The Surprising Trick to Achieving Bakery-Quality Apple Fritters at Home

My husband and I spent months soliciting food recommendations from people ahead of a trip to Memphis, Tennessee, in June of 2022. We were flooded with BBQ opinions (and left that trip all in on Charlie Vergos’s Rendezvous ribs, for what it’s worth) and Southern food restaurant guidance, and, from friends who actually lived in Memphis, several insistences that we visit one particular donut shop. 

Reader, I don’t have to tell you that was the only recommendation that exceeded my wildest dreams, do I?

We visited Gibson’s Donuts every morning of that trip, walking away with five donuts and an apple fritter each time. The donuts were delightful, of course, but the apple fritter was superlative. The platonic ideal. Overwhelming in their glory. Each one is the size of a newborn’s head (or so I imagined), covered in the thinnest, prettiest glazed sheen, packed evenly with chewy, tart apple chunks, and craggy at each turn with thick, funnel cakey dough. At the beginning of summer, they ate like your best Strawberry Festival bake sale memory. We returned in August, and they were then a perfect way to prep for fall. 

When we came back in late October, the people at Gibson’s knew us. Relatedly: Our first baby was born on that trip. My husband showed up at Gibson’s at 5 a.m. the day after she was born and announced “I have a daughter,” and, from what I hear, the whole shop went up in cheers. All the L&D nurses, nodding in approval at the Gibson’s of it all, got donuts, and I got extra apple fritters that morning. 

The next 72 hours were a blur. But I remember more clearly than anything eating an apple fritter up at 33,000 feet, en route to New York, a 2.5-day-old-baby strapped to my chest, her gorgeous, sweet-smelling head covered in apple fritter crumbs. Wondering if I’d already failed as a mother. Laughing to my husband: “This thing is as big as her head.” It was a wild time. But I’ve spent years—more grounded in reality than I was that week—searching for other, better apple fritters. They don’t exist. This recipe, though—it comes close.

Creating the Ideal Apple Fritter Takes Lots and Lots of Tests

I spent a few days in Birmingham this summer, eating through batches of apple fritters created by our test kitchen colleague Liz Mervosh. We talked through what achieving that platonic apple fritter ideal really meant, and it all boiled down to patty thickness-to-fluffy-interior ratio, apple chunk size and texture, and glaze sweetness. 

The most crucial of these elements was the thickness of the fritter itself. Through multiple rounds of tests, Liz discovered that the ideal fritter batter should be thick and sticky. This not only allows for A+ enveloping of the apple chunks, but it also gives you time to flatten your fritters while they’re taking their time cooking in the oil. (Liz found a large soup spoon worked best here, as it gave her more control when shaping the dough.) As for the actual patty thickness you’re aiming for? You shouldn’t have to extend your jaw to take a bite of the final product, and, if I haven’t mentioned, it should be big and round. This also allows for a fritter that’s more exterior than it is interior. You want this! The opposite yields too much raw chew; this way gives you golden-brown, crispy-crunchy edges in literally every bite. Flatten accordingly.

The Best Apples for Fritters

As for the fruit studded throughout, Liz landed on Granny Smith as her preferred apple. “It’s firm and retains its texture,” Liz writes, “and its naturally tart flavor perfectly contrasts with the sweetness of the glaze.”  She tested batches with raw apple chunks and batches with versions of par-cooked apple chunks. Ultimately, we craved more tartness (and less rawness) than plain old Granny Smith apple bits could provide. When Liz added lemon juice to her cooked-apple version, we knew we had it: “The lemony par-cooked apples meld into the batter so much better than the raw apple pieces,” she notes.

Crafting the Optimal Glaze for an Apple Fritter

Finally, for the glaze, Liz added apple cider to the equation, which took the fritter from “familiar thing you’d be perfectly happy to eat whenever” to “completely and wholly satisfying thing you simply cannot imagine existing on a chilly day without.” Going with a barely-there coating gives the experience a pleasant, glossy stickiness that you realize is on your fingers afterward more than you see it in real-time.

All that to say: Apple fritters can bring as much joy as babies can, if done correctly. Happy frying.

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