How to Make Truly Great Churros the Easy Way—No Special Tools Required
Making compromises isn’t always easy, but sometimes it’s necessary. This recipe? It’s a compromise—a very delicious compromise—and I believe a necessary one. That’s because real-deal churros are real-deal difficult to make without specialized gear that most of us do not have at home. My recipe does not require any special gear (beyond a pastry bag and star tip), and takes advantage of a modified choux pastry that’s less hydrated and has fewer eggs than most standard recipes. The result comes closer to a proper churro than most that go the choux route while still being doable for just about anyone.
Let’s start with what a “proper” churro is, since that will help explain the modifications I’ve made (and also help you steer clear of the multitude of recipes out there that claim to produce great churros but I promise you don’t).
What Are Traditional Churros?
Churros are fried sticks of dough that originated in Spain and Portugal but today are eaten all over the world, especially in places that were once under Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule, including all throughout Latin America and the Philippines. They’re often eaten as a breakfast food in cafés, but aren’t strictly a morning meal, and in many parts of the world are popular as snacks and desserts at any time of day. Depending on where you are and your personal preference, the churros may be rolled in sugar (or cinnamon sugar), dipped in thick hot chocolate, or stuffed with tasty things like dulce de leche, cajeta, and fruit fillings of various types.
Just as churros are served in different ways, they can also take different forms: stick-straight, gently curved, or spiraled and twisted; long or short; and thick or thin. There’s no one way.
It’s frequently said that churros are made from choux pastry, but this is incorrect. Choux is a batter-like dough (or a dough-like batter, depending on how you want to look at it) that is made by cooking water or milk with flour and fat to form a thick paste; eggs are then beaten in, at which point it’s ready to be piped for whatever you’re planning to make, whether that be cream puffs, gougères, éclairs, Parisian gnocchi, and a hundred other things.
The traditional dough for churros is not choux, though. Like choux, it is a hot-water dough that features flour, water, and salt, but it critically lacks fat and eggs. This difference is important: Churro dough is much stiffer and thicker, and requires a special piece of gear called a churrera that extrudes the dough with the help of a powerful lever or screw; it would be very difficult if not impossible to extrude churro dough by hand. Choux, however, is softer and more easily piped by hand thanks to the addition of fat and eggs and a higher water content overall.
These differences are critical to understanding what churros are, and, especially for the purposes of a home cook, how to modify things so we can create a hand-pipable dough that still cooks up like a churro.
Choux and Churro Doughs: a Closer Look
Both choux and churro dough are hot-water (or “cooked”) doughs, and it’s essential to understand what a hot-water dough is so that we can make good decisions about how to make churros.
In short, a hot-water dough includes a preliminary step in which the flour is mixed with water (or some other liquid like milk) that is hot enough to gelatinize the starch in the flour—meaning, it crosses the temperature threshold at which the starch granules in the flour swell, burst, and thicken the liquid. This is the same thing that happens when you cook oatmeal or a cornstarch slurry: When it gets hot enough, the thin, watery mixture suddenly becomes viscous, jelly-like, or even firm.
What’s so cool about hot-water doughs is that this preliminary gelatinization step allows the batter to hold a much higher ratio of water relative to the flour while still being thick enough to maintain its shape. In fact, one of the reasons I’m switching between calling this a dough or a batter is precisely because a hot-water dough is an ambiguous substance: It has enough hydration to be a batter, but because it’s been par-cooked it has the viscosity of a dough. It’s sort of both, all at once, and that’s the point.
It’s this special batter-dough–spanning quality that allows choux to be piped into specific shapes that will hold until baked. It’s what allows the hot-water crusts in traditional English pies to function not just as the edible pastry that surrounds the filling but also as the pie plate itself—rigid enough to hold the contents unaided without collapsing. It’s a key attribute in many Asian dumpling wrappers as well, allowing them to be soft, stretchy, and pliable but still firm. And it’s essential for churros, producing an extruded dough that can hold a ridged shape, puff slightly in the oil, but still be crisp outside and tender within.
The Problem With Using Choux for Churros
The problem that arises when using choux for churros instead of the more traditional churro dough is that choux cooks up quite differently. In fact, it’s the very thing that makes choux a handy stand-in for churro dough that also makes it undesirable: Its hydration and fat.
Choux can be piped by hand in a way churro dough cannot because it has more water in it, plus fat from the butter and egg yolks. This higher hydration and fat enrichment, though, also means it produces a lot more steam when it’s cooked. That’s exactly what you want with choux—you want it to puff up into big, mostly hollow pastry shells that dazzle with their inflated airiness, like an edible pastry balloon.
But think of the churros you’ve eaten at restaurants, cafés, and even Disney theme parks. They haven’t expanded to the point of being hollow. Instead churros have a crisp fried exterior and vaguely cakey middle that is ethereally light and tender; puffed, yes, but not inflated. Churros should not be dense, but they also shouldn’t be vacant.
At this point, I’ve seen way too many churros recipes for home cooks that claim to produce a churro-like result but call for a totally standard choux pastry. The photos make it look like these recipes are winners, but I’m telling you here and now, they don’t work. Or, I guess they do work, but not in a way that would please anyone seeking a churro.
