Quick post: not quite Stanley Tucci’s zeppole
I’m reading Stanley Tucci’s autobiography Taste at the moment. It is mostly about food, and entirely charming.
Little morsels keep jumping out at me, and the latest was Zeppole: savoury potato doughnuts stuffed with anchovies:
Zeppole, or 'zee-poli', as they are often pronounced by Italian Americans, are deep-fried, loosely shaped rings or balls of dough made from mashed-up potatoes and wheat flour. (They can also be made with only wheat flour.) When fried in very hot olive oil they instantly puff up and become addictively delicious. Whenever my mother would begin to fry them, the whole family would unconsciously start edging more and more closely to the stove until we were all huddled around her, practically panting with a hunger we didn't know we had until she started cooking.
[...]
Another way of making them is to place a couple of anchovies in the dough as you are shaping it. I remember the first time I tried these as a very young boy and was completely repelled by the potency of the anchovies. But once I was in my teens and my palate had become more accepting of stronger flavours, I would patiently wait for those zeppole that my mother or grandmother had filled with anchovies. But, honestly, both versions are in credibly moreish.
Taste, Stanley Tucci, p104-5
Yeah - I thought - I’m making those.
Tucci doesn’t give a recipe, and the internet gives all together too many. So here’s what I botched together one afternoon, plus some endnotes on what I’d change.
Ingredients:
Makes about 12
00 flour, 250g
Potatoes (Maris Piper, raw unpeeled weight), 250g
Water, up to 200g (Extremely see end note. I used the full 200 and it was way too much. Try 150?)
Butter, 20g (room temperature)
Yeast, 7g sachet
Salt, at least 1/2tsp
Anchovies, 1 and a bit of those little oval cans? 🤷♂️
Plus oil for frying, and a deep fryer. Or a sturdy pan and a steady nerve. Olive oil is traditional. I used vegetable oil because it was in the fryer already and pretty fresh. You do you.
Instructions:
Make a dough out of everything except the anchovies. Make doughnuts with it.
Too Bake Off? Ok.
Peel and roughly dice the potatoes. Boil them for about 10 mins or until really soft. Like, properly 1980s British cuisine ruined. Drain them and allow to cool so they steam dry a little. You want them cool enough to handle.
Mash the potatoes thoroughly.
In a really big bowl or a stand mixer, combine the flour, mash, salt, yeast and butter. Start mixing in the water until is forms a fairly slack dough. Probably stop at 150g of it. My dough was super wet.
The big bowl is because this dough is so wet (again, see notes) and it may not be practical to turn it out to knead it. But knead it we must, so you may find yourself generally slapping it around in the bowl.
Work it for at least five minutes, until the texture changes to something more silky, with a little elasticity, and then set it to rest. Let the dough rise for about an hour somewhere warm, until doubled in bulk.
You could also consider an overnight or multi-hour fridge prove, if you want to do this part in advance, or just slightly deepen the flavour. If you try that (I didn’t) you’ll still need a rising period to get it back to room temperature and an airy texture.
Fresh from the fryer.
Once the dough is risen, prepare a work area. This is messy, so be ready.
You’ll need a dessert spoon or two to measure the dough, a pot of water to moisten your hands, the anchovies close by (drained of oil and patted dry, ideally), and a wire rack covered in kitchen paper for draining the doughnuts.
Get the fryer to about 180c
To form the doughnuts, lightly wet a spoon and your hands. This helps stop it sticking. Scoop up a spoonful of dough, and shape it into a little strip a bit bigger than the anchovy fillet. Wrap it round the anchovy like a little sausage roll, then close that into a loop, like a ring doughnut. Don’t worry if it doesn’t hold the ring and closes into a little ball.
Use a moist spoon to carefully drop the doughnut into the oil, and then make the next one.
Fry for about two minutes on each side, and remove to drain on the kitchen paper.
They’re best eaten warm but surprisingly good at room temperature if you’re doing a buffet snack or an appetiser. They also hold their heat pretty well. Din;t worry, basically.
They come out beautifully delicate and soft, airy, with that salty anchovy bite. They’re fantastic.
You can make sweet ones by skipping the anchovy and rolling them in sugar while they’re warm.
Notes
This section is largely me writing to Future Me, but you might find it useful.
Dough consistency
The main issue is that the dough is a right bugger to work with. Let’s be honest, it’s a batter. You can’t knead batter. Thought the panettone was bad? Try this fucker. (I wonder what fried panettone dough would be like…).
So there’s two things causing that and they’re related: poor gluten formation and high hydration. Related because the high hydration makes the kneading harder (by hand) and the kneading is what helps the gluten form. There’s toss-all gluten in potatoes, and they’re half the solids so we’re pretty low elasticity overall. I don’t want to swap in strong bread flour or reduce the potato, because the texture is 👌 as is. Which means looking at the liquid. You could take the butter out, too (impedes glutens) but butter is tasty.
A quick google suggests a yeasted doughnut dough is probably quite tough, maybe 60% hydration. (600g liquid in 1,000g flour). This dough felt sticky as fuck and I used about 200g (eyeballed) which would get us to 80%. If we cut that to 150g we get the more manageable 60%, but we still haven’t accounted for the potato.
Do we treat the potato as liquid, solid, or some combination? After another quick google, I decided to treat it as a spherical cow in a vacuum. Potatoes boiled, cooled, and mashed loose a little of their raw weight as the water steams away, but still remain fairly moist. Between web results and the feel under the hand, I decided to assume that mashed potato made from boiled spuds that have been drained and allowed to cool is functionally equivalent to adding 50% hydration dough.
Look, I’m a product manager. Fermi estimates are how we stay sane.
The potato, then, is not exactly hydration neutral, but is close enough to be going on with for a 60% dough if we correct via the delicate adjustment that food scientists like to call “adding a sprinkle of water and carrying on with your life”.
Which is how I get to 150g of liquid, and hoping this works better.
Shaping and working
On the whole ring-shaping malarkey with the anchovies: yes it’s messy, but when I tried to just make a little ball and poke the anchovy inside the shape came out less even. You might be less clumsy than me, in which case this will be much easier. If you can get them to be actual rings with a hole in then go you!
If your dough comes firm enough not to stick to everything, you might even be able to batch shape them and then fry them. This would hugely simplify timings and aid consistency. I couldn’t manage it.
Flavours
It occurs to me that you could stuff these with anything you might stuff into an olive. Or with olives. Or with stuffed olives. They taste good as is, but there’s space to tinker.
Thoughts:
Chop a tablespoon of capers through the dough
Stuff with chorizo
Sprinkle with salt and ground fennel seeds
Jam a roasted garlic clove right up ‘em
Serve with a roasted pepper dip
For the love of god, these are ORs not ANDs.