What Are Sufganiyot? Why Jelly Doughnuts Mean Hanukkah

The oil behind the doughnut

The Talmud's explanation of Hanukkah is short. When the Hasmoneans retook the Temple, they found a single sealed cruse of pure oil, enough to light the lamp for one day, and it burned for eight. The next year the sages made those eight days a festival. In 2026 Hanukkah begins at sundown on Friday, December 4, and ends at nightfall on Saturday, December 12.

Frying in oil became the holiday's way of remembering. In the 12th century Rabbi Maimon ben Yosef, the father of Maimonides, scolded people who made light of eating fried sofganim on Hanukkah, calling it "a custom of the ancient ones." Those were most likely syrup-soaked fritters, writes Carol Green Ungar in the Orthodox Union's Jewish Action, not jelly doughnuts. In America the fried food of Hanukkah is usually the potato latke; in Israel it is the sufganiyah.

Where the jelly came from

The filled doughnut is a European idea. The food historian Gil Marks traced it to the Küchenmeisterei, the first cookbook printed in German, published in Nuremberg in 1485, which has a recipe for gefüllte Krapfen: jam sandwiched between two rounds of dough and fried in lard. Germans still eat its descendant, the jam-filled Berliner.

According to Marks, Jews who made it swapped the lard, which is not kosher, for goose fat, and the doughnut traveled east to Poland, where Jews called it a ponchik (in Polish, pączek, plural pączki). In some Polish towns, Marks said, ponchiks rather than latkes were the Hanukkah treat. The food historian Emelyn Rude told NPR that jam fillings arrived once sugar got cheap in the 16th century.

How Israel made it the Hanukkah food

The name is a modern Hebrew coinage built on an old root: sfog means sponge, for the way the dough drinks up oil, and the Talmud uses a related word for a spongy dough. Who brought the doughnut itself is less clear. The historian John Cooper has suggested German Jews brought it in the 1930s; Marks thought it was there earlier.

The usual story credits the Histadrut, the labor federation founded in December 1920. In the late 1920s, Marks wrote, it championed the doughnut over the latke because anyone could fry latkes at home, while doughnuts needed people to make, haul and sell them. Joan Nathan told NPR that early leaders were looking for foods that felt distinctly Israeli. How decisive the union's push was is hard to measure, but it worked: bakeries now sell sufganiyot for weeks before the holiday, and in 2018 Israel's Defense Ministry bought some 360,000 for its troops, filled with jam or chocolate.

How sufganiyot are made

Our Israeli sufganiyot follow Joan Nathan's 1979 recipe: a soft yeast dough with egg yolks and a pinch of cinnamon, risen 2 hours, rolled thin and cut into 2-inch rounds with a glass. After a 15-minute second rise they fry four or five at a time at 375°F.

Nathan's warning is the whole technique. Oil that is too cool soaks into the dough, and oil that is too hot browns the outside before the middle cooks. Each doughnut then gets a little jam through a hole in the top and a roll in sugar, and is eaten hot. Her recipe makes 30 to 35 small ones. You can compare it with every other filled doughnut in our doughnuts hub.

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