There are other recipes out there that are more in tune with what a proper churro should be. Many of them take a very reasonable alternative path, calling for a cookie press to extrude a more classic churro dough. I considered this approach, and I’ll admit that for those who have cookie presses, it’s a good way to go.
The only catch is most home cooks don’t own cookie presses, and it’s a real bummer to want to make churros at home only to discover you can’t without an annoyingly specialized piece of gear all but truly dedicated bakers won’t have. To make a recipe that works for all home cooks, I needed to go the choux route. The key is to alter the formula.
How to Make Choux That Works for Churros
The task before me was to dial in a choux recipe that was still soft enough to be pipeable by hand, but dry enough to not produce an inflated choux-rro ballon. And just as important as reducing the hydration, I also wanted to reduce the choux’s overall egginess, because real churros—at least all the ones I’ve ever eaten—are not eggy.
I set to work in the kitchen one day, starting with my basic choux recipe and ratios, and then dialing things back from there until I got something that was convincingly churro-like. Instead of the one cup of water I typically add per one cup of flour when making choux, I reduced it to 3/4 cup water. And instead of the four large eggs I typically beat into that, I found I could get away with just one egg.
The resulting choux pastry is tighter and less glossy than the standard, yet I was still able to squeeze it from a pastry bag through a star tip, which is exactly what we want. Once fried, the crispy stick is convincingly churro-like, but I’m not going to lie to you, there’s still a hint of underlying choux-ness. That’s the compromise I was talking about at the beginning. I think the difference is subtle enough to work as a valid stand-in for real churro dough, and to the degree there is a small tradeoff, I think it’s a worthwhile one, making this recipe accessible to so many more people than the cookie-press path would have allowed.
Churro Frying Tips
The dough in this recipe is stiff enough to make piping it directly into the oil more than doable (have some lightly oiled kitchen shears on hand to snip each length clear if you do decide to pipe right into the oil), but a trick that makes things even easier is to pipe the pastry onto a parchment-lined baking sheet, then freeze it.
The frozen pastry sticks are even easier to work with: Just pluck each one, one at a time, from the parchment and gently slide it into the oil. It’ll fry up into a perfect homemade churro directly from frozen. Even better: This trick allows you to stockpile churro sticks in your freezer, ready for frying whenever a churro craving strikes.
In a 3-quart stainless-steel saucier or saucepan, combine water (or milk), butter, sugar, and salt.
Set over high and and cook until liquid comes to a rolling boil and butter has fully melted, about 4 minutes.
Remove from heat and add flour. Using a wooden spoon or stiff silicone spatula, thoroughly mix in flour until no lumps remain (make sure to hunt down and smash out any stubborn ones).
Return saucepan to medium-high heat and cook, stirring very frequently, until dough registers 175°F (80°C) on an instant-read thermometer; if you don’t have a thermometer, other signs the dough is ready include a thin starchy film forming all over the inside of the saucier and the dough pulling together into a cohesive mass.
Let dough cool in saucepan, stirring frequently, until it registers 145°F on an instant-read thermometer. Add eggs 1 at a time, stirring well between additions until each egg is fully incorporated before adding the next, until a smooth, shiny paste forms.
Transfer choux dough to a pastry bag fitted with a roughly 1/2-inch (15mm) star piping tip. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment and, using a ruler as a guide and a permanent marker for easily visible lines, draw 12 evenly spaced 7-inch lines. Flip paper over, then, holding the bag at a 45° angle, lightly drag the tip along the surface of the paper and apply steady downward pressure, while slowly piping a 1-inch wide line of choux following a single line on the template. To stop piping, cease applying pressure and move the pastry tip up and over toward the opposite end of the churro before completely lifting away. Continue to pipe until tray is full. Transfer to freezer and freeze until firm, at least 30 minutes. (If desired, you can skip this freezing step and instead pipe the pastry directly into the frying oil, snipping each length free with lightly oiled kitchen shears before piping the next, though this is a little trickier than freezing.)
Set a wire rack inside a rimmed baking sheet and line rack with paper towels. In a large Dutch oven or fryer, heat 2 inches of oil over medium-high heat to 350°F (175°C). Working in batches to avoid crowding the oil, fry frozen choux sticks until puffed and deep golden, about 2 minutes. Using a spider or strainer, carefully transfer churros to prepared wire rack and let drain. If using cinnamon sugar, toss churros in it while still warm to adhere, and/or serve with hot, thick chocolate (if desired) for dipping on the side.
Notes
To make cinnamon sugar, mix 1 cup sugar with 1/2 teaspoon and a pinch of salt.
Feel free to use any hot chocolate recipe you like, though it’s important to make it thick enough to function as a dip that can coat the churros when dunked into it; thin drinking chocolate will not do.
Special Equipment
Pastry bag and 1/2-inch (15mm) star piping tip (or another roughly similar size star piping tip); instant-read or probe thermometer for frying, kitchen shears (if not freezing churros), wire rack, rimmed baking sheet
Make-Ahead and Storage
Once frozen, the churro sticks can be transferred to a zipper-lock bag and frozen for up to 1 month. Fry directly from frozen as directed in the recipe.
