Baked Banana Rye Sourdough-nuts

There’s a lot of rye sourdough starter left over after making waffles, which is a great excuse to try baking some doughnuts!

There are quite a lot of recipes out there for sourdough doughnuts, and they’re all pretty similar, so I’m choosing a source I trust from the Sourdough Surprises group: The Gingered Whisk. However I’m making a few changes…

I don’t have doughnut trays yet, so I’m going to have to chill my doughnut rings in an attempt to keep their shape. So I’ll make the batter in the morning, and cook them in the evening after we get back from Craft Beer Rising. So the bicarb of soda is going to act as soon as I mix the batter… and be long done after the chill. So I’m going to drop that in favour of extra baking powder, which I’ll still need as I’m not sure how much out-of-oven proving I’ll be able to do before they start to lose their shape.

Next: we have excess bananas going very ripe. We already have a supply of frozen ones, so I’m going to make these banana doughnuts by adding a couple of mashed bananas to the batter.

As my starter is 200% hydration I’m probably going to need less liquid than the original recipe has, especially as some versions of the recipe mention needing extra flour to make into a firm dough. Given I’m already adding bananas… I’m just going to leave the milk and oil out.

So making those changes, and converting to metric, I get:

1/2 cup sourdough starter
2 tsp baking powder
1 egg
2 bananas, mashed
250g flour
100g golden caster sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt

Mix the wet, separately mix the dry, then mix together and knead into a dough. As it turns out I needed a lot of extra flour, added a tbsp at a time but probably around 75g more in total, to make into something sort of rollable.

Roll out the dough, and cut into doughnut shapes. I don’t have a doughnut cutter, so I’ll just be using two round cookie cutters. This was very fiddly. The dough was really wet and sticky.

The doughnuts go on a lined baking tray and then go into the fridge while we go out and sample craft beers and street food :)

Upon return… we will not be deep frying anything! The trans-fats are not the issue here: it’s the drunk people around boiling oil I’m concerned about! So I’ll take the chilled rings out of the fridge and see how long I can let them prove at room temperature before they lose shape (or, in our drunken state, we get bored of waiting) before baking.

Now… I could’t find any recipes for baked sourdough dougnuts… so I’m having to look at other baked yeasted doughnuts for information here. Baking time seems to be 10 minutes,but some say 200C fan, some 170C fan… I’ll plump in the middle and go for 180C fan for 10 minutes (no turning as I don’t want to ruin the oven spring). And I ended up giving them an extra couple of minutes to get some browning.

Once they’re cooked I’ll coat in a cinnamon & sugar mix, and eat while still warm :) But… it didn’t stick… so I sprayed with oil and tried again, and that worked.