Spain May Not Have Invented Churros

The churro looks unmistakably Spanish. It arrives hot from the fryer, ridged and crisp, sometimes dusted with sugar and, in Spain, often placed beside a cup of dense drinking chocolate. Yet the history of churros begins with an uncomfortable absence. Nobody can identify the inventor. There is no surviving first recipe that settles the churro origin, no kitchen where historians can confidently place the first batch, and no document proving that Spain invented the food now treated as one of its culinary signatures. Even the traditional churros recipe—at its simplest little more than flour, water and salt dropped into hot oil—offers few clues. Fried dough is too basic, too useful and too widespread to belong easily to one place.

One of the most repeated explanations begins thousands of kilometres from Madrid, in China. There, youtiao—long strips of fried wheat dough—became a familiar breakfast food. The popular churro origin story claims that Portuguese sailors encountered this fried dough during contact with China, carried the idea back toward Europe and adapted it. Because the Chinese dough was traditionally stretched rather than extruded, the story continues, Europeans pushed their version through a star-shaped opening, producing the ridges that define the churro today.

It is an irresistible piece of culinary history. It is also frustratingly difficult to prove.

Portugal established direct maritime contact with China in the early sixteenth century and secured a permanent presence at Macau in 1557, so the cultural contact required by the story certainly existed. Portuguese ships were moving through a trading system that connected Europe with ports across Africa and Asia, carrying spices, ceramics, textiles, plants, techniques and food knowledge with them. Recipes did not need to travel as written instructions. A sailor could watch something being prepared, remember the principle and reproduce an approximation months later on the other side of an ocean.

But possibility is not documentation. No known ship’s log records a Portuguese sailor discovering youtiao and deciding to recreate it. No surviving early recipe provides the missing bridge between the Chinese fried dough and the Iberian churro. Similarity is evidence worth examining, not proof of descent. The youtiao theory therefore tells us something important about the world in which churros could have developed, but it cannot close the case.

Spain has another explanation, and this one does not require a voyage to China.

According to the traditional story, Spanish shepherds working in mountainous country needed food that could be made without an oven. Flour and water could travel. So could salt. Oil and fire provided the rest. Mix the dough, fry it, eat it hot. The simplicity makes practical sense, and it resembles the austere formula still associated with churros de agua: no eggs, no milk, no butter. Water, flour and salt become a food substantial enough to begin a working day.

The shepherd theory is often linked to the Churra sheep, an old Iberian breed whose curled horns are said to resemble the shape of a churro. Even here, however, certainty dissolves when the story is examined closely. The Real Academia Española’s historical linguistic material shows that churro and related words have a complicated Iberian history, including associations with Churra sheep and wool, but language does not provide a clean certificate of culinary birth. The shepherd story remains plausible tradition rather than a documented moment of invention.

Perhaps that uncertainty survives because the earliest churro hardly needed inventing in the modern sense. Flour mixed with water and exposed to hot fat is not a technological leap that could happen only once. It is the kind of food that can emerge wherever grain, oil and intense heat meet necessity. Its strength is precisely what makes its genealogy difficult to trace: there is almost nothing in the basic formula that requires wealth, specialized equipment or rare ingredients.

Then another history collided with it, and the churro became something else.

In the early sixteenth century, Spanish conquest and colonization brought Europeans into direct contact with the cacao cultures of Mesoamerica. Cacao had been consumed in the Americas long before the Spanish arrived, and the drink the Europeans encountered bore little resemblance to the sweet hot chocolate now associated with Madrid cafés. It could be bitter, spiced and culturally significant. Smithsonian material traces cacao use deep into pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, while linguistic evidence records the Spanish word chocolate by 1590 in José de Acosta’s Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias.

Europe transformed the drink. Sugar entered the equation, along with changing preparations and tastes. Chocolate moved through elite European culture and eventually into a much broader commercial world. Somewhere along the development of Spanish eating habits, fried dough and drinking chocolate found each other.

That pairing changed the social meaning of the churro.

A dough remarkable for how little it required could now be dipped into a product whose history ran through Mesoamerican agriculture, colonial conquest and transatlantic trade. The contrast is almost too precise: one food made from some of the cheapest staples available, another whose European history began as an imported commodity connected to empire and privilege. What became chocolate con churros compressed those histories into a single breakfast.

Madrid made the combination its own. Churros became street food, café food and late-night food, prepared by specialist churreros and eaten across social boundaries. By the nineteenth century, Madrid’s café culture offered the setting in which fried dough and hot chocolate could become ritual rather than novelty. One of the institutions most closely associated with that ritual, Chocolatería San Ginés, dates to 1894 and has become so embedded in the city’s identity that Madrid awarded it the Medalla de Madrid after more than 130 years of serving chocolate with churros.

