Loukomades
Tiny deep-fried doughnuts, usually covered in honey syrup. Easy to make and quick to eat. In Greece, they can usually be eaten in street snack bars, served in cardboard boxes.
INGREDIENTS:
15 g fresh yeast
100 ml milk at room temperature
100 ml water at room temperature
2 and 1/3 cups plain flour
2 large tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons oil
A pinch of salt
Frying oil
Extras:
Sugar sprinkles: 100 g sugar + 2 teaspoons cinnamon
Honey syrup: 3 tablespoons honey/maple syrup/simple syrup + 2 tablespoons water + optional tablespoon orange juice
PREPARATION:
Prepare a leaven from the yeast, 1 tablespoon of sugar, 1 tablespoon of flour and 50 ml of milk, i.e. mix everything and leave for 10 minutes.
After this time, add the rest of the ingredients, i.e. the rest of the flour, milk, water, 1 tablespoon of sugar, oil, a pinch of salt and knead preferably with a food processor, because the dough is quite thin, but you can also do it by hand (I do not recommend sprinkling with more flour than in the recipe)
Leave the kneaded dough to rise for at least 1 hour.
Heat the oil in a wide pot (I fried it in a wok) so that there is at least 5 cm of it. Do not pierce the risen dough, but use a spoon or two of dips in cold oil to put walnut-sized balls of dough on the oil. Don’t worry if the balls aren’t perfectly round. Mine aren’t either, but it doesn’t matter because they’ll look beautiful too.
Fry on each side until golden brown and keep a medium heat under the pot so as not to burn the doughnuts (When the oil temperature is too high, the doughnuts will burn and they will be raw inside).
If you roll the doughnuts in sugar (I like this method the most), mix the sugar with cinnamon and roll the hot doughnuts in it.
If you pour syrup over them, you can do it when you have fried all of them and the doughnuts are already slightly cooled.
To make the honey/maple syrup/simple syrup, bring water and possibly orange juice to a boil in a pot. Pour the slightly cooled syrup over the doughnuts.