Airfryer Beignets

We're making beignets in the airfryer today! All the tasty treats without the hazard of hot cooking oil.

This recipe will make ~30 beignets and will take 5 minutes to fry per batch.

Ingredients

0.75c warm water

0.25c sugar

1tsp. active dry yeast

3.5c flour

0.5tsp salt

2tbs unsalted butter (room temp.)

1 egg

0.5c evaporated milk

0.25c melted butter

1tbs. vegetable oil

Objects

Small bowl

Large bowl

Fork

Wooden Spoon

Rolling Pin

Basting brush or spoon

Knife or pizza cutter

Optional

1c powdered sugar

chocolate syrup

fruit sauce

In a small bowl add the yeast and a pinch of sugar to the warm water and let sit for 5 minutes. By the end of 5 minutes your yeast/water should be slightly frothy, if you just have yeast pellets floating around, you have to start over. See pictures for reference. The first yeast-in-water picture (with the spoon in the water) did not proof correctly (forgot to warm my water first) and I had to start over. The final picture (without a spoon) is what the yeast should look like.

In a large mixing bowl, stir together the flour(3.5c), salt(.5tsp), room temp butter(2tbs cut into small pieces), and sugar(.25c).

Lightly beat the egg.

Add the egg, evaporated milk(.5c) and yeast/water to the dry ingredients and mix with a wooden spoon. Mix until the dough forms a sticky ball.

Place your sticky dough ball into an oiled bowl. This can be the bowl you mixed it in, just remove the dough and oil the bowl. To oil the bowl I added about 1tbs. of vegetable oil to the bowl and smeared it around the bottom third of the bowl.

Leave your dough to rise for ~2 hours. Leaving it longer is fine, but don't let it sit more than overnight(if it is rising overnight, pop it in the fridge). The goal is for the dough to double in size. If it sits for too long your beignets will taste less sweet, and more yeasty; this is highly undesirably in a desert.

Once your dough has risen, lightly flour a surface and roll out your dough. You want the dough about 0.5in. thick. About twice as thick as your average cutout cookie.

Cut* your flattened dough into pieces, we normally do 1"-2" squares keeping the edges big enough to fry as well (~1" long triangles). You can cut the dough into any shape you'd like, they'll all bake pretty much the same.

2" squares will yeild ~30 beignets.

*If you are cutting on an easily scratched surface try using a plastic pizza cutter!

Heat your air fryer to 350 degrees. If you're unsure what this means or how to do that, just run your air fryer for a couple minutes at 350 to warm it up.

While your air fryer is heating, find/melt your butter.

Brush your beignets on both sides with butter before putting them into the airfyer.

Beignets don't grow very much so you can put them fairly close together when frying. Leaving ~0.5in. beween them is plenty of space.

Fry at 350degrees for 5 minutes, to brown more evenly, flip them half way through.

When frying try to fry like-sizes in a batch. We fry all our "normal" pieces together and then a smaller batch of the edge triangles. The triangles take a little less time, maybe 3 min total.

-Bad on me, I didn't take a single picture of thier set up in the air fryer...sorry friends...Didn't even last long enough to recreate...Please enjoy this poor sketch of how close to put them.

Beignets are best eaten fresh from the fryer, throw them on a plate to cool just a little, add some powdered sugar and eat them up!

Alteratively dip them in your favorite sweet sauce, we've tried chocolate syrup, maple syrup and various fruit flavored syrups, all are delicious.