Decades of fretting about your gut, Wil, and the most positive thing the doctor says about your insides is you aren’t diabetic yet. It seemed little consolation.
But this self-punishment passed quickly. Soon I appreciated how different the challenge in front of me was. This wasn’t as asinine as looking good in a pair of Speedos, though I admit that still does sound pleasant. This was about giving my body the best chance of seeing my children grow as old as I possibly could. The suggestion of restricting my diet, put clearly in front of me for the first time, was less about denying my body and more about taking care of it, loving it, in a way I’d never really prioritised before.
Brief epiphanies don’t easily bring lifelong changes. And it’s not lost on me how easy it could be to wholesale swap guilt at eating for slimness for guilt at eating for health. But seeing that goal in black and white, a goal infinitely more important than whether I am skinny enough, does feel positive to me. Satisfying, even. Understanding that has not just made the salad I’ve been eating more of recently taste better, but every doughnut as well.
One of the things I loved most about Thorpe Park, along with that farm and the meditative water ride soundtracked by Paul McCartney’s Frog Song, were the doughnuts. They were ring doughnuts and came in little white paper bags. So fresh were they from the oil they turned the bags translucent as soon as they were placed inside them. They weren’t like anything I’d eaten from a shop, days old and wrapped in plastic. They weren’t bready and tough. They were tender and moist, steam still rising from the flesh after the first bite. The second and third, too.
That was thirty years ago now. I sit here writing this a 38-year-old who needs to lower his cholesterol. It might sound weird, but I’m excited by that. I’m excited about a relationship with food that is neither one of guilt nor denial, but one of joy and health. I know a part of that is enjoying the things I love as well, whatever they are, however “sinful” I once believed them to be.
It was my birthday recently. I made doughnuts because I felt like it. I ate them with my family and I thought as little of cholesterol in that moment than I did the impact they would have on my waistline.
They tasted better than the memory of a ring doughnut from a white paper bag eaten at a British amusement park in 1996. They tasted better, even, than being skinny.
This is what I choose to believe.
A recipe for the doughnuts you deserve
These doughnuts are like really great french fries or roast potatoes. They are time-sensitive. They demand to be eaten, I’ll be honest, soon after being fried. They’ll be good a few hours later, but they are at their best still warm. Certainly the next day they are but a mere memory of past brilliance.
Ingredients (makes 8 doughnuts)
Whole milk 75ml
Dry yeast 1.5 teaspoons
White sugar 10g
Butter (room temperature) 75g
1 egg (room temperature)
White bread flour 150g
Fine salt 1/4 teaspoon
Oil for deep-drying
Plenty of caster sugar to roll the doughnuts in and whatever jam you like to fill them with
Method
Warm your milk to something like blood temperature, then add the yeast and half the sugar. Give it a little mix until everything is dissolved. Let that sit for 10 minutes to get the yeast pumping. Beat the butter with the rest of the sugar, then slowly add the egg until combined. Add the yeast/milk mixture, then the salt and flour. Beat this together until it is smooth. Don’t be alarmed that what you end up with is more like a batter than a dough. That’s how it should be. Give it a good beating with a spoon for a few minutes/as long as you can to develop the gluten. You don’t need to knead this in the traditional way. Once you’ve done this beating, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it rest until doubled in size. In my hot kitchen in sunny Finland recently this has barely taken an hour, but do give it time to double in size. It will take longer in colder kitchens.
Once it has risen, it’s time to let it cool down in the fridge. This extended fermentation will develop flavour, but, importantly, because of the high butter content, it also firms the dough/batter up making it easier to work with later.
After at least an hour in the fridge, carefully work the dough out of the bowl onto a floured surface. Gently flatten the dough and carefully shape it into a very rough rectangle so you can cut out 8 equal chunks. A dough scraper is very good at this job. I say chunks because I want you to work the dough as little as possible at this point. Don’t worry about making perfectly formed round “nuts” here. The less you work the dough at this stage the lighter, I find, the doughnut turns out.
Place your 8 equal chunks on your floured counter top or plate and cover very loosely with plastic wrap to stop them drying out. Leave them another 20 minutes or so for them to rise a little more. Meanwhile, heat your oil to 170°C/340°F. I cook no more than 3 at a time in a frying pan with just a few centimeters of oil to save on the amount of oil I need to use. Fry them for 2 minutes each side at the above temperature before draining them on a plate lined with kitchen paper. While still very warm, cover them in the caster sugar. The optional extra is to fill them with a jam of your choice using a piping bag. I don’t think you can improve on raspberry or strawberry jam, but if you’re one of those filthy sorts that wants to fill them with Nutella or some kind of custard then you go right ahead you crazy diamond.
Eaten fresh, you will end up with a beautiful doughnut that is crisp on the outside but moist and light and infinitely yielding on the inside. A treat. An absolute treat.
Thanks for joining me this week. The Recovering Line Cook is a source of great pride to me. If you can support my work here, please become a paid subscriber by clicking below. It makes all the difference.
Wil
Have to agree, a freshly made jam donut, or sugar and cinnamon, an irresistible treat.
What a lovely and affecting essay. I’m so glad I subscribed to your Substack!