It's Okay To Give Your Sufganiyot A Modern Touch

While sufganiyot may not be as well-known as latkes, these two Hanukkah foods share the same symbolic value. As history tells us, the reason why latkes are associated with Hanukkah has nothing to do with potatoes but is because they're fried in oil, which is true of sufganiyot, too. The oil used to cook both dishes is meant to hark back to the oil that filled the lamps in the Second Temple of Jerusalem — an amount sufficient to last for just one day somehow kept burning for eight days, which is why Hanukkah is celebrated for eight nights. Nowadays, we generally get our lighting from electricity, but oil still performs miracles in the kitchen, as anyone who's eaten a freshly fried sufganiyah can attest.

Sufganiyot are related to the jelly donuts of Eastern Europe as well as numerous other fried desserts familiar to Jewish culinary tradition. These Hanukkah donuts, however, seem to have evolved in Israel during the 20th century (a country that wasn't officially established until 1948) and were first introduced to the  American Jewish community in the '80s. While sufganiyot are typically filled with jelly, modern cooks are re-imagining them along with other Hanukkah foods. 

"Joy of Kosher" author Jamie Geller favors chocolate, lemon curd, and peanut butter fillings, while some Redditors on r/JewishCooking have experimented with dulce de leche, Nutella, and Lotus Biscoff (aka the official airline cookie). By general consensus, it seems that using a non-jelly filling doesn't invalidate your donut's sufganiyot status. After all, as long as there's oil involved, you've honored the Hanukkah tradition.

While it's cute to call sufganiyot "the sweetest part of Hanukkah," it may not be strictly true in all cases. Not only can sufganiyot be filled with sweet substances other than jelly, it's also possible to make them with no sugar at all. No, we're not talking diet sufganiyot made with stevia (ick), but savory sufganiyot filled with such substances as goat cheese, ground lamb, or mushrooms.

Savory sufganiyot may not be as popular as the dessert variety, but they, too, seem to have some history behind them. Sephardic Jews in Spain make a Hanukkah dish called lachmazikas which are essentially sufganiyot filled with meat or chickpeas, while Roman bakers have been known to fill sufganiyot with mozzarella. Among contemporary cooks, we're not surprised to find savory cookie fan Molly Yeh creating savory sufganiyot recipes. Among the fillings she's tried have been tomato and onion jam, and she's been known to use seasonings such as za'atar, sumac, rosemary, powdered yogurt, and cheese to flavor the fried dough. Other bakers have come up with sufganiyot stuffed with meatballs, lox, and cream cheese with scallions, but one of our favorites has got to be the pizza sufganiyot created for Hanukkah in 2019 by Mendelsohn's Pizza in Brooklyn which you can see in the picture above.