Make Your Own Easy Mardi Gras Beignets With This Frozen Grocery Shortcut

A brassy, boisterous New Orleans Mardi Gras celebration is full of plenty of live music, parades, and parties, and the food is an integral part of the festivities. Whether that's a ring of king cake covered in glittering gold, purple, and green sprinkles, a huge pot of deep brown, impossibly complex gumbo, or sizzling-hot beignets mounded in powdered sugar, rest assured, you'll be chowing down.

Now, many of these celebration-worthy foods require hours in the kitchen or a special order from an establishment that specializes in Creole and Cajun cuisine. But if that's not in the cards for you this Mardi Gras, you can still whip up some pretty darn satisfying beignets with minimal effort using frozen dinner rolls.

Simply defrost your favorite bread rolls according to the instructions on the package. Once they've risen, you'll likely have to cut them in half to make them more reasonably sized. Fry them up in neutral oil until golden brown, drain them on a wire rack or paper towels, and then cover them in plenty of powdered sugar. They may not be quite as impressive as the best beignets in New Orleans, but the combination of freshly fried dough and an ample dusting of sugar is still pretty great in our book.

Homemade beignets require making a butter- and milk-enriched yeasted dough. Depending on the recipe, the dough then has to be proofed both at room temperature and in the fridge. The cold proofing step might take as long as 18 to 24 hours. All of that has to happen before you even get to rolling, cutting, resting, and frying the rectangles of dough, and it's not like you can cook them in advance either — it's crucial that a beignet be eaten when it's hot and fresh.

Naturally, the dinner roll beignet hack saves you a whole lot of time, allowing you to basically skip right to frying once they're thawed. A good beignet is more dense than a yeasted donut, but still has a crumb full of air bubble pockets. They're tender, offering almost no resistance when you bite into them, but as you savor the treat, there's still a bread-like chewiness. Frozen rolls are the perfect stand-in for homemade dough. Shortcut recipes that call for store-bought pizza dough (which produces the best pie possible) tend to yield beignets that are too dense, whereas biscuit dough or canned crescent rolls fry up lighter and flakier than you'd want — so bread rolls strike an ideal balance.

Just make sure to select a product that doesn't have any savory flavorings, like garlic or herbs, though salt is perfectly okay. In fact, ample saltiness is key in balancing a beignet's abundant powdered sugar topping.