Apple Cider Fritters

Bless me, readers, for I have sinned. It has been only four days since my last doughnut post, and I have again deep-fried dough for this blog. Forgive me.

Forgive me for making these apple cider fritters, so tender on the inside, crisp on the outside, dripping with apple cider glaze and bursting with caramelized apples…wait, scratch that. I’m not sorry at all. There’s nothing to apologize for when it comes to these apple cider fritters! Call me a deep-frying heathen if you must, a ruiner of diets and a scorner of the Food Pyramid, but these fritters are perfect—no forgiveness required. Amen and amen.

I wanted to call these Apple Cider Apple Fritters, but I was worried that all of those “apple” references would seem like a typo. How else to express, though, that these are the perfect combination of apple cider doughnuts and apple fritters? Imagine if you will that apple cider doughnuts and apple fritters had a baby. A beautiful, delicious, fluffy, super flavorful, apple-packed baby. Now imagine that babies are socially acceptable to eat. Yeah, they’re like that.

Many apple cider doughnut recipes are cake-based, not yeast-based. And most apple fritters don’t have cider in the dough, they just rely on the apple chunks to provide flavor. So this fritter recipe is the best of both worlds: it’s a yeast dough recipe, so it’s wonderfully light and fluffy, and it also has really concentrated apple cider in both the dough and the glaze on top, so even the bites without chunks of apple have a nice apple undertone.

And the apple chunks! Caramelized in butter and brown sugar, with a hint of cinnamon, they’re literally bursting out of every surface of these fritters. I used SweeTango apples, which are a variety I tried for the first time this year. I was sent a few samples to try, and I loved them so much I immediately bought a few more bags of them. When eaten raw they’re very crunchy and sweet (similar to a Honeycrisp) but they’re also a good cooking apple! They became tender but not mushy, and held their shape nicely during the caramelizing process. You don’t have to use these apples, though—any cooking apple you enjoy will work well.

I’d never made apple fritters before, so I was interested to learn that there’s a specific method for assembling them to produce the signature craggy bumps and edges and protruding apples. I read a lot of different recipes and cobbled together my favorite instructions into my own method. It’s a little more involved than the usual roll-and-cut doughnut process, but I think the wonderful final texture makes it worth it, and it’s fun to see ugly blobs of dough (there, I said it!) turn into beautiful fritters right before your eyes during the frying process.

The basic idea is to try and work the apple pieces deep into the layers of dough, so they’re randomly distributed and tucked into pockets of dough here and there, not all crammed together in the same place. To do this, I rolled the dough out, topped it with half of the apples, folded it into a packet, then rolled the dough out again, topped it with the other apples, and rolled it out once more. This is pretty good apple distribution, but we can do better—so we cut the dough into small squares and mash several squares together into a patty. It’s a little crude, to be sure, but it gets the job done. The rough balls of dough expand and puff out during frying, and they end up with that signature bumpy, apples-poking-out-everywhere look of traditional fritters. Pictures, you demand? Pictures you shall have:

I really can’t think of a more fall-appropriate food. It reminds me of apple picking and falling leaves and crisp mornings—all things I’m not enjoying in Southern California right now!—so it’s wonderful to have these edible seasonal cues, even if the weather outside isn’t cooperating very well.

Enjoy them for brunch with a mug of hot apple cider or hot cocoa, or warm them up and top them with a scoop of ice cream for dessert. They’re best the day that they’re made, but they’ll keep for several days at room temperature, so if you make them at the start of the weekend, you can enjoy them all weekend long! Still not convinced? I’ll let this parting shot do all the persuading for me….

⇒ Click Here for the Recipe - Apple Cider Fritters

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