How to Make Puff Puff: Soft, Round and Not Greasy

Puff puff looks simple and behaves like it has opinions.

Flat, oily, dense, or shaped like commas instead of balls. Every one has a specific cause, and none of them is the recipe.

It is a batter, not a dough

This is the thing to understand first. Puff puff batter should be thick, sticky and just barely pourable, closer to very thick pancake batter than to bread dough.

People make it too firm because sticky batter feels wrong in the hand. Firm batter gives dense, heavy puff puff.

What you need

• 3 cups plain flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 tsp instant yeast
• 1/2 tsp salt
• A pinch of nutmeg
• Warm water, roughly 1.5 to 2 cups
• Oil for deep frying

The four rules

1. Warm water, not hot

Hot water kills yeast. It should feel comfortably warm on your wrist. Dead yeast means flat puff puff and there is no recovering from it.

2. Let it rise properly

One to two hours in a warm covered bowl, until doubled and the surface is full of bubbles. Rushing this is the second most common failure.

3. Deep oil, medium heat

The batter needs room to float and turn itself. Shallow oil gives flat-bottomed puff puff. Medium heat, again — hot oil browns the outside while the middle stays raw.

4. The hand technique

Grab batter in your fist and squeeze it up between thumb and forefinger, then scoop the ball off with your thumb into the oil.

Genuinely difficult the first time. An ice cream scoop works fine and nobody at the party will know.

Why yours came out oily

Oil not hot enough. Test with one ball first. It should sink briefly, then rise and start browning within about thirty seconds.

Why yours came out flat

Yeast dead, rise too short, or batter too thin. In that order of likelihood.

Serving

Hot, dusted with sugar. At parties with chin chin and small chops. For breakfast with pap, which is genuinely underrated.

We ship the flour, sugar, margarine and milk anywhere in the United States, along with everything else on the party table.