Why hello there, and welcome to the first post of 2021 here on Kitchen Catastrophe, where even we are kind of shocked we get to write a new year number. Wasn’t 2020 just…forever, now? Trauma-Time-Dilation aside (also, I’m just realizing I think I’ve always said “di-a-lation”, adding an extra syllable. Weird to randomly catch a mistake like that now.) ANYWAY, today’s post is…a little sad, but mostly fun and happy, with frustrations and confusion as per usual. For those who want to jump the emotional roller-coaster, here’s the link to the recipe. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

A Sprinkle of Salt, to bring out the flavor

The slightly sad part of this is that the name of this recipe reminds me of my father, at a sadly appropriate time. You see, as I write this (the day before it goes on the site), it is January 3rd, which was my father’s birthday, and my father actually grew up in Southern California, near Death Valley. (I BELIEVE, though I did not spend the time to double check this, that he grew up near Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard “China Lake” in the stories, and it’s one of those “if he says he grew up in Death Valley, on a military base, and his dad worked for the Navy…mathematically, there’s only one valid location that meets those qualities.”

Not a lot of room to hide stuff out here, you know?

I’m not going to dwell on it too much, since, as far as I am aware, my father had no great affinity for Churros (though he did like Cinnamon-Sugar), and this is actually a coincidence. See, if you’re a member of the Patreon, you’ll know I’ve been referencing “maybe I’ll make Churros this month” since June last year, because at some point in May, I learned that Churros are basically just Pate a Choux dough shaped and fried, which, since I made that dough last January for the Gougeres, I was like “Oh, cool, that’s something fairly easy I could make, and I like churros!” And I just never got around to it, until I was in the late November rush to get dishes done so I could just work and hang out with my friends in December.

So, before we get into the details of how my mad dash went, let’s unpack the history of the churro! Let me just open up my handy-dandy history of foods, and…oh. Oh dear.

The Mystery Box Could Be Anything. It Could Even Be A Boat!

Churros, if you’re not aware of the dish, and have so far been stumbling along without context, are, essentially, a Hispanic donut: fried dough that is, in America and northern Mexico, often rolled in Cinnamon Sugar. It comes in a HUGE variety across the various Latin American countries, with many regions making fairly thick churros with various fillings like chocolate, vanilla cream, dulce de leche (a caramel-like confection popular in several tropical regions), cheese, and more. It’s also frequently dipped into hot beverages, or a melted chocolate sauce.

I guess with mint? Mint is not something I associate with Churros, but this picture is from Canada, so who knows what they do.

Their history is…a mystery. The word first shows up in Spanish/Portuguese, at a time when the lines between those countries were a lot vaguer (or rather, a time when Spain was technically like, 5 different countries), and there’s a couple guesses as to how it came about. See, churros actually look and work a lot like youtiao ,  a kind of Chinese breakfast pastry, consisting of a fried tube of dough turned over itself, in almost a braided or chop-stick fashion. The main difference being that youtiao tended to be more savory, often sprinkled with big chunks of salt. (You may remember jianbing, or as we called it “the egg fold”? It is NOT uncommon to get youtiao IN your jianbing, as a crunchy element.) And shortly before the churro appeared, Portugal WAS trading with China, so maybe Portugal brought home the idea of the youtiao, and the salt was replaced with sugar? Others suggest that the dish was invented by Spanish shepherds, who would make a paste of churro dough, place it in a bag, and carry it with them to fry while alone in the hills watching their flocks.

Complicating the issue is that the name doesn’t help at all. “Churro” doesn’t MEAN anything in Spanish. It’s CLOSE to several words (burro, for instance, or cuerno.) One source asserts that the word is onomatopoeic…which…for WHAT? The sound of it frying? The sound of eating it? What sound is ‘churro’ supposed to be replicating? Some people point to cuerno, which I mentioned earlier, which is Spanish for “horn”, as in a goat or ram’s horn. Maybe “churro” is supposed to be a riff on that. Which...I can see GOAT horns, but Rams horns are typically more curled….but then again, a lot of places FRY churros in one long curl.

Like, sure, THIS one looks like a ram’s horn, but now you’re arguing that Spanish Shepherds were making one long, single curl with their lunch paste.

It could be a semantic mix-up: youtiao is pronounced a lot like the Italian word “ciao” with “yo” in front of it, so maybe it was misremembered by syllabic metathesis, a $5 phrase that just means “when you swap the order of the syllables of a word.” Like, Sideburns are called that in America because they were “burnsides”, after a famous General who wore them, but people screwed up the order, and now it’s sideburns. Or, for an older example, the old Norse word for “the large, tusked seals” was hrossvalr, which came to Old English as horshwael, and later “walross” So perhaps Portuguese introduced it to the Iberian peninsula as “ciao-yo”, which they probably would have spelled as…well, it could have gone a few ways. See, at the time, Portuguese and Spanish (and Italian) were kind of juggling around what sounds I, J, and Y made, and when you should use which, Spanish also using LL for a similar sound. Also, “ao” wouldn’t go “ow” in Spanish, that’s au. So it’s entirely possible that it got written down as “chaullo”, “chauyo”, “chauio”…all of which could EASILY become “churro” due to dialect or misspellings…but this is literally just me spit-balling based on 6 years of Spanish study and some rudimentary linguistic insights. I feel like someone MUCH more educated would have found proof of this before me if the answer was this simple.

