For my Advanced Food and Beverage concept, BA- (a 2 1/2 in one Japanese dining experience), we featured a morning bakery called Panya, which would turn into an izakaya (Japanese gastropub) at night. Panya boasted a lot of cute and simple baked goods and doubled as a cafe in the morning. One of our signatures would be our sugar doughnuts, including the matcha sugar doughnut.

Now, my biggest pet peeve is when somebody says that something is ____ flavored because you  topped a plain or vanilla flavored thing with something of that flavor. That peeve typically falls into the realm of doughnuts. Almost 95% of the time, whenever I get a doughnut of any flavor, only the glaze is the promised flavor. Not the dough itself. Which is why when I said that these doughnuts are matcha sugar doughnuts, yes, the outside sugar coating has matcha in it, but the goddamn bloody fucking doughnut has matcha infused into the dough as well. I ain’t no poser, bitches. I’m the real fucking deal.

So for my project, these were actually one of the four desserts I brought in, along with a butterfly tea-elderflower roll cake, an activated charcoal taiyaki with kumquat custard, and an ovaltine devil’s food crepe cake; the taiyaki recipe should be on the BU TasteBUds  website but I might post the other recipes here if I feel like it. I wanted to start with this recipe, because a. it was the simplest one to write about, and b. besides the roll cake, this was the only one I had guaranteed photos on. I still remember making these… I deep fried my finger because I was in a hurry to get these made right before the presentation so that they were fresh and not greasy.

For the matcha dough:
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour + more
3/4 cups milk
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 packet active-dry yeast
1/4 cup 110 degree F water
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 egg
2 tablespoons matcha powder
oil

Mix yeast with sugar and water. Sit for about 10 minutes at room temperature. Combine with egg, milk, matcha, and whisk until light green and frothy. Sift in the flour and fold together. Place in a lightly oiled, airtight container and allow to sit in a warm room for about 1 hour.

Lightly flour a surface and turn the dough onto it. Flour the exposed surface of the dough as well. Roll out to about 1/4 inch thickness and using a circular cookie cutter, cut out the doughnuts. Use either a piping dip or a small cookie cutter to create the holes in the center. Allow the dough to sit for another 30 minutes in the refrigerator, so that they don’t become a gross mess when you try to transfer them into whatever you’re going to fry them in.

Either fill a pot or a deep frier with oil and bring up to 350 degrees F. You can tell if it’s the right temperature if you put a cube of bread  in and it turns golden in 10 seconds. Once it’s that warm, keep the flame on the lower side so that it won’t get any higher. Fry the doughnuts for about 1-2 minutes on each side and drain on a paper towel to remove the excess oil. Toss in the matcha sugar and serve warm!

Matcha sugar:
1 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon matcha powder
A pinch of salt

Literally mix together the ingredients. You can do this while you’re waiting on the yeast.