Why 10,000 People Are on the Waitlist for Kora’s Filipino Doughnuts — The Experts

when you flip these pans of flan, you have to be very confident when you approach this task, you work super fast and get right into it, the whole flan inside the donut situation, I don't know how I came up with it, honestly, I think it's all It came down to that they wouldn't really experience flan unless there was a When we start making on Wednesdays, the first thing we do is make the dough we're starting in our brioche program. Basically this recipe is the base of all our donuts depending on the flavor we will change it up a little bit we will add cocoa powder for our chocolate and ube extract for ubedo so Kevin is our co-founder and he is also the director of operations here at cora , it's going to go ahead and get the eggs actually take over all of our masses, now we have milk and you can see there's ice here.

Brioche tends to ferment very quickly due to the sugar content and if the brioche or any bread is fermented too quickly or too much. it starts to develop like that, alcoholic taste and smell and it's just not pleasant so we thought to slow down the process we have almost all of our ingredients cold so we go with the flour and use two different types and they have two different percentages of gluten. I like to have a really fluffy donut, a donut with a little bit of bite, and we found that this balance of blossoms, this proportion of blossoms, has given us like the lightest, fluffiest donut right now. by simply performing something called a window pane test on our dough to see that the gluten has developed.

The goal of this is to see how elastic the dough is. The more elastic a mass is, the more air it can contain from the gases it releases. Yeast, as a test culture, has its donut version. This donut is similar to bellini foam dough. Honestly, it's almost exactly the same. The process is very similar before starting this donut business. I don't even remember the last time I had a donut. my life, the fact that I'm doing this as my full-time job these days really makes me laugh. We are currently only offering pickup and everything we currently produce during the week is already paid for and available for pre-order.

I think one of the biggest challenges in running a business with this model, I guess a pre-order model is that because everything is already paid for, you're kind of on the hook, for some reason the chef gets sick and she can't come in or she dough not reacting correctly, you know that's one of the difficulties, okay, now we're going to degas our doughs, they've been sitting in the refrigerator for a couple of hours and we'll see how nice and fluffy they are. They've doubled in size so we just want to get the excess gas out of them if you allow this to continue to inflate and it could inflate so much that it just pushes the top open and then the dough starts to dry out. outside and forms a scab, so we don't want that we can only do so much, but at the end of the day the rabbit is going to do what she wants, she is a living, breathing being and understands how the rabbit reacts to her environment and how to work with he.

It's an art, I mean it's a science, we actually have this machine here that we call r2d2 and what that machine does for us is it divides the dough into 36 brioche joe balls because of its high fat content, it has so much butter. and lots of whole milk and eggs, it actually lasts longer than typical yeast donuts. Take this here and a lot of

people

ask why we don't use the big cans, for some reason it's hard to find condensed milk in volume that doesn't have fillers, we're making the flan now. Filipino flan is very different maybe from the flans you've had in Spain or other Latin American countries because it has many, many egg yolks, so I'm just going to get this nice and soft, I just want to get rid of big chunks of egg. and make it nice and homogeneous.

Now, when my grandmother used to make this, she would actually take all the eggs and run them through cheesecloth. and that's how he strained it with his hands he became Christian when Mike in the kitchen is pouring some condensed milk and evaporated milk coming out hot if it doesn't completely cover the bottom of the tray your flan is going to look naked in some parts they won't have that nice uniform color throughout the flan if the caramel in the pan is not level, then when you bake the cream it will not be level, it has to work super fast, so we measure two and a half. quarters of custard and then we'll take the blowtorch and burn the surface of the custard to remove the bubbles.

The flan has finished cooking. It cooks for about an hour there at 250 degrees. The flan is delicious and has already cooled. you couldn't work fast enough and the whole flan will slide out of the pan if you're too nervous about it and then we'll have to make another flan starting from the beginning, so now let's go ahead, pierce our flan in circles, this one is in actually one of my favorite projects to do in the preparation, it is very satisfying, the next step for the lechoflan donut is to pierce the hole that the flan goes into, nothing too much, nice. from feeling like it's biting into you you don't want to go all the way you just want to fluff it again and ideally it looks like this where there are no wrinkles on the edges here we have our custard cream, it's basically a byproduct of the actual custard circles, once we pierce the flan circles, everything that is left behind the remains we mix in a roboku and it becomes this flower cream, the penultimate step here is to add the flan inside, we basically have two desserts here.

In one then Cora is my grandmother's name Her full name was Corazon Mendoza The Luchaflan recipe is from my grandmother's recipe book that I found after she passed away Last step of the flan Here we go the extra mile and then use the leftover caramel to clean the flan and we really just want a nice, shiny, perfect circle right in the center. Our team is very, very small and we've always been small when we started, it was really just Kevin and I, honestly, for the first few months, everything good, good team. In the morning, going over the numbers very quickly, we are going to produce 130 cases in total, all of our current employees are quite young, I think they are all under 23 24 years old, so to me they are at a very early stage in their careers , that's the most.

