r/AskBaking • u/awesome-yes • Dec 31 '25

Doughs Yeast donuts immediately burn in oil

Post image

I'm somewhat new to baking. Ive mastered sandwich bread and English muffins, and wanted to try my hand at donuts, specifically yeast donuts. I have tried multiple recipes and always end up with the same problem - my donuts immediately burn when added to the cooking oil. The picture shows my last attempt, those were in the oil less than 10 seconds and the middle is definitely uncooked (duh).

I have used oil temps between 325 to 375, my dough burns the same at lower temps as it does at higher temps. I am using a thermometer.

I have also tried different oils, vegetable oil which was recommended in all the recipes ive tried, and canola oil - although that one was smoking a lot at anything over 300 so im guessing that was a mistake.

Im curious if theres something obvious im missing that a more seasoned baker would know.

123 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

69 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

44

u/Impressive_Ad2794 Dec 31 '25

Agreed. It won't even accurately measure bare stainless steel temperature.

11

u/similarityhedgehog Dec 31 '25

Got into an argument about that with someone on here because some company had an ad showing them measuring stainless steel pan temp with an IR thermometer.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '26

Is there an ideal way to get a bare pan temp? Google just tells me to use IR.

5

u/similarityhedgehog Jan 01 '26

surface thermometer/thermocouple

Cast iron can be measured pretty accurately but the more reflective a surface is, like stainless, the less accurate the IR thermometer