 Hi, I'm Philip Dorwirt, I'm the chef and owner of Create Catering and the dining studio of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Today I want to make Benyees for you. Benyees are a Marty Graf favorite. They're a tradition in New Orleans, but you know what, there's nothing that says you can't make them all year round. Today we're going to make perfect Cafe Du Monde style, Benyees. My favorite du monde has been making these Benyees for 150 years, so they must be doing something right. As with any recipe we want to start with high quality ingredients, we're going to start with some yeast, some warm water, not too warm. If you go over 105 you might kill your yeast and a little bit of sugar. We're going to whisk this all together and make sure that all the yeast dissolves in this bowl. The sugar helps activate the yeast. So if you're making this recipe at home you'd let this sit for 12 minutes. It's called letting the yeast bloom. We'll pretend right now that it's been 12 minutes. In a smaller bowl we're going to add our eggs, we're going to add our evaporated milk, and we're going to add our salt. We're going to whisk this together very well, but it's nice and smooth. It won't take long, just like that. Now we're going to take our egg mixture and pour it back into our yeast mixture. And we're going to whisk these together too, so it's nice and smooth. We're almost done already. So now we're going to take three cups of our flour, and we're going to add that. We want to whisk this together until it just starts to come just like that. So it kind of looks like pancake batter. We remove that, and now we're going to add our shortening. Shortening is a key ingredient here because what we want to do is we want to make really nice tender pillowy-style baguettes, and this shortening will help cut gluten that might develop. It's fantastic for bread, it makes wonderful chewy crusty bread, but we want pillowy-tender baguettes. Now we're going to add the rest of our flour. And again, we're going to stir until it starts to come together. And once this starts to come together, we're going to turn it out onto our work surface. And then we're going to get kind of dirty here because we're going to need this, and we want to need it as little as possible, but it's enough to make it smooth. So as you can see, this is starting to come together. We're going to pull this out. I'm going to just stir it by hand just a little bit here. Now it goes on to our work surface to start kneading. I'm going to get all that flour that's still on the bottom there. Here we go. Start to knead. See how this is coming together already? So I want to fold it over. I want to turn it a quarter turn, and I want to push with my hand, right? Down. Same thing. I'm going to fold it over and knead it. Fold it, knead it. Here we go. Now this dough is a little bit tacky. If you're used to making bread, this may throw you for a little bit of a loop. But rest assured, tacky is good in this case. So get into it really. Let yourself work. Now it's starting to come together. Just about smooth. There we go. Any clumps at all, and that's exactly what we're looking for. So then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take another bowl. I'm going to add just a little bit of cotton seed oil here. And I'm going to spread this around. This is the bowl that our dough is going to rise in. So now put our dough in the bowl. We want to cover it with a linen. Let it sit for two hours at room temperature. This is a key. Don't rush it. We need this to about double in size. All right. Our dough is risen for two hours. And here it is. You can see how it's virtually doubled in size, which is just a wonderful, wonderful dough. It's very light and airy. So during that two hours, I also preheated our cotton seed oil to 370 degrees. Cotton seed oil is a perfect medium for frying benyez. It has a neutral flavor, really lends itself to delicate desserts. Cotton seed oil and benyez go back 150 years. That's a pretty long history. So I'm not about to mess with that. We're going to use 100% pure cotton seed oil for this. Our next step is to flour our board lightly. And we're going to turn out our dough. See how nice and airy that is? We're going to put a little bit of flour on top. We're just going to rub that in. And now we're going to roll. We want to roll to about a quarter of an inch. So not too thick, not too thin. Here we go. By letting that dough rise for two hours, you can see all the air pockets here. And it makes it really easy to roll out. So now it's time to cut our benyez. We're going to cut just a little bit of a corner off here to do our test. Our cotton seed oil is 370 degrees. We want to test that temperature by dropping just a little piece of our benyez. And if it floats within eight seconds, which it magically did already, we know that our fryer oil is ready to fry a batch of benyez. I'm going to put a little bit more flour on top of here. And now I'm going to cut. Now I like the traditional square benyez, but you can get a cookie cutter. You can cut whatever size or shape you want. There we go. So now I'm going to gently drop these in. And I like to use the basting method. And that means I just gently wash the oil over the top of the benyez. And this will help it puff up really quickly. It takes about a minute to a minute and 20 seconds to do. And we want to pull them out. We want to flip them when they're perfectly golden brown. If you don't have a fryer like this at home, maybe you have a smaller fryer, you can cut your benyez as small as you want. It may, you can also use a cast iron pan with a thermometer. But I'll tell you one thing that you have to have is 100% cotton seed oil. So now you can see we flip these over. They're perfectly golden brown. About another 15 or 20 seconds. I'm going to continue to base this side. Cotton seed oil is available at Bass Pro Shops. And it's also available at any number of other sporting good stores. There we go. Now we're going to pull these right out of the fryer. They're just perfect. I'm going to let these drain for just a few seconds. At home, you can use a plate with a paper towel on it. Let it drain for a few seconds. And then what you want to do is cover it in powdered sugar. And now we have these, the ones that we've already fried. Nothing will finish these off like a nice cafe, do-mong style cafe old lady. For more information on cotton seed oil, visit cottonseedoiltwred.com.