TELL ME YOUR SECRETS, YOU PLUS-SIZE PINNIPED!

So no one knows where Churros come from, or even where the WORD comes from. But, people do know that it caught on in Spain, who then…”aggressively exported” it to various Central and South American countries, along with many other aspects of their culture, and their armies. Weirdly, Churros are now a popular street food in Korea, meaning that Churros are mere MILES from becoming an export-ouroboros.

So, with the Churr-mangandr encircling the world in its curls, let us appease our sweet serpentine lord with our offering of dough!

Making a Mess, and a Menace

So, what makes these “So-Cal” Churros? Well, as the authors at Cook’s Country note, they’re going with the plain cinnamon sugar coating, along with the chocolate sauce (Which I did NOT make, because that’s not something my family typically does with their churros), and they’re relatively small and visually uninteresting, being a single star-shaped baton of about 6”. There’s a natural joke to make right there, but, as your friend: if your penis is star-shaped, either get a doctor, or congratulations on the weirdest body modification I have ever heard of, and I know about people who have tattooed their EYES.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, simple unadorned penises. Or Churros. Whatever. One thing this recipe does is make things a little less terrifying for the home cook. See, most straight churros (as opposed to the already mentioned curved bois) are cooked in a fairly specific, kind of terrifying way: the dough is loaded into a press that sits above a pot of boiling oil, it squeezes out the churro, dangling in the air over the pot, and then you cut the churro, causing it to plummet into the oil. Very visually fun for like, fairs and street vendors with deep pots with gallons of oil…less enjoyable for a home cook. So this recipe fixes that by having you refrigerate and pipe the dough, so it’s firm enough to withstand waiting its turn to fry. But first, we gotta make choux pastry (and I’m going to leave a note for myself to go back and delete the u’s from my earlier misspellings of pate a choux, and we’ll see if Morning Jon remembers.). (Morning Jon: You only spelled it ONCE. It would have been VASTLY easier to just scroll up and delete one letter than to write that sentence. Also, we didn’t fix it ANY times when we made the Gougeres!)

SO, the Choux. We made this once before, but interestingly, we’re dealing with a slightly different version. In the Gougeres post, we cooked the choux fully in a pan. This one doesn’t, for reasons I will explain in a second. But the initial steps are the same: bring to a boil some water, butter, and seasonings. Since we’re making a dessert, this one uses salt, sugar, and vanilla.

I promise you that the weird brown hue over the sugar is from vanilla.

Once the butter is melted and the water boiling, add flour, and stir to combine. The hot water is, as we mentioned before, going to cause the flour to gelatinize, absorbing more water than usual, to the point that some flour cells are going to burst, creating a stickier, more elastic dough. Speaking of flour bursting, let me tell you, this is when things got FUN for the cooking process, because the last person other than me put the flour container back wrong, so I had to pick it up by the lid, which ended about as well as could be expected.

Oh no, my cocaine bomb went off early.

One you’ve finished swearing at the giant mess made (a decision you will later be mocked for, because everyone else in the family have done their best to become emotionless cogs in their respective bureaucratic machines, and view any emotional outburst other than catty criticism as inappropriate) at this point, we move from beating up our emotions to beating up the dough in a stand mixer.

You must suffer, as I have suffered.

See, the gougeres we stirred by hand, because they didn’t need to have much in the way of rigid structure: we were just going to make little balls of the dough. But Churros are traditionally star-shaped, so we want to make sure the dough is extra resilient in order to maintain its sharp edges. Indeed, we’re actually going to refrigerate the dough in order to help it set up and maintain its shape.  So into a stand-mixer, then beat it for a minute to cool down, before adding the eggs, and beating until fully incorporated.

Now, this is where I ran into my second problem: I assumed, making an ass out of u and med. So apparently this mistake makes Honey look bad, according to Russian. Anyway, the point is that I didn’t CHECK that I had the proper equipment to make these churros. I knew we had a wide variety of piping bags and piping tips, so I ASSUMED we had a 5/8 inch star tip. We, as 15 minutes of searching from myself, my mother, and my brother revealed, do not. So instead, I had to go with a half(ish)inch tip from a Pampered Chef product.

You need a vaccine? I got something that will “do a number on your illness”. Though, as David Mitchell notes, it will also “do a number on the human being”.

This is meant to be used for like, decorating cakes, but that should be okay. Just load it up with dough (well, load it and a second bag, since there’s way too much dough to fit in this one tube) and pop it into the fridge to set-up, for “at least 15 minutes, and up to an hour”. At which point we went and got Taco Bell for dinner, figuring “if we’re getting churros, we should have something vaguely like Mexican food”, at which point I got distracted eating my dinner and watching a YouTube video for an hour and a half, so by the time I came up to finish the churros, everyone else had gone to bed, undermining the point of getting Taco Bell.