An exciting thing is to be their current mentor, their current leader. I love watching them grow. Lance come in here, bro. This is Lance, another of our cooks, so he already peeled all the ube, which I put in quotes because he is actually Okinawa purple. yam, we use this purple yam for the garnish just because it's the closest thing we can find and I personally think it's the closest in flavor to real ube, which is why you can't find fresh ube in America because actually ube It is an invasive species. It doesn't grow anywhere, the only way to get authentic ube is frozen, imported from the Philippines, this is a frozen grated ube, we had to have ube on our menu, I already knew it, you can't go past that vibrant purple color. so now we are making the ube pastry cream in these pots we have milk heating with a little bit of ube extract and she is adding the frozen grated ube to each of these batches the base of our pastry cream which really gives it that craving that thickness and it makes it look like a pipettable cream is starch, so here we have a little bit of cornstarch and this particular pastry cream is quite thick because of the ube, so while you're stirring, I'm going to pour this in in a thin stream so that we don't get big lumps of this mixture cooking there and you'll see how quickly it thickens because the milk is already very hot, what that does is gelatinize the starches in this mixture, ube in its natural state really has like a very deep earthy flavor because it's growing like under the ground it smells a little vanilla, a little almost fruity.

I would say we've rinsed this about three four five times more than necessary to get the water pretty clear, that means most of the starch has been rinsed out. These are the purple yam chips that will be placed on top of the ube donut for decoration. I think a lot of

people

when they make ube desserts, I feel like you don't make an effort, you don't take it home, every component of our donut has ube in it somewhere, you know if it's extract, if it's the grated yam, you know, it just gives you that maximum ube flavor.

The busiest part of the day is usually about two hours before we are ready to start boxing. I would say around 12 o'clock. It really comes down to the decisive moment and it really is a race to the finish line. one o'clock you one o'clock we're running behind we all have to really speed up, right now I'm working on the topping for our kamoteku donut our kumoteku donut is based on a Filipino street food that's essentially a caramelized fried sweet potato and it's delicious and crunchy and then sprinkled with a little toasted sesame. We actually get our sweet potatoes from a local Asian seller, they give us really huge sweet potatoes so we can produce these delicious big circles of them that kind of crown the donut we need almost 200 pieces for this week in cora I'm very extra when it comes to my work I love having multiple components in everything I make multiple textures I love having different sensations in the mouth the flavors come from different places and every time you take a bite, a musolina is basically a pastry cream, the base is the same.

You know, we have our starch that thickens milk, sugar, of course, and eggs, but a musoline is one. it's a little fluffier than a standard custard, so it's a toasted sesame paste, you can see how dark it is, it's a little darker than peanut butter, this is kind of the mousse part of the musoline and basically what we want is for the butter to look nice and white and fluffy before we add the pastry cream that we made before and that is now cooled and that is our musoline. I'm just going to give it a try.

I always like to try all of our fillings. before we put them in bags because that's the last time I'll see them this is my lovely mother uh aka tita babes today she's going to help Shanice glaze our kamoteku um do you want to say something for the camera for the people oh my god the you'd make me cry and then I'm going to cry, oh my god, here comes the big boss, my dad is here too and I had no idea he was coming so this is my dad, huh, I don't know, he's just hanging out. having my mom and aunt on site with us is a lot of fun, it's definitely brought us closer, especially the fact that we bonded over their mom and my grandma and how this business was built on that, right now they're just getting for the glaze to reach the right temperature and consistency, it's essentially our same glazed base, it's the white chocolate base for our glaze with a little bit of muscovado sugar added so that our sweet potatoes are done, they've been baking for about 20 minutes. a little syrupy, they are very nice and soft, almost like a custard, when they fry the sweet potato, they actually put a little sugar directly into the oil which caramelizes and envelops the sweet potatoes and this emulates that because it becomes nice and crispy.

While I'm burning the sweet potato, Shanice is starting to fill the donuts, so she's going to start with the first layer of filling, which is our mashed sweet potato that we made with the leftovers, the last step of the komoteku donut is to take. our piece of sweet potato broulaid and roll just the edges in some toasted sesame seeds, it gives it a nice crunch, a little nutty flavor, that's the finished komodo cube, we're almost done with production, actually, This is the last donut left. assemble ourselves before starting our line to pack all the donuts into their interlocking boxes and then deliver them to our customers hey, how are you?

Well, here you go, oh, under Frida, okay, I bought one at first, I didn't feel burdened to put Filipino culture or food on the map. I think in more recent times I've felt some pressure to create more, I don't know if that's necessarily because I feel pressure to be an ambassador for this Filipino food movement. I think there has been more pressure. about me from a personal and professional point of view to just be a better chef because I'm constantly thinking about new ideas and how I want to put something new into the world and I want it to be so unique. cora is the union of all my In life there is no way that my grandmother would look down on us and not be so proud of all the work we have done honestly, it always started with her and will end with her wherever Cora takes us behind everything, It's my connection to her and my connection to my heritage and my connection to my family so it's the end of the day we just finished eating the family meal and now we're packing everything up because we ordered too much food and then what and then we have to Do all this again next week.