The best things in life are sweet. A cone at the local ice cream shop. Cotton candy at the county fair. Hot, crispy doughnuts right off the assembly line.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could make your favorite desserts in the privacy of your own home? Because let’s be honest, food tastes better when you’re eating it on the couch in your undies.
As kitchen gadgets grow increasingly intricate, we’re seeing a slew of devices that let a dedicated hands-on homebody create fairly complicated, high-quality sweet treats in a regular home kitchen. We tested some of the latest dessert-making tech to see if doing it yourself really is just as good as letting the experts (and their industrial machines) do it for you. Our suddenly larger waistlines are proof that, in most cases, the answer is yes.
Mini Doughnut Machine
It’s hard to believe this little $150 machine can turn out delicious doughnuts. It weighs almost nothing given its size, and it’s made almost entirely out of plastic. That may seem like a bad combination — plastic and super-hot oil — but it works. It just works verrry slowwwly, and it creaks like an old wooden roller coaster.
To start, you fill the machine with oil and wait for it to heat up. Then, fill the extruder with the right consistency of batter (it will only work if your “dough” is the liquidy consistency of pancake batter). Flip a few switches — there’s one to turn on the conveyor and another to turn on the extruder, so you’ll really want to read the instructions closely. But after that, just walk away. Well, sort of; the little baskets that move the doughnuts through the hot oil and flip them over don’t always catch correctly, so you’ll need to monitor the machine’s progress.
The conveyor that moves the doughnuts through the oil is painfully slow. And that’s because doughnuts just take a while. But since the extruder only dispenses one doughnut at a time, and each doughnut takes about 90 seconds to cook, completing the included recipe (100 doughnuts) will take about two and a half hours.
But here’s the thing. All these little finicky problems with the machine are easy to ignore. ‘Cause at the end of the day you have a ton of hot, crispy, delicious, mini doughnuts. And, let’s be honest: If you’re gonna eat 100 doughnuts in one sitting, you’re better off pacing yourself.
It’s not the highest quality. It takes practice, makes a lot of noise, works at a glacial pace, and costs a bundle. But there’s nothing else out there that makes hot doughnuts for you and isn’t made for use in an industrial kitchen. So, it’s worth the trouble.
WIRED Light for its size and very easy to carry around. The final product — delicious, crispy, hot doughnuts — outweigh the negatives.
TIRED Takes 2.5 hours to make 100 doughnuts. Plastic rubbing on plastic is loud and creaky. Requires reading instructions thoroughly to get everything working right. Not the most attractive tech you’ve put on your kitchen counter. Pricey.
Photos by Peter McCollough/Wired 