Vienna’s Jelly Doughnuts & Uri Scheft’s Sufganiyot (Recipe) #Ponchikis #Krapfen

with Viennese jelly doughnut recipe

IN recent years champagne-creme-filled and gold-leaf-topped donuts and sufganiyot have been en vogue. Try these wonderfully homey jelly doughnuts for a change. Though you don’t have to use jelly, apricot jam is the most classic filling in Vienna, as strawberry jam is in Israel. Use any filling you prefer, like vanilla cream, Nutella,¹ or even marzipan. Today I’m making some classic Viennese jelly doughnuts with Uri Scheft of New York’s Breads Bakery and of Tel Aviv’s Lehamim Bakery. 

Krapfen are Viennese doughnuts, delicious little pastries filled with apricot jam. They’re available all year round in Vienna, but traditionally they are carnival fair. Their reach extends far outside of Austria. Marie Antoinette introduced these Austro-Hungarian jelly doughnuts to the French court.² They have been adopted in contemporary Israel, where they’re called sufganiyot (singular sufganiyah). They’re eaten on Hanukkah because they are fried in oil.³ Good food tends to travel.

Among the many new cookbooks in autumn 2016, there were three that catered to bakers and anyone with a sweet tooth like mine. There were Dorie Greenspan’s striking, colorful colorful photographs in Dorie’s Cookies, Mark Bittman’s major installment on How to Bake Everything, and then there was the fashionable, magazine-style Breaking Breads – The New World of Israeli Baking by Uri Scheft. The latter features a classic Israeli version of the jelly doughnut.

Competition for the most imaginative and unheard-of fillings and toppings for jelly doughnuts is growing tougher every year, especially in Israel around Hanukkah. This craze has even reached the shores – or more precisely, the Danube banks – of the resolutely conservative Austrian pastry shops and bakeries. Yes, over the last couple of years Viennese customers have been presented with a few very unorthodox jelly doughnuts. Though that’s nothing compared to what you can find in Tel Aviv.

Uri Scheft’s pages on jelly doughnuts are an exception to this tendency. Elsewhere we’ve seen everything from of alcohol-creme fillings to salty caramel ones, and a host of vegan, gluten-free and lactose-free versions. But this year even the Israeli newspaper Haaretz voices concerns and calls for a more traditional approach. Returning to the classic jelly doughnut, despite its simple and unassuming ways, might transport you right back to sweet childhood pleasures.

So, my family wanted to give Uri Scheft’s recipe a try for one of our annual Hanukkah batches of homemade pontchikes, the Poilish-Yiddish version of jelly doughnuts.⁴ I’ve made a few little changes to streamline the efficiency of the recipe even further. And, in order to make these sufganiyot into authentic Viennese Krapfen, we’ll use a customary Austrian rum instead of brandy, lemon instead of orange, apricot jelly as the filling and nothing on top but a dusting of confectioners’ sugar.

Yes, in reality, the difference between all these jelly doughnuts, whether they’re called bomboloni, Berliners, Krapfen, pontchikes or suffganiyot, comes down to only slight variations in size, but often major changes to the filling and the topping. Well, and, as you would expect, Italian bomboloni are made with olive oil⁵ and some Central- and Eastern-Europeans are frying theirs in schmaltz or lard.

Still, these jelly doughnuts, though of different geographical origins, are nonetheless so similar that you could simply take any regular jelly doughnut and call it bombolone, Krapfen, Fank (in Hungarian) or whatever you like! So why even bother making these Viennese jelly doughnuts at home? Just buy one and call it Krapfen and be done with it! In fact, the case for

In fact, the case for homemade jelly doughnuts is easily made. Simply put, they will taste better, not least because of the effort it took you to make them. And at home, you don’t have to skimp on the filling. Fill it so you’ll get a bit of apricot jam with every bite. Lastly, and most importantly, if you have children, you should let them cut out the doughnuts. Let them make one of those memories, you yourself got from your own childhood – or wish you would have. And while you’re at it, why not try it the Viennese way, once?

And finally, before you start preparing the ingredients for the recipe, enjoy this picture of a jelly doughnut photographed at the Viennese Espresso-Café-Konditorei Aida by photographer Martin Parr. (It appears in Martin Parr’s 2016 book on Vienna, “Cakes & Balls“.)

Further Reading:

• A must-read are the entries on doughnut and sufganiyah in the “Encyclopedia of Jewish Food” by Gil Marks.
• Our go-to standard and all-time favorite recipe for Krapfen is featured in Neue Cuisine – The Elegant Tastes of Vienna. Recipes from Wallsé, Café Sabarsky and Blaue Gans by Kurt Gutenbrunner, on pape 169.
• In German, on the history of jelly doughnuts: “Das große Sacher Kochbuch,” by Hans Maier-Bruck.

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1. Better try to go with some quality Pasta Gianduja instead of this industrial ersatz.
2. Claudia Roden in The Book of Jewish Food, p. 197.
3. According to Wikipedia “The Hebrew word sufganiyah and Arabic word sfenj derive from the words for sponge (sfog, Hebrew: ספוג‎;^[2] isfanj, Arabic: إسْفَنْج‎‎).”
4. Also spelled ponchikes or ponchkes. In Yiddish in some places the word Krapfen is used too.
5. See for example the recipe for bomboloni ripieni in Edda Servi-Machlin’s The Classic Dolci of the Italian Jews, p.50.
6. Iodine produces a bitter and metallic taste.