Italian Donuts Recipe (Sfingi) - Sundays with Nonna

Italian Donuts (Sfingi) Recipe - Sundays with Nonna Italian Donuts (Sfingi) Recipe – Unless your Nonna would fry these for you around Christmas, you’re probably thinking, “what the heck is a ‘sfingi’?” Sfingi are basically the fancy Italian version of donut holes. They are fried balls of bread dough coated in sugar, aka diabetes balls.

Although on paper they are basically donuts, this dessert has more of a sponginess to them once you take a bite.

Sfingi typically like to make an appearance around the holidays when all diet plans go out the window. There’s actually a specific holiday associated with sfingi that occurs the day before my birthday on March 19th! Its called St. Joseph’s day.

Here’s what you’ll need:        

Potatoes Flour Yeast Water Sugar olive oil salt orange zest

The hint of orange incorporated in this recipe brings these donuts to the next level. Its such a subtle and delicate addition but its essence is unmistakable in this dessert.

Now, the most important part of this recipe is the mixing process. Nonna calls this the “slapping technique” and you can see how she does it in the video below. The purpose this technique serves is to create many air pockets in the dough. This is exactly what gives the sfingi its spongey texture.

Whenever these get busted out to the table, I always tell myself I’m only going to eat just one.

Then after that one, my cousins and I will split one…. and then another one… and then another one… Until I might as well have just eaten each entire damn thing myself cause now Ive lost track of how many freaking halves I’ve eaten!

These are so good on their own but if you want to get real fancy, you can dress them up with a chocolate drizzle, or better yet, you could dip these in Nutella and either thank me or hate me later.