Bomboloni - Doughnuts Italian style

This recipe is great, in fact there is a video of it on Youtube but, in Italian http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzHRtyQ-sjk I do not know how many times I tried making these in the past but they never turned out. Now, older and bit smarter, I found this and tired it. It worked and is an easy way to do these, time consuming but they were perfect. This recipe is without egg and I find it better.

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500gm flour
50 gm sugar
250 ml milk
10 g salt
100g butter, clarified, softened!
lemon zest from one lemon
one cube 25gm of fresh yeast

Dissolve the sugar in the milk and then divide into equal portions placing 125ml in a bowl. In the other half of the milk, add the salt and stir to dissolve and set aside.

Dissolve the yeast in the bowl of sugared milk. Then add 100 gm of flour from the 500 gms measured. Mix and cover with plastic. This will be a wet mixture and needs to double in volume.

Once this is ready, add this to the rest of the bowl of flour along with the lemon zest and the rest of the milk with dissolved salt. Mix until absorbed.

Add the soft butter and work the dough for 10 minutes on a pastry board. Place in a large bowl and cover for 2 hours with plastic. If you are in a drafty kitchen you can pre-warm the oven on low, turn it off and place the bowl inside after the oven has cooled for at least 30 minutes.

Roll dough to about 2 cm thickness and cut 8 cm rounds. Use a sharp round cookie cutter, not a glass because the dough rounds need to be cut not pressed together at the edges when using a glass, which is what tends to occur instead of cutting the round.

Place the rounds on a floured clean pastry towel and let rise about 30 min.

While these are rising, prepare the pan for frying. Optimal frying is not with oil but with lard because you can cook at a higher temperature and the products are not greasy once you pull them from the oil.

These may then be filled with jam or pastry cream or just rolled in finely granulated sugar or powdered sugar.