Nice Cookies

My friends and I were trying to make churros last night for the hell of it.

The dough came out pretty well, despite the fact we didn’t have a pasty bag, but a zip lock with a scissor snip at the bottom piped out the dough just fine.

They fried up pretty well, but my friend kept turning up the heat, and the oil began to burn. The odd thing was the fact that after I turned down the heat, the olive oil began to foam up like some sort of angry, nasty crab. Does any one know why it would do that?

Our problem wasn’t so much the frying, but more of the chocolate sauce. We followed a recipe from the FoodNetwork’s website, and while the dough was perfect, the sauce was just shitty. It was more like chocolate water than an actual sauce.

It asked for a bar of semi-sweet dark chocolate, but we used morals instead. However, it was baking chocolate nonetheless.

I tried to narrow it down to two main factors:

Either the we didn’t use enough chocolate (It asked for 4 oz. and we delivered)

Or not enough cornstarch (we used one tablespoon as specified).

I was mainly afraid of adding too much starch and losing flavor, so we added more chocolate, then more powder to thicken it up.

Any suggestions?
Olive oil question: you passed the smoke point then cooled it down, that’s what happens to oil after its molecular bonds essentially shatter. For future reference, you should probably avoid deep frying in olive oil, especially EVOO, unless the temps aren’t going above 325 or so. I can’t recall the exact smoke point but it’s at least 50 degrees lower than peanut oil and canola, along with all the rest.

As for chocolate, in my opinion the best way to make chocolate sauce of any kind is to get a perfect balance of chocolate to external fat sources. If you’ve got a darker chocolate it will have less fat in it from the beginning so you’ll want to add more fat later, and vice versa with milk chocolate and white "chocolate," which is ALL fat. Use a double boiler (most chefs just use a metal mixing bowl over a sauce pot of water in a pinch) and melt the chocolate almost all of the way down over medium-medium low heat, then add a tablespoon of canola oil or a pat of butter (more or less depending on how big your batch is). The fat will give the sauce a nice sheen and keep it from seizing up so quickly. After you finish melting it and combining the fat and chocolate, take it off the heat and add a touch of real vanilla extract. It seems contradictory to flavor a chocolate sauce with vanilla, but it brings out a deeper, richer flavor in the chocolate that you can’t get without it.

Mike

Not true, they could have used some unrefined walnut oil or flax seed oil
I thought that them little morsals that you buy are not the same thing as regualr chocolate. I thought that stuffwas added to them to help them hold shape during the cooking process??

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