Thursday, February 26, 2009

Fried Jam Donuts

I want to talk for a moment about fried jam donuts. Here in New Zealand, on every major street, in every neighborhood, sits a greasy fish-and-chip shop, a modest squat little building with greasy yellow smoke curling from a greasy little chimney. They're usually owned by Chinese people and they are basically just a counter in front of a bank of bubbling vats of oil. There's usually a menu of chips and burgers, battered blue cod, oysters and sausages and a fairly extensive selection of Chinese dishes too.

It's delicious, quick, affordable, and extremely bad for you. If the fat doesn't kill you, the guilt will.

But there's a part of the menu that almost no sensible person would order from: It's the fried dessert section, which includes fried donuts, fried ice cream, and fried candy bars, etc. So, they take something that's already quite bad for you, and they throw it in oil and fry it, and then they roll it around in sugar for good measure.

The other night we finally tried a fried jam donut. $1.40 NZD. The exterior: fried golden-brown, crispy and crunchy with sugar. The interior: moist, warm dough, and jam made hot and runny, superheated by the frying. It was so uberdelicious. So wonderfully wrong. So tasty and sweet. So ... very good. So deadly.

We know we can never ever eat one again.

3 comments:

Britgirl said...

OMG that looks soooooooooo good. Are the fish and chips any good ?

Anonymous said...

Affirmative.

Anonymous said...

Best eats in Dunedin: fish and chips from the Flying Squid, obviously. Best f&c outside Dunners: from the f&c shop in Hampden (and the Waikouiti one is pretty good too!). But the donuts from the coffee-and-donuts stall that sometimes sets up on the Museum reserve opposite the BNZ bank on Albany Street are the absolute embodiment of the most blissful food that a human being can ever put in his/her mouth. Ever.Jo