Dawn Images

RAWALPINDI: No matter which kind of doughnuts you like, Rawalpindi has them all. The soft, fluffy, fried dough confectionery makes for an interesting addition to the breakfast table and is a good item to serve as an after dinner dessert.

Doughnuts come in many sizes and shapes the more popular of which are the ring shaped ones. Sometimes, doughnuts are shaped into bite sized balls or as flattened spheres and twists.

They can be filled with fruit preserves, cream and even custard. Once they are fried, doughnuts are either glazed with sugar icing or spread with chocolate with colourful sprinkles on top or layered with jam.

To make doughnuts, fine flour is kneaded with oil, milk, sugar, eggs and salt along with vanilla extract and other flavourings if need be. After it is kneaded well, the dough is shaped in moulds, often into rings, and then deep fried. In bakeries across the city, most doughnuts are then glazed with honey.

Residents of the garrison city like getting doughnuts on their morning coffee run and are popular with kids for their colourful sprinkles and generous layers of chocolate.

Though almost all bakeries across the city offer doughnuts, the old Tehzeeb bakery remains a favourite for locals to get their doughnuts from and has been making some of the most delicious, doughnuts for 25 years now.

“We have been making doughnuts for 25 years and they have been one of our more popular items. To make them, we use fruit flavouring while honey glazed and chocolate topped doughnuts are favoured by customers,” Shaukat Noon, owner of Tehzeeb Bakers, told Dawn.

He said soybean oil is imported from the United States for the doughnuts to be fried in.

“The taste in our doughnuts is different because we use better quality ingredients,” he added.

Chefs who have been trained in culinary schools in other countries work in the bakery’s kitchen, he said, and that flavours are changed and experimented with according to changing tastes of the bakery’s clientele.

“We don’t use preservatives in our doughnuts. They taste so much better when they are freshly made,” he said.

Mrs Abdullah, a resident of Westridge, had come to get a box of doughnuts for her children.

“Doughnuts are an interesting addition to the breakfast table, especially in a house with children. They are definitely more interesting than paratha or bread and go well with both tea and coffee. My children crave doughnuts in the evening and I put on a bit of extra honey or cream for them,” she said.

She said she was always drawn by colourful displays of doughnuts in bakeries. “They have them in super stores as well,” she said.

Another customer at the bakery, Malik Waqas, said he either had French toast or doughnuts for breakfast.

“There is just nothing like them,” he said.

Though they are a fried dessert, he said he did not find them too heavy. For those who crave something sweet after dinner, he recommended putting doughnuts into the microwave for under a minute and then layering them on with extra cream.

Raja Tahir, who was waiting for his order of doughnuts in a bakery in downtown Rawalpindi, said he preferred the desi take on doughnuts.

Though they require the same ingredients to make, these doughnuts are soaked in sugar syrup like jalebi and gulab jamun after they are deep fried. Rather than milk and eggs, the taste of oil is more prominent in doughnuts made in smaller bakeries in the downtown area.

Published in Dawn, March 14th, 2016