When I think of beignets, I think of New Orleans. 🎷 I’ve never been to the real Café Du Monde in New Orleans, but I have been to the Mint Julep Bar in New Orleans Square at Disneyland which serves beignets (very delicious ones).
8-54: Beef Beignets are NOT like the ones at Disneyland or Café Du Monde–they’re more like Mongolian Beef before you toss it in sauce.
I looked around for similar types of recipes to confirm that this wasn’t just a Simply Delicious invention–and I really couldn’t find too many. There’s nothing wrong with battering beef and frying it–just don’t call it a beignet.
Note that the prep time says 2 hours for marination, but the recipe itself only calls for 30 minutes each for the marinade and batter–if you’re savvy, you could have them chilling at the same time. I’d say aim somewhere in the middle (between 30 minutes and 2 hours) in terms of length of time.
Ingredients. I’m swapping cooked beef for fake beef, but if you wanted to use the real thing and didn’t have any leftovers around, beef stew meat would probably work pretty well. The red wine is the bottle of port wine I bought for some recipe long ago and lives in my fridge now, waiting for use in random recipes here and there.
It’s a bit silly that they have you only use 1 TB of beer, but I’m willing to drink the remainder for the cause. 🍺
Chopping up the shallots.
Sautéing the “beef” with the garlic and shallot. I realize this is off-recipe, but the fake meat often needs a bit of help to help it compete with the real thing.
These have to be defrosted one way or another, and it might as well be done in the most flavorful way possible.
Mixing up the marinade, with the dried thyme on top.
You can definitely tell there’s red wine in there.
I took my cooked “meat” & veggies and coated them in the marinade. I’ll let these meld in the fridge while I work on the batter.
Starting the batter off with the two eggs.
Mixing in the rest of the ingredients.
That slight bit of bubble is thanks to that whopping 1 TB of flat-ish beer.
Warming up my mini-fryer.
Batter is prepped, “meat” is marinated. Oil is heated and fryer light is green–let’s go!
I used a colander to drain the “meat” cubes and make it easier to get them out of the marinade and into the batter.
Dropping one cube in as a test.
As I got a better feel for them, I was able to drop more than one at a time. Each left a bit of batter in the oil, so by the end the oil was much less clear than how it started.
After frying. They look good, but those are definitely not beignets in the traditional sense.
I felt like they needed a little pizazz in their final form, and my earlier mention of Mongolian Beef inspired me to give these a bit of a unagi sauce drizzle with a light sprinkle of sesame seeds.
Grade: B
