Elevate Your Glazed Donuts With One Common Spice

Have you recently decided to turn your kitchen into your own personal donut-making paradise? Tasting Table can help you get started with all the tips and tricks you need to start making bakery-level donuts from scratch in no time. While you can dive into all kinds of complex doughs and delectable toppings and fillings once you have more practice under your belt, let's focus today on something simple: the classic glazed donut. This donut isn't just relatively easy to make, but its simple ingredients provide a clean, sweet flavor profile that goes perfectly with a cup of joe. And if you start to find glazed donuts a little boring, just reach for your spice rack and grab the nutmeg.

Whether you use it ground or whole, nutmeg is a quintessential kitchen spice that you should keep on hand whenever possible. To add a subtle sweet spice to your donuts, just add around a teaspoon to your dry ingredients and mix it right in. The dough should be soft, pillowy, and a bit sticky, and you should be able to see nutmeg flecks throughout. I'd suggest against adding it to your glaze since that might leave you with a gritty and unpleasant texture. Nutmeg's best baked in the actual dough itself, which awakens all the warm notes of the spice.

Nutmeg is universally known as a comforting spice, and while you definitely shouldn't overdose on nutmeg because it can make you feel sick, it provides a depth of autumnal flavor when added to baked goods. In fact, a pinch of nutmeg is the secret to recreating that cozy vibe that bakeries capture so well, which elevates their baked goods and gives them that special bakery-fresh flavor. Nutmeg is also a constant ingredient in popular spice mixes like pumpkin pie spice and apple pie spice, so it will conjure up those fall-favorite flavors in anything you add it to.

On top of that, nutmeg's just a good, rounded spice that suits the somewhat simple flavor profile of a vanilla glazed donut well. As the name implies, nutmeg has a nutty, warm, and slightly sweet taste that has the tiniest kick and a hint of woodsiness. It's a pretty complex flavor. In fact, you want to avoid going overboard and adding too much, because it can easily overwhelm the more delicate flavors in your glazed donuts. If you want a little more sharpness and strength to the flavor, try grating your own nutmeg from the whole seed instead of buying it already ground. But in a pinch? Either will do, and the result will be a dang tasty donut regardless.