Potato doughnuts (papanasi)

Although the weather outside creates difficulties for us to say whether it is winter or not, still, according to the calendar, we are in the middle of winter. And while we are dreaming of all the fruits and vegetables that will appear in the spring and that we will be able to use in the kitchen, we are still thinking about what else to cook, having the winter vegetables at our disposal.

The most used winter vegetable is the potato and today we thought we would present you an interesting recipe with potatoes: potato doughnuts (papanași).

Ingredients for 6 people:

• 400 g white flour “000”
• 280 g white potatoes
• 250 g of milk
• 50 g of butter
• 40 g of sugar
• 2 eggs
• 25 g of fresh yeast
• 1 l of oil
• 1 lemon

For decoration you need 200 g of sugar.

Start by boiling whole potatoes in salted water. After they are cooked, peel them and let them cool down. Separately, heat the milk well, take it off the heat, add the butter cut into pieces and the yeast, then mix well until everything dissolves.

Place the flour in the shape of a well, put the eggs, sugar, lemon peel, crushed potatoes in the middle and then pour the milk. Knead until you get a suitably hard dough.

Put the dough in a bowl, cover it with a kitchen napkin and let it rise for about an hour and a half. After this period of time has passed, take pieces of dough and shape them into rolls with a diameter of a few cm.

Cut the rolls into pieces with a length of 10-12 cm and glue their ends, forming crowns of dough. Place them on a surface sprinkled with flour and let them rise for another 20-25 minutes.

Immerse 3-4 papanasi in a bath of hot oil and fry them until they become golden on both sides. Remove them with a slotted spatula, place them on a paper napkin to absorb the excess oil.

Then put them in a bowl with sugar, turning them quickly from one side to the other, so that the sugar sticks to their entire surface.

Let them cool down and serve them accompanied by a Romanian incense wine.

We look forward to welcoming you at Hotel Alpin Poiana Brașov, at the Forest Lounge restaurant with a Romanian specialty to delight your senses and exalt your taste buds with delicious dishes made by master chefs.