The transformation is important. Tradition does not necessarily begin when a food is invented. It begins when people repeat an act often enough that it acquires meaning.

The same process carried churros far beyond Spain. Spanish imperial networks had already connected Iberia with the Americas for centuries, creating routes along which ingredients, techniques and eating habits moved in both directions. Once established across the Spanish-speaking world, the churro proved unusually adaptable. Mexico developed versions coated in cinnamon sugar. Across Latin America, local preparations changed the fillings, shapes and accompaniments. Argentina and neighbouring countries embraced churros filled with dulce de leche. Elsewhere they acquired chocolate, custard and other fillings that would have been unrecognizable to anyone making the stark flour-and-water version associated with Spanish churros de agua.

The irony is that none of those transformations made the churro less authentic. They reveal how food actually becomes traditional.

A recipe can cross a border and survive precisely because people refuse to preserve it untouched. They substitute what is available, adapt it to local tastes, sell it at different hours and attach it to different rituals. Eventually the adaptation becomes old enough that another generation regards it as the original. The churro may have traveled through exactly this process so many times that searching for one moment of invention obscures the more significant history.

Even its distinctive ridges tell part of that story. Pushing dough through a churrera is not merely aesthetic. The grooves increase the surface area exposed to hot oil, helping create the crisp exterior that separates a good churro from an anonymous piece of fried dough. Whether that shape descended from a Portuguese attempt to imitate Chinese dough, emerged independently in Iberia or developed through another route remains uncertain. What matters historically is that the technique endured because it worked.

And that may be why churros became larger than their uncertain origin.

They require almost nothing, yet they can absorb the identity of almost anywhere. They belong beside thick chocolate in Madrid, beside cinnamon sugar in Mexico, beside dulce de leche in Argentina, and in countless churrerías where the dough passes through an extruder directly into oil. The ingredients remain modest while the cultural meanings accumulate around them.

The history of churros therefore resists the kind of answer food history often wants to provide. There may never be a document identifying the first cook who made one. The Portuguese connection to Chinese youtiao remains an intriguing hypothesis rather than established fact. The shepherd story preserves an image of rural Spanish practicality but cannot provide documentary proof of invention. Spain nevertheless became the country that transformed the churro into an enduring cultural institution, paired it famously with chocolate and helped carry its descendants through a global Spanish-speaking world.

Perhaps the missing inventor is not a hole in the story at all. It may be the point.

The churro survived because nobody needed ownership papers to make it. Sailors could imitate. Shepherds could fry. Street vendors could sell. Cafés could turn it into ritual. Migrants and empires could carry it elsewhere, where another cook could change it again. What began as flour meeting water and hot oil became a record of movement between people who rarely left their names behind.

The churro does not tell us who invented it. It tells us how ordinary food survives history.

Watch it here (again):
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📚 RESOURCES & FURTHER READING

Real Academia Española — Boletín de la Real Academia Española: historical discussion of “churro,” Churra and related Iberian terms
http://webfrl.rae.es/BRAE_DB_PDF/TOMO_XLVI/CLXXIX/GarciaDiego_411_494.pdf

Real Academia Española — Historical linguistic material on the word “churro”
http://apps2.rae.es/BRAE_DB_PDF/TOMO_V/XXIV/Alemany_469_491.pdf

Smithsonian Libraries and Archives — Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage
https://www.si.edu/object/chocolate-history-culture-and-heritage-edited-louis-evan-grivetti-howard-yana-shapiro%3Asiris_sil_916116

Cambridge University Press — “The History of the Word for Cacao in Ancient Mesoamerica,” Ancient Mesoamerica
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ancient-mesoamerica/article/history-of-the-word-for-cacao-in-ancient-mesoamerica/FE4A2AE4F9D0C1EDCFB583DB315907E4

Smithsonian Latino Center — Historical educational material on cacao and chocolate in Mesoamerica
https://latino.si.edu/sites/default/files/docs/smithsonianbro_prep.pdf

Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Chocolatería San Ginés and its place in Madrid’s cultural history
https://www.madrid.es/portales/munimadrid/es/Inicio/Actualidad/Noticias/Almeida-garantiza-que-Madrid-seguira-siendo-icono-de-convivencia-y-union-entre-los-espanoles-durante-la-celebracion-de-San-Isidro/?vgnextchannel=a12149fa40ec9410VgnVCM100000171f5a0aRCRD&vgnextoid=278e9aaf9877f810VgnVCM2000001f4a900aRCRD