Churros con Chocolate.

Name: Churros con Chocolate (Spanish Fried Dough and Drinking Chocolate)
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 55 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Spain
Ingredients: 250 g plain flour; 250 ml water; 1 tsp fine salt; 1 tbsp mild olive oil; 1 l sunflower oil, for frying; to taste caster sugar, for dipping; 500 ml whole milk; 150 g dark chocolate (60–70%), finely chopped; 1 tbsp cornflour; 30 g caster sugar; 1 pinch ground cinnamon; 1 pinch fine salt

Spanish Fried Dough and Drinking Chocolate

Churros con chocolate · say it: CHOO-rrohs kon choh-koh-LAH-teh

Spanish churros are not sweet. The dough is flour, water and salt — no egg, no sugar, no butter — scalded with boiling water, piped through a star nozzle and fried until the ridges go crisp and deep gold while the inside stays soft and faintly chewy. All the sweetness comes from the chocolate they are dipped into, which in Spain is not hot cocoa but chocolate a la taza: real chocolate melted into milk and thickened with a little cornflour until it is closer to a warm sauce than a drink. Eaten together, hot and greaseless against dark and almost bitter, they are breakfast, mid-afternoon merienda, and the traditional last stop after a night out.

Jump to the recipe

Read the story

Spanish Fried Dough and Drinking Chocolate

Gate: Spain
Prep: 20 min
Cook: 25 min
Total time: 55 min incl. 10 min rest
Serves: 4
Status: Medium
Nutrition / serving · estimated: Calories 615 kcal; Protein 12 g; Carbs 79 g; Fat 28 g; Fiber 4 g; Sugar 32 g

Why this recipe works.

The authentic Spanish eggless dough — scalded flour and water only — rather than the choux batter most English-language recipes give.
Explains why the star nozzle is structural and not decorative, which prevents the churros bursting in the pan.
Chocolate a la taza thickened properly with cornflour, so it coats a churro instead of running off it.
Oil temperature checkpoints at every stage, because a churro that absorbs oil is a churro nobody wants.

Tips from our kitchen.

The star nozzle is not optional. The ridges let steam escape as the dough fries; a smooth round tube traps it and the churros can split violently in the oil.
Use a sturdy piping bag or a proper churrera. This dough is stiff enough to burst a thin disposable bag mid-pipe.
Hold the oil at 180°C. Below 170°C the churros drink oil and go limp; above 195°C the outside sets before the inside cooks and they stay raw in the middle.
Pipe over the pan and cut with scissors dipped in the oil, so the dough releases cleanly instead of dragging.
Never cover fried churros or stack them on a plate. Steam trapped underneath softens the ridges within a minute — drain them upright on a rack.
Let the dough rest 10 minutes before piping. Warm from the pan it is too slack and the ridges blur as they hit the oil.

Substitutions.

Dark chocolate for the drinking chocolate → 30 g unsweetened cocoa powder plus an extra 40 g sugar: Thinner and less glossy because you lose the cocoa butter, but it works and is closer to how many Spanish homes make it from a supermarket packet mix.
Cornflour thickener → Nothing, plus 100 ml more chocolate and 15 minutes of reduction: Purists reduce rather than thicken. It tastes better and takes considerably longer, and it will still not be quite as thick.
Sunflower oil for frying → Mild olive oil: Traditional in parts of Spain and it gives a subtle savoury note. Do not use extra virgin — the smoke point is too low and the flavour dominates.

Variations.

Porras: The thicker Madrid cousin: add ¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda to the dough and pipe far fatter lengths. Softer and more bread-like inside, and they need an extra two minutes in the oil.
Churros with cinnamon sugar: Toss the hot churros in caster sugar mixed with ground cinnamon. Common at fairs and in Latin America, less so in Madrid churrerías where the sugar arrives in a separate dish.
Chocolate con churros a la taza espesa: Push the chocolate further — an extra teaspoon of cornflour and a pinch of salt — until a churro stands upright in the cup. The Madrid standard, and messier than it sounds.

