‘The Pioneer Woman:’ Ree Drummond’s Apple Fritters Are ‘Guaranteed to Make You Smile’
Ree Drummond has a delicious apple fritters recipe sure to please any doughnut lover. The Pioneer Woman star’s fritter recipe is easy enough to whip up and feed a crowd.
Ree Drummond makes an easy apple fritters recipe
Drummond wrote about her recipe in a 2021 blog post on The Pioneer Woman website. “I love apple fritters! I made a batch late yesterday,” she wrote. “Evidently, I felt my life had somehow been missing petite fried nuggets of cinnamon-flavored batter stuffed with flavorful apple chunks and covered with a dusting of powdered sugar.”
Drummond continued, “These are delicious, and my life is now complete. They can be served as a warm, yummy breakfast treat or as a scrumptious apple dessert with vanilla ice cream. (Did I just say that?) The easy route is to dust them with powdered sugar, but I love dunking them in a light, sweet, doughnut glaze, too. Either way, these are guaranteed to make you smile.”
At the end of her step-by-step recipe, she explained how to reheat the fritters. “You can heat them up the next morning in a 350-degree oven for 8 to 10 minutes, and they’re totally delicious,” she wrote. “Maybe even more so.”
How to make Ree Drummond’s apple fritters
Drummond demonstrated how to make her apple fritters recipe on an episode of The Pioneer Woman.
She combined flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and sugar in a bowl. “This is a really easy fried doughnut recipe,” Drummond explained. “What I love about it is you don’t have to make a yeast dough and wait for it to rise as you do with regular glazed doughnuts. This is something you can just whip up on the spot.”
In another bowl, she whisked together eggs, milk, and vanilla then poured the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, using a spatula to fold everything together. “You definitely don’t want to beat this or mix it too much,” Drummond explained. “You want it to stay nice and light.”
The Pioneer Woman star added melted butter, noting, “It just makes the apple fritter batter extra delicious. When they fry, they get a little bit crisper, taste a little better.”
She added peeled chopped apples and folded them into the batter. “The apples are a very important component to the apple fritters so there are a lot of them,” Drummond explained.
‘The Pioneer Woman’ star uses an easy trick for making fritters
Drummond heated vegetable oil in a pot to 340 degrees. “Any hotter than that and the fritters get a little too burned before they get done in the middle,” she explained. The Food Network host had a simple trick for easily making the fritters the desired size — Drummond used a kitchen scoop to plop balls of batter into the oil.
She placed six fritters in the pot. “I don’t want to have too many because I need to be able to babysit them to some degree, make sure they all get browned evenly,” she explained. “And the great thing about these fritters is they should have strange little shapes. That just makes them more delicious. Perfectly imperfect.”
Once the fritters were deep golden brown on the bottoms, Drummond flipped them over. After the other side browned, she removed the fritters and placed them on a paper towel-lined sheet pan. “I definitely want them to drain on paper towels,” she said. “Get as much of the oil out of there as possible.”
Drummond repeated the process for the remaining batter then sprinkled powdered sugar over the top of the fritters. “I like to do this when they’re nice and warm,” she explained.
The full recipe is available on the Food Network website.
