Sufganiyot


By MARK MIETKIEWICZ


hen you think of Chanukah, the first food that comes to mind is probably the
latke. While the potato pancake certainly has its virtues, its oily cousin
the sufganiyah has it own unique pleasures. Today, we troll the Internet to
see what it has to say about the jelly-filled, powdered sugar-topped, doughy
concoction.
According to cookbook author Joan Nathan, the Hebrew word "sufganiyah" comes
from the Greek sufgan, meaning "puffed and fried." Traditionally, she says
[http://starchefs.com/Holidays/99/recipe_03.html], they "consist[ed] of two
rounds of dough sandwiching some jam, and the jam always ran out during the
frying. Today, with new injectors on the market, balls of dough can be
deep-fried first and then injected with jam before being rolled in sugar.
This is a much easier, quicker way of doing them. And no jam escapes."
If you'd like to try making some, the Jewish-Food Recipes Archives has 21
variations, including chocolate, no-yeast and raised potato. And lest we
forget that we are living in Canada in wintertime, there's even a variation
that uses apple cider and a maple glaze
[http://www.jewish-food.org/recipes/sufindex.htm] .
A sufganiyah wouldn't be a sufganiyah without hot oil. But that doesn't mean
kids can't join in the fun making them. The Epicurious Web site has a
family-friendly recipe that's divided into tasks for kids, such as sifting
the flour; tasks for kids and adults, such as kneading the dough; and tasks
only adults should tackle - dropping the doughnuts into the hot oil
[http://food.epicurious.com/run/recipe/viewid=40003] .
Can latkes and sufganiyot live in harmony? They do in Naomi Silbermintz's
kitchen, thanks to a recipe for Yerushalmi-style sufganiyot, in which a
yeast mixture is dropped by the spoonful into an inch of oil. Check out the
recipe while learning about Naomi's family history.
"My grandmother (savta) was a Yerushalmit. She was born in 1910 in Jerusalem
to a family whose roots go back only to Jerusalem. (They never were in the
Diaspora.) Every Chanukah, when we visited my grandmother, she made these.
My mother always said that they are the precursors to jelly-donut type
sufganiyot. We used to call them 'Chanukah latkes' or 'Savta's sufganiyot'''
[http://www.jewishfood-list.com/recipes/desserts/sufganiyotyerushalmi01.html
] .
Sufganiyot may be popular in your home, but even if you double or triple
your recipe, you won't be able to compete with Angel's Bakery in the Kiryat
Moshe neighbourhood of Jerusalem. Angel's begins its preparations a month
before the holiday to fry up more than a quarter-million doughnuts every 24
hours during the eight-day festival. Each batch uses 100 kilos of dough and
makes 1,600 doughnuts.
I'm not sure whether Angel's Bakery was involved, but back in Chanukah of
1997, some Israelis with time on their hands tried to set a record. They
erected a 12-foot structure consisting of 6,400 sufganiyot near the town of
Afula. As the History Channel Web site delicately puts it, "The blob was
dismantled later, and the sufganiyot were distributed to Israeli soldiers
serving along the border with Lebanon." No word whether the oily pyramid
ever drew the attention of the folks from Guinness
[http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/holidays/hanukkah/feats.html] .
Digging into a typical sufganiyah can leave you with 18 grams of fat and 250
calories. There are alternatives, some healthier than others. You can try
yours made of whole wheat [http://www.jewish-food.org/recipes/sufgan12.htm]
oven-fried [http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q12121CA6] or no fry at all
[http://www.jewish-food.org/recipes/nofrydou.htm] . But these alternatives
are rare: when I searched the Internet for "sufganiyot" and its various
spellings, I came up with more than 2,000 references. When I added the term
"low calorie" I was down to about nine hits.
If the calories don't get you, something else may. Somebody at the Kolel Web
site is a walking survivor
[http://www.kolel.org/pages/holidays/Chanukah_customs.html] . "I have a
small scar on my lip from boiling hot custard shooting out of a fresh
sufganiyah bought from a street vendor in Jerusalem. For years now that
little ridge on my inner lip has been a year-round reminder of the sweetness
[and heat] of Chanukah."
Mark Mietkiewicz is a Toronto-based Web site producer who writes, lectures
and teaches about the Jewish Internet. He can be contacted at
highway @ rogers.com.




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