Pumpkin doughnuts, rougail sauce and tomato emulsion
Pumpkin is in season
This is the most important thing, since pumpkins are the tastiest and the cheapest.
I am not one of those people who blindly follows trends. So, I am not the one to start making everything pumpkin just because I saw it on instagram.
components
- PUMPKIN DOUGHNUTS:
- 125 gr of grated pumpkin
- 4 spring onions
- 1 garlic clove (see this post)
- 3-4 parsley branches
- 8 gr dry yeast
- 1 egg
- 125 ml of milk
- 1 ginger teaspoon
- A bit of cumin
- A bit of cayenne pepper
- ROUGAIL SAUCE:
- 1 bigger tomato
- 2 spring onions (to your taste)
- 3 roasted peppers (cleaned and chopped)
- 1 garlic clove
- 1 teaspoon of coriander (or the fresh one)
- 1 lemon (juice) (or 2 lemon juice)
- Olive oil
- Balsamico vinegar
- Salt, white pepper, chili pepper
- TOMATO JUICE FOAM:
- 1 fresh tomato juice
- A bit of juice from rougail sauce
- 2 pinches of soy lecithin
- Oil to bake doughnuts
Instruction
- PUMPKIN DOUGHNUTS: Clean, chop or grate pumpkin, garlic, spring onions.
- In a separate bowl, mix dry yeast, four, dry spices: salt, pepper, ginger, cayenne pepper, cumin, egg, milk.
- Add fresh vegetables to this mixture (pumpkin, spring onions, garlic), cover with transparent foil and leave it be for 1 hour. In the meantime, make the sauce and tomato emulsion.
- ROUGAIL SAUCE: Cut, peel and chop the pepper.
- Clean and chop spring onions.
- Clean the tomato, remove the seeds (keep them with the tomato juice), peel the skin (you can also blanch it lightly), and the meaty part cut into cubes.
- Mix together all the fruits and vegetables in a separate bowl, add spices, salt, white pepper, chili pepper, lemon juice, balsamico vinegar.
- Once the doughnut dough had sat for enough, it should be baked. I baked it in a mold so that I have a correct shape and so that the doughnuts look better on a plate, in a saucepan in oil, on each side.
- After baking, I left them on a pice of napkin to remove excess fat.
- TOMATO JUICE EMULSION: This is the tomato juice I got by removing the soft inner part of tomato with seeds and by mashing rougail sauce through a strainer (see the video). I combined this to have enough liquid to make foam.
- I added 2 pinches of soy lecithin in that juice and mixed with a hand mixer until I got foam of the right thickness.
- SERVING: Once I prepared everything, I served the doughnuts in a deeper, elegant white plate with rougail sauce and tomato foam. I decorated with microgreens (micro peas).
But, going through books, magazines and instagram I decided to make pumpkin doughnuts. I mean, I wanted to eat doughnuts, so why not make them from pumpkin.
It’s something I think everyone loves…doughnuts, not pumpkin. The pumpkin just goes with doughnuts 🙂
Rougail sauce
Let me explain what Rougail sauce is first. Of course, it has French connections, just like my cuisine in general.
Rougail sauce originates from Reunion island (French territory in the Indian ocean) and Mauritius. Both of these islands are located west of Madagascar. If this doesn’t mean anything to you, then that’s west of Africa in the Indian ocean. On the Reunion island, the word „rougail“ is used to determine a combination of spices that you can always carry with you.
There are several types of rugail. Rugail alone comes in the form of a sauce or a paste. It’s very spicy, traditionally made from vegetables or fruit cut into pieces, onion and chilli pepper. It is always put in a cold or fresh dish no matter if it is made from vegetables or fruit and you can carry it with you wherever you go.
Today’s rugail is made from tomatoes, roasted pepper, spring onions, garlic, pepper, lemon, coriander, vinegar and olive oil.
Let me just say this. It’s worth every ingredient. And when you put it on pumpkin doughnuts, I have nothing to add.
It’s not hard to make by mixing all these ingredients while previously cleaning them.
There is also one tip for garlic if you are not a fan. If you don’t like garlic, you can do this:
- throw it out completely (but the rugail will lose its essence then)
- blanch it for a few seconds three times in cold water
All the best chefs do the blanching 🙂
The entire preparation video is here
Pumpkin doughnuts
To make doughnuts, you need flour. And to make pumpkin doughnuts tasty, you need spices.
Pumpkin goes well with:
- Butter
- Pimento (here you can find how to use it and with what)
- Cheese (feta)
- Cooking cream
- Cinnamon
- Clove
- Ginger
- Nutmeg
- Sage
- Salt, pepper, sugar
Some of the good combinations are:
Pumpkin + Pimento + Cinnamon + Salt + Bay laurel
Pimento +Pumpkin + Cinnamon +Ginger
Pumpkin + Apples + Curry
Honey +Pumpkin + balsamico
Pumpkin + cream cheese + orange + rum
Butter + Pumpkin + Garlic + Chicken soup + Thyme
Our pumpkin doughnuts went with spring onions, garlic, cumin, ginger, cayenne pepper.
While we’re at spring onions, you can put it in as much as you want. I love it, and sometimes put too much.
The rest is in the video and the pictures.
If you think something is unclear, feel free to write to me or leave a message here.
Tomato emulsion
In this part, I will reveal how the tomato emulsion is made in modern cuisine. So, anyone who doesn’t like modern cuisine can skip this part.
This is where we come to the „sustainable cooking“. You do not throw away anything, and you use everything. When I cut tomatoes and removed the seeds, I also removed part of the tomato juice. I did not throw it away, but collected them in a separate bowl. I strained the juice in the end, added a bit of juice from rugail sauce (see the video) and added a bit of lecithin soy powder.
To make steady foam. modern cuisine uses soy lecithin which you put in a ratio relative to the liquid. On average, it’s 2 gr per one litre of liquid. You need special beam scale to measure that small quantity. However, you can also measure approximately.
So, if you want to try this, and you don’t have a beam scale for small quantities, then do a pinch.
You can get soy lecithin in health food stores or stores that sell ingredients for cakes and cookies.
Bonus
For those of you who like trends and want to try these flavours:
Crispy pumpkin pie with gorgonzola cheese
