It’s not often a chef gets to create something they can completely call their own.
Eric Dale’s brunch dessert is the result of an ingenious combination of treats — and a desire to bring yeast-raised donuts back to Rioja, the Larimer Square restaurant where he’s served as pastry chef for more than 20 years.
He’s calling his new menu item the “bao-nut”: a donut first steamed for 20 minutes, like a bao bun, then briefly dipped in the deep fryer to develop a crunchy brown exterior. For the current seasonal iteration, two lemon-flavored bao-nuts are laid atop a seductive blueberry compote, adorned with lemon confit, piped mascarpone cream and morsels of crystallized white chocolate and oatmeal streusel. Then they’re dusted with powdered sugar.
Calling something a bao-nut isn’t entirely original. An online search and hashtag of the name produced photos of jelly-filled snacks, and Dale will tell you the mashing of names stems from the branding successes that were the cronut (croissant and doughnut) and cruffin (croissant and muffin).
Dale cites Cedric Grolet, Amaury Guichon and Antonio Bachour as inspirations, pastry chefs who’ve made their name with meticulously made trompe l’oeil desserts.
“I’ll take aspects of what they do to learn how to create something new,” Dale, 52, said.
The idea for his bao-nut, however, originated inside Rioja’s kitchen and relied on a simple formula and an assembly line.
“This is something that I didn’t look at anybody else [for]. This is something that I just created on my own.”
Fried delights have been a part of Rioja’s playbook since Jennifer Jasinski and Beth Gruitch opened the restaurant in 2004, Dale said. He would join the operation a few months in as a graduate of Johnson & Wales University‘s inaugural pastry class, hopping into a role that included baking bread, beignets and yeast-leavened donuts.
He assumed a greater responsibility and autonomy as Jasinski’s and Gruitch’s restaurant enterprise grew to include Bistro Vendome, Stoic & Genuine and Ultreia. The days of running back and forth between locations ended two years ago when Jasinski and Gruitch closed or ceded control of all but Rioja. (One recipe has stuck around amidst the decades and restaurant re-shuffling: that for chef Jasinski’s beignets, which Dale said he is not allowed to alter.)
Dale was tasked with making steamed bao buns earlier this year when Rioja flipped its menu for a week-long commemoration of the Lunar New Year. Dale thought of the donuts and wondered if steaming them in their combination oven would consistently bake them all the way through.
“I put a pan of donut dough on a regular tray and threw it in the steamer just to see if it would work,” he said. “They looked gorgeous. They were big, they were fluffy, they were sweet and shiny.”
They were also quick to finish in the fryer, a “kitchen hack,” as Dale called it, because of how easy they were to prep and finish with a consolidated staff.
Their final shape, round and big as racquetballs, came together when Dale portioned the dough balls into a silicone half-dome mold.
The bao-nut has already taken on different variations. Aside from his current blueberry-and-lemon combination, Dale devised a strawberry version with balsamic-macerated strawberries and rose whipped cream and plans to make them with cherries as soon as the stone fruit arrives.
Dale and assistant pastry chef Christopher Cordova are constantly introducing new and seasonal items to Rioja’s dessert menu, Jasinski said. It was the consistency of the bao-nuts recipe that made it stick out to Dale as a keeper, she said.
“He’s curious about his craft, which is always good for a chef to have,” Jasinski said.
Dale teased the bao-nut last month . They’re available at Rioja, 1431 Larimer St., only during weekend brunch from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
