Breadcrumb Baked Donuts with a Sea Salt and Maple Glaze

Author Notes

I have been experimenting with lots of different flours recently and given how much I have been using oat flour with great success, I figured I could not go too wrong in using breadcrumbs as a substitute for regular wheat flour.
Breadcrumbs are the kind of thing I always have in my kitchen but rarely use (so rarely I cannot even remember what we had bought our bag of breadcrumbs for). But, they are inexpensive (if you wanted to be really frugal you could even make your own breadcrumbs using some stale bread and a high speed food processor), and I had hoped that using breadcrumbs would be similar to baking with nut flours, a moist crumb with a bit of bite and, fortunately, that is exactly what I got. While breadcrumbs might not work well for batters that need to rest for a while (in which case the moisture would likely soften the breadcrumbs), for these baked donuts they are perfect.
Although breadcrumbs are pretty bland in their normal state, once they are combined with the rest of the ingredients in this recipe, your kitchen will basically start smelling like French toast. Once baked, these donuts have none of the dryness or ‘cakey’-ness (if that is even a word) some baked donut recipes produce – instead you have incredibly light and moist donuts with a bit of bite from the breadcrumbs that is quite similar to baking with nut flours or polenta. The muscovado sugar and the melted butter add a little bit of a toffee flavour which pairs beautifully with the breadcrumbs. But there is also a certain savoury-ness that is hard to pinpoint and I think that is what makes these donuts so delicious (and no doubt comes from the breadcrumbs).

While the donut recipe is my own, the glaze is a recipe I loosely adapted from one I found on Saveur's website (the proportions of ingredients were slightly different and Saveur uses cream rather than milk). —Sophia R