Auntie Miyoko’s andagi are the best, or so my wife claims. I haven’t had Auntie Miyoko’s andagi for almost 30 years. I guess I’m more partial to Mrs. Tomashiro’s, but since she died a number of years ago, there’ll be no andagi shootout.

Andagi are balls of fried dough, similar to a plain cake donut, that originated in Okinawa. There they are formally called sata andagi (サーターアンダーギー). They are quite popular among people of Okinawan descent in Hawaii, and most other people who try them. Each Mom had her own recipe. Part of the mystique is that they are made by squeezing a handful of dough between the thumb and index finger of a closed fist. Even though the andagi start as a lump of dough, they end up as perfect spheres, sometimes with a cute little tail.

I’ve had Mrs. Tomashiro’s recipe in my to-do pile for many years, but never attempted it because it called for an ingredient I didn’t want to buy: Bisquick. It’s not that I have anything in particular against a premade biscuit mix. I just don’t know what I would do with all that was left over. Plus, it doesn’t make any sense in the recipe. Bisquick is a combination of flour, shortening, salt, and baking powder; all of which were present separately in Mrs. Tomashiro’s recipe. When I checked with my mother-in-law, her andagi recipe also used Bisquick. I just couldn’t get away from the stuff.

So as I continued to make excuses why I didn’t want to make andagi, I continued to enjoy eating them whenever the opportunity arose. One sister-in-law always serves them on New Year’s Day. I always eat more than I should. When we’re back in Maui for the Obon festival at my in-law’s Buddhist Temple,  the congregation sells andagi along with pig’s feet soup and chow fun during the Bon dance. We always buy a bag and eat them on the spot. The best andagi, in my opinion, are made by Jun, one of my wife’s Okinawan dance buddies. He works at a small Japanese restaurant in San Jose, and they always have his fresh andagi for sale at the counter. The bag never makes it home full.

Now that I’m always looking for ideas for mignardise, andagi seem like a natural item to miniaturize. The best part of andagi is the crust. By making them smaller, I can increase the crust to crumb ratio. So, I started to search for a recipe. I knew I didn’t want to use Bisquick. I also knew I didn’t want to use condensed milk, a depression-era or war-time substitution commonly found in many recipes. So I looked at as many recipes as I could easily find, many purporting to be from Okinawa, and evolved my own.

The first attempt worked pretty well, but I had problems with my deep-fryer, and I used some-long-past-pull-date-but-still-smelling-okay buttermilk. For my second attempt, I was out of all-purpose flour and buttermilk so I substituted cake flour and heavy cream. These andagi almost exploded when they hit the hot oil. The outsides split and the insides came rushing out. Cake flour wasn’t a solution. For my the third try, I replenished my all-purpose flour stock and continued with the cream. That seemed to be the ticket.