I thought I’d follow up a success story with a long lost blog post from months past… when my boyfriend and I decided we wanted to try making churros at 12 a.m.
It wasn’t exactly a failed recipe. We did end up with churros, they just weren’t the best churros. Any sort of dessert recipe that involves frying things never really goes off without a hitch for us, but I’m going to share our adventure anyway in the hopes that someone else will be able to do it correctly.
Here’s the recipe for some basic churros:
- 1 cup water
- 2 1/2 tablespoons sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- MORE sugar: 1/2 cup
The first thing to do is make the powder that the churros are going to get rolled into, so to do that just mix 1/2 cup sugar and cinnamon.
Now that that’s set up, it’s time to start on the actual churro part of this.
In a saucepan over medium heat, combine water, eggs, salt, and the 1 1/2 tablespoons of sugar. For our recipe, we used eggs, but I’ve found a few online, like this one, that substitute vegetable oil. I would recommend trying both and seeing what works best, because I do not think it makes a huge difference either way.
When everything is combined evenly in the saucepan, start adding some flour bit by bit and mixing everything together until it forms a ball.
The next step is to get the hot oil started up. I’m really not sure what type of oil is best for frying things. I’ve heard from some people that vegetable oil does just fine, but others have said sesame or peanut oil. This time around we just used a bunch of vegetable oil.
Heat the oil in the pan to 375 degrees, making sure to test it with a cooking thermometer to check that it’s not too hot, because the insides won’t fry before the outside burns if that is the case. We also thought it would be best to put a few little dots of the dough in to see how they reacted, and judged any adjustments in temperature from there.
Piping bags would come in pretty handy for this recipe if the churros need to look more professionally-done, but we didn’t have piping bags so we filled a plastic bag with the dough and cut a pretty wide tip out of the corner, so we could pipe out some churros and drop them directly into the oil.
Ours were a little skinny, so be sure to cut a wide hole in the bag for bigger churros. From there, just pipe them directly in the oil, making sure they are not too long. This will make them easier to flip while they are frying.
It was sort of a guessing game to tell when they were done, but we let them fry on each side for about 30 seconds and it seemed to do the trick. Just be sure to keep checking the oil temperature. After they are done frying, set the churros on a plate that has a paper towel on top so that excess oil gets absorbed.
Once the churros have cooled down on a wire rack, roll them in the cinnamon sugar mixture and then they are ready to go!
Overall, our churros turned out pretty well. They are a little dark on the outside, and when left overnight the insides became a little soggy, which means we might not have fried them long enough or we had the oil too hot.
Either way, they were super tasty and we could probably get the hang of making them after a little bit of practice.
cookingwithlauren 