What Made One Of The 'Best Donuts' Julia Child Ever Had So Special

The odds are that if you order a basic donut at the local chain, coffee shop, or patisserie, it's going to have a cake or yeast base. The former has a spongey crumb that's probably a little denser than your standard birthday slice, and the latter is light, airy, and often enrobed in a glaze. Then you've got your crullers, made of choux, crossovers like the Cronut, and the Julia Child favorite: the brioche donut.

Brioche donuts have more in common with yeast donuts than their cake counterparts, because yeast is also a key brioche ingredient. But brioche donuts just finish with a bit more heft and a richer, more velveteen finish due to their typically increased use of butter and eggs. In an old episode of her show "The French Chef" titled "Coffee and ... ", the American chef and dessert aficionado actually prepares a few beautiful brioche treats virtually all at the same time, and makes the donuts seem like a relative breeze. "Don't get all upset about it and make it a production," Child sais near the top of the show. "Just plunge right in, because all doughs are essentially very much alike, if it's bread dough, roll dough, croissant dough, or brioche dough, which we're going to do today." That relative ease is, like a lot of baking projects, in the eye of the beholder.

There would not be films and television shows about Julia Child decades after her original rocketship to fame if she didn't have such a comforting way of putting the home cook at ease. In addition to the relatively low-lift ingredient gathering and mixing — milk meets yeast and sugar, eggs are beaten, flour gets introduced, followed by more eggs, salt, butter, sugar, and cinnamon or mace, and a flour kneading finale — there are at least five and a half hours of rising and resting and chilling time. That's before she, you know, made the donuts.

Once the dough is complete, making the donuts is super simple, much like those last few triple Axels are simple in the moment between an Olympic athlete's lifetime of training and her gold medal win. Rolled to ¼ inch thick, circles are then stamped with donut or cookie cutters, including the holes. They rest to rise for one last hour and a half before they're fried in fresh oil. Child preferred peanut oil, which comes in a few varieties, and used an electric skillet. The donuts only took a few minutes to brown before Child removed them to a plate to shower them with powdered sugar. "I think it's the best donut I ever had in my life," she said before moving on to make a brioche coffee cake.