How To Make Homemade Doughnuts
How about if I told you that you could make these Homemade Doughnuts real quick, serving them warm and golden to your family, with no knowledge whatsoever of yeast or dough, no special equipment other than what you likely have on hand, and have them done start to finish in under ten minutes, including prep time?
Here’s How To Make Donuts at Home… You’re Welcome 🙂
We Southerners (and humans in general), love our doughnuts.
The most important thing about this doughnut making recipe though is that you begin with CANNED BISCUITS. No, they do NOT taste anything like a biscuit when you are done. They taste every bit as melt in your mouth good as they look!
Recipe Ingredients:
- Vegetable oil
- Canned biscuits for the doughnuts
- Butter
- Cinnamon
- And sugar for the coating.
TIP: For the biscuits, any style at all will do, just don’t get the flaky layers because they will absorb the oil whereas normal biscuits won’t if we get our oil hot enough before frying them.
- In a bowl, stir together cinnamon and sugar and set that aside.
- Melt a stick of butter in another bowl and set aside as well. Now they will both be handy as soon as the doughnuts are done.
Making the doughnut hole
Now you can go buy a doughnut cutter or some other fancy finagled device (which I actually have tucked away in the dark recesses of my kitchen drawers) but I like to show y’all how to do things the simple way. I’m a big fan of not over complicating a simple matter. For that very reason, we are going to just use a plain old 20 oz bottle cap to cut the centers of our doughnuts out.
- Cut out the holes in every doughnut, reserving them to cook along with the doughnuts.
- Voila, our doughnuts are done.
Pour your oil in a skillet. You need a little less than a half inch.
Heat your oil on medium to medium high for several minutes. We want it to be hot so that our doughnuts are instantly seared when they enter it. This prevents them from absorbing too much of the oil and being soggy. However, we don’t want it too hot so that the outside gets done before the inside.
TIP: To test my oil, I put a doughnut hole in it. It should sizzle and bubble around the edges and then you know its hot enough. You may need to turn your heat down a bit after testing it with some doughnut holes to see if it is just right. Once the doughnut hole is golden, remove it and let it cool a minute before taking a bite to make sure it’s fully cooked, not gooey, in the center.
Time to cook the doughnuts!
TIP: If your skillet isn’t big enough you may have to do them in batches. By the time you have put them all in, some may already be ready to turn. It takes less than a minute for them to be ready to turn over.
This is how they look, nice and golden.
- Turn them all over and let them cook until the undersides are this way. All in all, this should take less than two minutes.
- Remove cooked doughnuts from oil and place on paper towel lined plate or a drying rack if you’re feeling fancy.
- Now do the same thing with the doughnut holes.
- Here are our cooked doughnuts, now let’s add a little bit of heaven to them!
- The doughnuts should have cooled just enough so that you can handle them but they will still be very warm.
- Pick each one up and dip both sides in melted butter…
- Then press them down into the cinnamon sugar on both sides.
- Repeat with all doughnuts and doughnut holes.
- Eat them warm. They will positively melt in your mouth, they are so good!
No one will believe you started out with canned biscuits so lets just keep that little tidbit to ourselves 😉
Doughnuts in minutes! What a fun breakfast or evening treat when family is visiting!
Ingredients
- 1 large can Grands style biscuits or your preference, just not flaky layers
- 1 Cup Sugar
- 1 1/2 Tablespoons cinnamon
- 1 stick butter melted
- Vegetable Oil For Frying
Instructions
- Pour oil into skillet to the depth of a little less than 1/2 an inch and heat on medium to medium high for about five minutes. In a bowl, melt butter. In a separate bowl, combine cinnamon and sugar.
- Using a plastic bottle cap, cut the center out of each biscuit. Drop dough into hot oil, watching carefully and turning when golden. Once doughnuts are golden on both sides, remove to paper towel lined plate. Repeat until all dough is cooked, including doughnut holes.
- Dip both sides of each doughnut into melted butter, then press both sides into cinnamon sugar mixture. Serve warm.
Nutrition
You may also like these recipes:
Quick and Easy Jelly Filled Doughnuts
Biscuit Pretzels – AMAZING Pretzels From Canned Biscuits!
I remember these! Made these with my mom in the winter when I was a wee one! Nice memory. 🙂
We are snowed in and I made these for my family today. I didn’t realize until everything was ready to go that I had the flaky style biscuits. I decided to try anyway and they were really good – I’m sure they’re even better w/ the recommended biscuits. I will be making these again. Thanks for an awesome recipe!
I tried making these today, and the insides were still a little doughy, okay, a lot doughy, as in, not cooked.
What did I do wrong? I used the Pillsbury Grand’s Buttermilk biscuits (but not the flaky layers kind).
They even got darker (deep golden brown) than shown, so I THOUGHT I had left them in long enough.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Don’t use the GRANDS Pilsbury for this. The little butter nuggets they put in to make AWESOME biscuits do not make awesome donuts. Use store brought brand, and the 4 cans for like a buck fifty work WONDERS.
Hope that helps.
Oh my gosh!!! I’d forgotten all about making these when I was in college (in the dark ages) when the only cooking equipment we were permitted to have were electric hot water kettles and popcorn poppers. You know — the kind you had to put oil and popcorn kernels in and then turn on until it was mostly finished popping??? Well, the WONDERFUL thing about those popcorn poppers is that they also get oil the PERFECT temperature to make these doughnuts! We’d skip Chapel (required attendance every Tuesday at 9:30 a.m.) occasionally to stay in the dorm and eat doughnuts. What a treat!
Thanks for the trip down memory land and yet ANOTHER great idea of a way to make memories for my family, Christy!
And a Happy New Year to you and your family and all of Southern Plate 🙂
Hey Christy i think you doing a wonderful job
i love to cook and i really like all the easy and inexpensive recipes that you have.
Thank you and keep up the good work!!
Why don’t you include a link on your homepage (or recipe pages) so that we could easily print your recipe. I love your idea for homemade doughnuts, but I won’t spend 30 minutes writing down the recipe. Help us out–we’re your fans!
I’m doing the best I can, honest!
I already spend over six hours each day working on Southern Plate and it’s about all I can do. I know some days my family wonders what life must be like with folded laundry and a clean house, lol.
Making recipes printer friendly requires software that I don’t have on my computer so I have to put them in document form, email them to my husband, have him format them and upload them, then embed the link. It takes quite some time to get all of that done and so far I just haven’t been able to come up with it.
Most folks just copy and paste and then print it in a word document on their computer. I have instructions on how to do this on my Frequently Asked Questions page, its super easy and will revolutionize the way you use the computer!
Thank you very much for reading and commenting, Barry, hope my response helps!
Gratefully,
Christy 🙂