Caution: Churros, though delicious, will make your house smell like a deep fryer

Before I opt to make a recipe I always do research and compare the recipe I want to try with others. This past Sunday I made churros and after looking through a few different recipes and reading their reviews I settled on a Paula Deen churro recipe. Now I know that Paula Deen isn’t exactly an on the border gal and as much as she knows about butter she is knows equally nothing about the border but her recipe looked good and her southern accent sells me every time.

Churros Recipe: Paula Deen: Food Network

But let’s get back on track. For this recipe I had all the ingredients right in my kitchen. It calls for everything basic like flour, sugar, water, eggs, cinnamon and vegetable oil. The only things that people may not have is nutmeg or an orange (which you end up grating the peel off to add to your batter but I didn’t because I didn’t have one). Cookware wise, you need something to fry the churros in, a pan to mix in and a pan to sugar in. The only thing I was required to buy was a piping tube with a large star tip so that I could make my churros look like the ones from the fair. I got it at Safeway for $5.

Before you start you should pour about and inch to an inch and a half of vegetable oil into a deep enough pan on the stove and start heating it. Paula says warm it to about 350 degrees. I do whatever Paula says. From there just follow the recipe by cooking your water, sugar and butter together on the stove and then removing from heat and adding the flour, which should thicken into a dough and will roll into a ball in your mixing bowl. You let it cool a little bit and then start adding eggs. The recipe called for 4 eggs but I only added 3 because I buy the freakishly huge eggs and it would just be too much. I actually had to add some flour after failing on my first churro but I’ll get to that in a second. Beat in your eggs until the batter is a little bit thicker than pancake mix. If your confused about thickness and your pancakes are always runny then you can test to see if your batter is too runny as well by pouring it into your piping tube with star tip. If it all comes running out the tip then it needs to be thicker. All you do is add a little bit of flour slowly to fix it. Put back in the piping tube.

Now on to the fun and dangerous part. Check to make sure your oil is hot enough, using one of those meat thermometer should suffice (I just burned a couple churros before cooling it down enough). Using your piping tube squeeze out about 4 inches of batter into the oil. I apologize for the odd shape they will take but I promise they taste awesome. Fry them until they are golden brown and make sure that you rotate them so that they cook evenly and once they are done remove them with tongs or something and set on a paper towel. Let the oil drain off for a minute then drop in your cinnamon and sugar and coat. I found that the churros turned out looking better later on in the batch and I think it is because the batter had time to set and thicken up in the piping tube a little bit more.

I wanted to have pictures of people enjoying the churros but by the time I got to the Super Bowl party and set them out and realized that people were really enjoying them, they were gone.

This recipe was super easy and once you get into the flow it will go a lot faster. The only major drawback to the whole thing was that my house smells like the deep fryer at a carnival. Open a window, light some candles and you’ll be good to go!