Churros

In our neighborhood, on Sundays, a woman makes Churros in front of the church. You have to get there early because they are gone pretty quickly, and they are absolutely delicious. She brings out a gas can flame, sets a big metal bowl on top and fills it with cooking oil. When it is the right temperature, she gets out this mechanism that looks like a giant caulking gun. She fills this with the batter and squeezes it in circles into the hot oil. After it has reached crispy, heavenly perfection, she fishes it out and puts it in a large, shallow ceramic dish filled with cinnamon sugar. You can buy either the whole coil or broken off pieces that you hold with butcher paper. The crunch of a hot churro is absolutely marvelous.

In the evening, she comes back and makes churros rellenos. These are churros that are round and formed by hand. The batter for these has leavening in it and so it puffs up when thrown into the hot oil. After she pulls them from the hot oil, she cuts an opening in one side and spoons in a sinfully wonderful syrup called cajete. Cajete is when condensed milk is cooked until it caramelizes but is still liquid. Pepe used to make cajete in the restaurant he cooked in by taking a can of condensed milk and putting it in a pot of beans to cook over night. In the morning, the cocineros (cooks) would come in and pull the can out with tongs. It would be runny and a brownish color and they would eat it on top of hotcakes (which is the Mexican word for pancakes). Here, they also eat regular lechera (condensed milk) on top of pancakes – remember when I warned you not to come to Guadalajara if you are on a diet?

You can also buy the long, skinny churros filled with something, lechera, cajete, chocolate, or miel (honey). To fill these churros, they inject the filling with a large syringe. Messy to eat, but yummy as well. I like the regular churros the best, there’s something about the oil and sugar. I’m so glad they don’t make them in the US or I would be too large to fly here on commercial airlines.