Salted Coffee Brioche Donuts

and a behind-the-scenes look at my recipe development process

Greetings from me and these very very delicious and slightly imperfect salted coffee brioche donuts. When I completed this recipe the other day and they had a few flaws, I thought about scrapping the whole recipe and starting over, but instead, thought it might be helpful if we took a bit of an analytical day over here and talked about what went wrong and what went right so here’s a little look at the development process. Hopefully this little case study will be helpful when you’re trouble-shooting a slightly imperfect recipe in your kitchen. Let’s get to it!

part 1: the brainstorm

I get a lot of my recipe ideas from taking very long looks in my fridge and figuring out what needs to be used up. It’s not glamorous, but it’s true. A few weeks ago, I went a little crazy buying out-of-season strawberries on sale and discovered I had two pounds of watery strawberries slowly softening in my fridge. The original idea for this recipe started as a strawberries and cream brioche donut—I was going to incorporate malted milk powder in the dough and fill them with a strawberry pastry cream and roll them in a freeze-dried strawberry sugar dust. (This idea is still on the radar so if a recipe like this shows up in your inbox in the next few months, act surprised!)

But alas, I took a little too long and Marco and Tahini didn’t seem to care that the strawberries weren’t at their peak and inhaled them like the little berry fiends they are. Taking another long look at my fridge, I found I had been saving my leftover French press coffee, but never drinking it and had accumulated a little stock of mason jars filled with day-old coffee. I decided to pivot to a coffee cream donut, but as egg prices began to rise and Trader Joe’s started putting an employee next to the refrigerator to make sure that no one took more than a dozen eggs off the shelf, I couldn’t ask you (or me) to make an egg-heavy dough recipe and fill it with an egg-heavy pastry cream. That’s a lot of eggs.

So I decided to keep the coffee idea and move away from a filling and onto a glaze. I wanted these donuts to be lightly coffee-d, so that they tasted like a simple glaze donut quickly dunked into a hot mug of coffee.

part 2: the plan