These doughnuts were a labor of love. First, after soaking my beans overnight with some foresight and spending all day babying my boiling beans, I ended up overfatting my first painstaking batch of bean paste with duck confit. Not my best idea. Determined not to give up, I starting over with just enough beans for half a recipe and started making the doughnut dough by hand. Contrary what you would think given the fried doughnut's pillow soft nature, this is not a gentle process, as the dough is very sticky, floppy and yet extremely elastic. Rolling in otherwords is likewise a tricky proposition to fulfill.
After several days of ongoing work, I am however, generally pleased with the results. The bean paste recipe is a Frankenstein culmination of techniques and ratios in three separate books. The dough is almost verbatim from The New Best Recipe by Cook's Illustrated for Yeasted Doughnuts.
Sweet Red Bean Paste
1 cup dried red beans, adzuki
water
4 cups tepid water
3/4 cup sugar, white or brown. Some recipes call for as little as 1/2 or as much as 1 1/2 cups. Adjust to taste and the final use of the bean paste. Likewise, add less if you are making paste to store and just add more sugar later.
1 tbsp peanut or vegetable oil, or lard. Butter also works depending on the final use.
Soak beans in water overnight. Or in a pinch, cover beans with 3 cups of water in a saucepan and bring to a boil for several minutes. Beans should be covered at least 1" by water. Drain.
Return beans to the pot, and add 4 cups of water. Bring to a boil, cover and turn heat to low for a simmer. Cook for 30-60 min or until the beans are very soft. Halfway through, crack the lid. If the beans didn't soak overnight, this may take 1 1/2-2 hours. Monitor the process so the bottom doesn't burn. Stir once in awhile and if necessary, add a little hot water. By the end, most of the water should have evaporated, with concentrated liquid covering only the very bottom 1/3 layer of bean. Carefully gauging this process means you will not have to reduce or squeeze the liquid out later.
Once soft, let the hot beans cool till easily managed. Put beans and liquid through a food processor or blend with stick blender or blender to a smooth consistency. Alternately, to make a very smooth paste, smash through a sieve, reserving bean water and tossing the solids. You can now reduce the paste further in a pot or press it in cloth to get rid of some moisture if necessary. The consistency will depend on what you might be using the paste for.
On low heat, add sugar and stir till glossy, for 5 minutes, reducing slightly while the mixture "burps". Swirl in the oil, and leave on the range to cool. For a more traditional approach, heat the oil in a frying pan and add the red bean paste till mixture becomes thick. Stir and stay attentive, so it doesn't burn.
Doughnuts:
Adapted from Yeasted Doughnut recipe in The New Best Recipe
1 1/2 cups plus 2-3 tbsp extra all purpose flour if needed for hand mixing
1 1/4 tsp yeast
3 tbsp granulated sugar plus 1-2 tbsp for rolling
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp whole milk, room temp
1 large egg,
3 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into 6 pieces, softened but still cool
2 1/2 cups Crisco
I added at least 3 tbsp of flour during final mixing to make the dough more workable. Adding flour also makes the doughnut a bit more bread-like. If using a mixer, this step may be unnecessary. After rising, the dough is still gooey but not too hard to shape. My dough was still quite springy (maybe due to undermixing), so I just "pasted" my shapes to the Silpat surface without using a lot of flour.
To shape, the dough needs to be rolled rather thin, about 1/8-1/4 of an inch. Roll (or press the dough by hand into a circle) with the desired thickness at the center and tapering to the edges. You can make 2 rounds and fill it like a sandwhich, or 1 round and pull up the edges as you would for a char-siu bun. Whatever works so the filling doesn't squeeze out when fried. Give the closure a firm pinch. Put the doughnuts sequentially on a floured surface, with the seam side down for bun shape, and give them a 30 min rest while the oil is heating up.
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