Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2016 3:08 pm Post subject: The Priciest Part Of The $100 Golden Doughnut Isn't The Gold
The doughnuts are expensive, running at $1000 per dozen. But Delacruz uses pricey ingredients, and makes each pastry by hand. He makes doughnuts on Fridays, based on how many orders he receives by Thursday night. He gets to the kitchen very early in the morning and makes a pâte à choux. It’s the same dough that eclairs and cream puffs are baked from, although his contains vivid purple ube flour. Next , he pipes out hundreds of doughnuts by hand, and fries them up.
Once they’re done, he fills them with purple ube mousse studded with chunks of Cristal jelly he makes a day or two ahead of time. He glazes the donuts, and dusts them with gold. Before the icing hardens, he flakes on 24 karat gold leaf.
An $80 book of gold leaf covers about four doughnuts, he says. But the real cost and flavor of the pastry is in the Cristal, not the gold. Delacruz says he didn’t pick Cristal to jack up the price of the doughnut. “If we wanted to make an expensive doughnut, I could have used Ace of Spades, but it doesn’t taste as good as Cristal” he says. Cristal’s honey notes contrast with the deep, earthy flavor of the ube.