Storage & reheating.

Churros do not keep. They are excellent for about ten minutes, acceptable for thirty, and disappointing after an hour — the ridges soften and the interior turns dense. Do not refrigerate them. If you must get ahead, pipe the raw churros onto baking paper and freeze them solid, then fry from frozen at 175°C for an extra minute. The chocolate is the opposite: it keeps 3 days refrigerated and reheats beautifully, thinning with a splash of milk as it warms, so make it the night before if you like.

Serve with

Café con leche alongside the chocolate, which is a very Spanish amount of liquid for breakfast but that is how it is done.

The story behind Churros con Chocolate.

Churrerías work strange hours, and that tells you what the dish is for. In Madrid the famous ones open through the small hours and do their heaviest trade between four and eight in the morning, serving people finishing a night and people starting a working day at adjacent tables. The rest of the country eats them at breakfast on a Sunday, at the merienda around six in the evening, and compulsively at every fiesta and winter fair, where portable churro stalls appear with vats of oil and a copper urn of chocolate.

Where churros come from is genuinely contested. One widely repeated account credits Spanish shepherds with a pan-fried dough made from simple pantry staples, named after the horns of the churra sheep — which the ridged shape does resemble. Another traces the technique to Portuguese contact with China and the long fried dough sticks eaten there for breakfast, brought back and given a star-shaped ridge. Neither is documented well enough to settle the matter, and Spanish food writers tend to present both and pick neither. What is clear is that the modern churro is inseparable from chocolate, which arrived in Spain from Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century and was drunk thick, spiced and heavily sweetened long before the rest of Europe took it up.

Spaniards distinguish carefully between shapes. The thin ones, often looped into a continuous coil and cut with scissors, are churros. The thick, softer ones — porras — carry a little raising agent and a different texture inside, and are typically Madrid and the south. Both are usually sold by weight, both come with sugar in a dish rather than pre-dusted, and neither is filled with dulce de leche; the stuffed churro is a Latin American development, delicious on its own terms and not what you get at a Spanish counter.

Questions, answered.

Do Spanish churros contain eggs?

Traditional Spanish churros do not. The dough is flour, water and salt, scalded so the starch gelatinises and holds its shape when piped. Egg-based recipes are essentially choux paste, which produces a lighter, more hollow, more cake-like churro — closer to what is sold in many Latin American and North American versions. Both taste good; only one is what you get in a Madrid churrería.

Why did my churros explode in the oil?

Almost always a smooth or badly formed nozzle. The star shape creates thin ridges through which steam escapes as the dough cooks; without them, pressure builds inside the sealed crust until it bursts, throwing hot oil. Oil that is too hot makes it worse, because the outside sets before the steam can find a way out. Use a proper open star tip and keep the oil at 180°C.

What is the difference between churros and porras?

Porras are thicker, softer and contain a raising agent — usually bicarbonate of soda — which gives them a more open, bread-like interior. Churros are thinner, crisper and denser, and often piped in a long continuous coil that gets cut into lengths. Porras are especially associated with Madrid and the south, and are usually sold alongside churros rather than instead of them.

Why is Spanish drinking chocolate so thick?

Because it was never meant to be drunk in quantity. Chocolate a la taza is deliberately thickened, historically with ground rice or maize and today usually with cornflour, so it clings to a churro rather than soaking into it. Spaniards drink it in small cups; a mug-sized serving of it would be overwhelming, which is exactly why it is served in a squat little cup.

Can I bake or air-fry churros instead?

You can, but you will not get a churro. The crisp ridged crust comes from the dough hitting hot oil and dehydrating instantly at the surface; dry oven heat produces something closer to a piped breadstick, pleasant but pale and chewy. If deep-frying is out of the question, use a small saucepan with 4 cm of oil rather than a full pan — it is far less oil than people expect.

All recipes →