Pigs in Blankets

Wind Buñuelos

Wind buñuelos are typical in Spain during easter. They are hollow dough balls made with pâte à choux or choux pastry, which is the dough used to make profiteroles, eclaires and croquembouches. Choux pastry is usually baked, but for buñuelos it is fried. As they are hollow, they can be filled with pastry cream, whipped cream, chocolate or even gianduja and lemon curd, you choose!

Ingredients

125 ml. water
125 ml. milk
110 g butter
3 or 4 eggs
140 g flour
5 g sugar
3 g salt

Instructions

Mix water, milk, salt sugar and butter on a cooking pot and place over medium heat, until it starts to boil. Remove from heat, add flour and mix well with a wooden spatula. At first, the dough will look coarse and with lumps, as seen on the following image.

Keep mixing with the spatula until the dough stops sticking to the pan, as seen below. The dough will form humid ball. At this point, you can either reduce the dough's humidity over low heat with the wooden spatula or transfer it to an electric mixer and mix until dry. The drying process will take a couple minutes, until water vapour stops coming out from the dough.

Add beaten eggs one by one and mix well after each addition. You must add enough eggs until the dough forms what is referred to as a duck's beak. This will mean that the dough is soft enough to make light buñuelos. The way to check if the dough is ready is to grab a big scoop with the spatula and let it rest on top of the bowl. Eventually, a blob of dough will fall, leaving on the spatula a fine, almost translucent triangle called duck's beak.

Place dough into a piping bag. Heat sunflower oil in a pan until it reaches 160 ºC (320 F). Cut the tip of a piping bag and pipe batter onto the hot oil, cutting every couple of centimetres with a knife, so as to form small balls.

The small dough balls will puff up, yielding round, hollow balls.

When the buñuelos are lightly golden, remove them from the oil and let them drain over a wire rack. You can line the rack with absorbent paper towels to eliminate the excess oil.

Drizzle with anise liquor and let rest until fully absorbed. Fill buñuelos with a piping bag, with the filling of your choice.

Coat with sugar and serve!