Homemade Churros

William asked me to make some homemade churros. While I am sure I can continue to perfect my technique, here is what I did and what I have learned for future reference. In the end, these were super yummy!

Homemade Churros

Ingredients: (makes about 12 churros)

• 1 cup water
• 6 Tbl butter
• 2 Tbl sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/8 tsp almond extract
• 2 eggs

Cinnamon Sugar Coating:

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon

Directions:

1. Preheat your fryer and frying oil to 350-360 degrees.
2. Mix together your cinnamon sugar coating ingredients and set aside. I mixed mine in a bread pan because that seemed like the right size and shape for rolling the churros in the cinnamon sugar later, but you can use any pan/dish you like.
3. In a saucepan over medium-high heat, bring to a boil water, butter, sugar and salt. 
4. Once boiling, lower the heat to medium. 
5. Dump in the entire cup of flour at all once and begin vigorously stirring until all the flour is absorbed and combined into a soft dough. 
6. Once combined, stir and cook the dough for a minute or two and then remove from heat to cool for about 5-10 minutes.
7. Place dough in a mixing bowl and with a stand or hand mixer, mix and breakup the dough to allow more of the steam to escape, for just another minute or so. 
8. Then add your vanilla and almond extracts plus one egg and mix until combined.
9. Add your last egg and mix until combined.
10. Spoon your mixture into a piping bag fitted with a large star-tip. 
11. Pipe into the desired shape onto a parchment lined baking sheet, leaving enough space in between each churro such that you can later take scissors to cut the parchment paper into a wide strip under each churro. To make your shapes, pipe the churro dough to the desired length and then cut the dough with clean scissors to end the churro.
12. With your frying oil at 350-360 degrees (that's about a 4 on my stove), pick up each churro on it's strip of parchment paper and put the dough AND paper right into the oil. Within a second or two, you should be able to take your metal tongs and fish the paper out of the oil.
13. Be careful not to over crowd the pan. For my largest frying pan, I did about 6 churros at a time, cooking all the dough in about two batches.
14. Fry for several minutes until the churros are a deep golden brown to ensure the middle is completely cooked (not light brown, but a very dark golden brown). Turn churros over during the cooking process to get an even color on all sides.
15. Remove cooked churros to a paper towel-line plate to drain for just a moment. While draining, if you have more churros to cook, you can add them to your oil at this time.
16. Once the cooked churros have had a minute to drain but are still very hot and slightly wet, roll them in your cinnamon sugar mixture to coat. I found it was easiest to take a spoon and spoon the sugar over the churros to get it in all the cracks. Then, I used a fork to remove the hot churro from the sugar and placed it on a paper towel-lined plate until ready to serve.

This is my dough on parchment paper. Then I took scissors and cut the parchment sheet around each churros so I could pick them up and put them in the fryer. It was a little tricky to cut around everything once the dough was already on the paper, but I didn't think that the paper would stay flat and not curl up on me if I pre-cut the paper into strips. I am sure there is some way to do it though. I also wasn't sure I could be accurate enough with my piping bag to pipe the churros on little strips of paper, so piping them on a big piece seemed less intimidating.

Here I wanted to show that I was using the 4 setting on my stove.

Here you can see the bread pan I used for the cinnamon sugar mixture.

Things I learned:

• Light golden brown is not brown enough for the middle of the churro to be done, so be sure to let them cook long enough to get a darker outside. Don't be temped to turn up the heat if your oil is at 350 degrees, you will just cook the outside faster and not the inside.
• My churros were probably about 6 or 7 inches long, so maybe 1/2-2/3 as long as the super long ones you can get at a food truck or restaurant. We wanted to possibly attempt to fill the inside of our churros, and it was recommended that it is easier to fill them if they aren't too long or skinny, unless you have special equipment. 
• At the fair, I have seen people use pump dispensers to get the filling inside churros, and the dispensers have these really long (probably a foot or more) straw/tubes at the end of the pump that they insert all the way through the churro (and you need PERFECLY straight churros to do this), and as they press the pump to dispense the filling they slowly pull the churros away from the tube. See image below. Yeah... I don't have one of those, so I attempted to make do with shorter churros I could poke a hole in the middle of with a skewer or straw. 
• Did it work? Kind of. I had made some filling the day before for a batch of churros that failed miserably (not the ones shown above) and so by the time I made my new batch the next day, the filling (which was basically just a homemade whipped cream) was too soft and runny to really pipe into the middle of the churros. But, if the filling at been fresh or I did more of a stable pudding-type filling, then I think it would have worked beautifully. Just put your filling into a piping bag with a small tip, make a hole in the middle of your churro with a straw or skewer, and then carefully pipe the filling inside (probably from both ends).
• Easier than filling them, you can also just make your desired filling and serve it as more of a dipping sauce and save yourself the trouble.
• Some recipes call for 3 eggs or more, some use oil instead of butter in the dough, some have more or less sugar for sweetness and browning, some tell you to freeze the churro dough once piped to help preserve the edges of the dough when cooking, some have different water-to-flour ratios or even baking powder/soda in them, so you can experiment with whatever combination you like.

This is one of those fancy churro filling machines. So yeah... If I can't get mine to fill like the professionals, I am not going to beat myself up over it.