Whole wheat churros with chocolate, fleur de sel and orange sauce
Unless you are willing to settle for an apple, there is no such thing as a healthy dessert. But surely there are numerous ways in which you can cut down on your dessert’s calories.
One such trick is to replace refined flour with whole wheat. While both the ingredients work flawlessly as bases for simple desserts such as tea cakes, sweet breads and mud cakes, it gets complex if daredevilry is on your mind.
When it comes to bakes such as croissants, éclairs, soufflés and other French-sounding names, whole wheat doesn’t work as well as refined flour. This is because with fine flour, an impeccable buttery, flaky exterior or a moist interior is guaranteed, but with whole wheat, the bake turns out tad bit denser than then usual.
Thankfully, when it comes to churros, whole wheat seems work equally well. Also known as Spanish doughnuts, churros are long pipes made using a combination of flour, water and yeast. The technique to make them is very similar to a Maharashtraian snack known as chakli.
To make them, the batter is filled in a piping bag topped with a star-shaped nozzle. The paste is squeezed out in hot oil and fried to obtain crisp, brown, rigged pipes that are dusted with sugar and cinnamon before serving. The dessert is ideally chomped with a generous helping of molten chocolate sauce.
My churros are healthier than traditional ones. Since eating fried food in itself is a guilty ride, I thought swapping flours would make it a comfortable one.
I’ve teamed the tubes with a hot chocolate sauce that has been spiked with a touch of orange zest and fleur de sel. While the former addition adds fragrance and fruitiness to the dense sauce, the latter helps in offsetting the sweetness of chocolate. Continue reading