But we shall persevere nonetheless! The next step is to pipe out 18 churros onto a parchment lined-baking sheet…before…refrigerat-…Oh. Dear. We were not supposed to keep the dough in the tube when we refrigerated it. That…makes sense. I assumed we did it so that the dough would be firm enough to ‘stand’ on its points as we prepped it, but instead, we’re supposed to pipe it out, and chill it in that shape…so now I have a bunch of set dough in a pastry tube.

The next 40 minutes sucked, as it turns out a device built to push out FROSTING with a gentle one-thumb trigger is not so great at pushing functionally a pound of now chilled and set dough. I had pressure marks stuck in my hands for the next 12 hours, it took so much force to get some of that dough out onto the sheet. At which point, YES, I DID chill it again, in case the point was that we wanted them cool when they went into the oil.

Which is why THIS picture, of the churros finally starting to fry, was taken at 11:44, while the first picture was taken at 5:25. Which…Hey, you COULD think of it as a two-step process! Start the dough in the morning, pop it in the fridge, and fry it in the evening. That’s a much better use of a 6 hour gap in the cooking process.

I’d have taken a picture of my suffering, but I needed both hands to try and push the dough through.

Anywho, once you get to this point, it’s very fast and pretty simple: a third of the churros go in hot oil, fry about 6 minutes, move them to some paper towels for 30 seconds or so, then pop them into a warm oven (180-200 degrees F) to keep warm as you cook the other batches. They came out a little pale for my understanding of good churros, but otherwise, were pretty accurate.

This is a solid tan level for most Southern Californians, but it’s like Canada-tier for Churros.

Dust in some cinnamon sugar, and serve immediately. Because if you leave them overnight, the sugar WILL wick moisture out of the air and the dough (even if you stored them in an air-tight container), and turn the outside sugar coating into a kind of thin sugar glaze. Which isn’t bad, it’s just not what Americans are used to for churros.

Now THIS is podracing. Or something. I don’t know, it’s like, Midnight. Well, technically, for me, it’s like, 5 PM, but this picture was at midnight.

Honestly, despite the many fairly massive and frustrating mistakes, I’d call this recipe something of a success. The churros aren’t GREAT, but they’re definitely churros. I think with the proper tools and timing, the recipe should work perfectly well, and I’d honestly suggest giving it a try. It really is just a bunch of pantry staples, with the only even slightly weird/hard thing to get being the star piping tip.

Oh, and small shout-out to Pampered Chef: while it wasn’t fun getting the dough out of that machine, it DID eventually happen, with no permanent damage, and I bet if I had just done it at the right time, I’d have barely noticed an issue at all.

THURSDAY: JON REVISITS A NETFLIX SHOW THAT USED TO OSTENSIBLY BE ABOUT BAKING, AND IS NOW CLEARLY JUST ‘LET’S JUST LET VANESSA HUDGENS ACT AGAINST HERSELF.” AFTER ALL, WE REVISITED CHOUX PASTRY TODAY.

MONDAY: THAT DEPENDS ON A LOT OF VARIABLES. IT MIGHT BE SOUP, IT MIGHT BE SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. LET ME GET MY BUSINESS LEGS BACK UNDER ME.

Recipe

So-Cal Churros

Makes 18 churros

Ingredients

                Dough

2 cups water

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ teaspoon salt

2 cups (10 ounces) all-purpose flour

2 large eggs

                Coating

½ cup (3 1/2 ounces) sugar

¾ teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 quarts vegetable oil, for frying

Preparation

1. Line 1 rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper and spray with vegetable oil spray. Combine water, butter, sugar, vanilla, and salt in large saucepan and bring to boil over medium-high heat. Remove from heat; add flour all at once and stir with rubber spatula until well combined, with no streaks of flour remaining.

2. Transfer dough to bowl of stand mixer. Fit mixer with paddle and mix on low speed until cooled slightly, about 1 minute. Add eggs, increase speed to medium, and beat until fully incorporated, about 1 minute.

3. Transfer warm dough to piping bag fitted with 5/8-inch closed star pastry tip. Pipe 18 (6-inch) lengths of dough onto prepared sheet, using scissors to snip dough at tip. Refrigerate, uncovered, for at least 15 minutes or up to 1 hour.

4. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 200 degrees. Set wire rack in second rimmed baking sheet and place in oven. Line large plate with triple layer of paper towels. Add oil to Dutch oven until it measures about 1 1/2 inches deep and heat over medium-high heat to 375 degrees.

5. Gently drop 6 churros into oil and fry until golden brown on all sides, about 6 minutes, turning frequently for even cooking. Adjust the heat, if necessary, to maintain oil between 350 and 375 degrees. Transfer churros to paper towel–lined plate for 30 seconds to drain excess oil, then transfer to wire rack in oven. Return oil to 375 degrees and repeat with remaining dough in 2 more batches.

6. Combine the sugar and cinnamon in a shallow dish. Roll the churros in the coating, tapping to remove excess sugar, and serve warm.