During the school holidays, my sister and her kids came to stay with us for two days. It was super fun, but it’s sure busy having her four kids plus my three in the house!

What goes with having lots of little busy bodies is fueling their energy that they expend so freely. My sister and I were on a mission to feed the masses: 7 children under one roof and whose tummies were seemingly bottomless pits.

As an experienced mommy of four kids, my sister introduced me to a really awesome crowd-pleasing recipe which she calls “Cheat Churros”. They are called cheat ones because you don’t make your own dough in this recipe, you just use the crusts of bread.

If  you don’t know what real churros are, they basically are skinny strips of dough that are fried and then rolled in sugar and cinnamon. They originate from Spain, hence the name “churro”. Such good comfort food! They are very common over there and in other Latin-American countries and are usually eaten for breakfast or as a snack. I loved having them with a nice warm mug of hot chocolate.

What You’ll Need:

• 1 loaf of white bread
• 8 eggs
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• oil, for shallow frying (I used coconut oil just to try make this a bit healthier)

What to do:

1. Slice all sides of each slice of bread off – these crusts are the things we need! You can use the inner part of the bread for something else.
2. Whisk the eggs, milk, vanilla and salt together for a minute, until the mixture is nice and consistent.
3. Mix the sugar and cinnamon in a big bowl. This is what you’ll toss your fried churros into once they are done to give them that nice cinnamon-sugar coating.
4. Heat a non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat with enough oil to fill the pan to about 2 millimeters deep. You will know it’s hot enough if you drop a little bit of the egg mixture in the pan and it gives a nice sizzle.
5. Taking about 10 strips of crust at a time, quickly coat them in the egg mixture and  lay them in the hot oil to fry in the pan.
6. Turn them frequently and once all sides are golden brown, lay them on paper towelling to absorb the excess oil.
7. Toss them in the sugar-cinnamon mixture in the big bowl and make sure to coat them evenly.
8. Ensure you adjust your heat accordingly. If it burns, turn the heat down, if it takes too long and the churros get soggy from the oil, turn up the heat!
9. Add more oil to the pan and repeat steps 5-8 until you’ve used up all your ingredients.

 

 

These things are seriously so good and so economical as a treat. Also, I know that the bread crusts are the things that most people leave over at the end of their loaf of bread. Wouldn’t it be a great idea to actually save up all your bread crusts, slice them up and freeze them over time? Eventually you will have a big bag of frozen sliced crusts that you could defrost and then use for churros. Waste not, want not!

A word of advice about frying: it’s messy and you need to exercise a lot of caution working with hot oil. Have a look at BBC’s article: How to deep-fry safely. Although I didn’t deep-fry the churros, the same safety principles apply.

Also make sure you wear an apron to avoid greasy spatters! Ventilate your kitchen while you fry and use your extractor fan above your stove, too.

As they say in Spanish – buen provecho!

Or in other words, I hope you enjoy this recipe!

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Feel free to comment below about how your Cheat Churros came out!