Chloe-Rose Crabtree’s Champurrado Pie with Churro Crust
Chloe-Rose Crabtree’s Champurrado Pie with Churro Crust
A spiced, corn-infused chocolate custard pie inspired by memories of Los Angeles. Text and photography by Chloe-Rose Crabtree.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this new weekly slot, our roster of six rotating columnists will share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Chloe-Rose Crabtree. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
Chloe-Rose Crabtree’s Champurrado Pie with Churro Crust
A spiced, corn-infused chocolate custard pie inspired by memories of Los Angeles. Text and photography by Chloe-Rose Crabtree.
The recipe for this champurrado y churros pie came to me like a revelation, tinged with a bit of homesickness for LA. Before moving abroad, I lived in Montecito Heights, in the northeast of the city. My apartment, a 1920s shotgun duplex with a secret room hidden behind a built-in china cabinet, was just up the hill from the now-closed Mom’s Tamales and close enough to the LA Metro’s Gold Line that my husband and I could easily share a car, much to the confusion of everyone around us.
However, it did not have a washing machine, which meant that I often found myself spending Sunday afternoons at the laundromat. What I thought was going to be a chore soon became a highlight of my week. If I timed my visit right, a minivan would pull up to sell bags of homemade tamales right as my dry cycle was finishing. I’d buy an assortment of tamales to eat throughout the week, as well as a cup of champurrado to drink as I waited for my husband to pick me up.
Champurrado is a chocolate version of the Mexican beverage atole. Somewhere between a drink and a porridge, atole is often paired with tamales during celebrations of Día de los Muertos or Las Posadas, and sometimes served with warm churros for dipping. As a base, atoles are made with water, cinnamon, panela or piloncillo (a raw cane sugar), and milk, which is thickened with masa harina. Vanilla, guava, strawberry, and chocolate are commonly added to this base, but the primary flavouring of the drink comes from the nixtamalised corn (a traditional maize-preparation process in which dried kernels are cooked and steeped in an alkaline solution) in the masa harina.
In champurrado, the earthy bitterness of chocolate is tempered by the subtle sweetness of corn (if you want a recipe for the drink, I recommend checking out Karla Zazueta’s Norteña, which is full of gorgeous recipes from Northern Mexico). Although I am not usually a chocolate person, there’s something about the corn–chocolate combo that I really love, especially when it’s paired with crisp buttery caramelised puff pastry crust coated in cinnamon sugar, like in this pie.
I usually make these as mini-tarts for a weekend counter special at Bake Street. It does take time if you decide to make your own corn-infused milk – you need to leave the milk to infuse overnight, and then chill the champurrado custard that you make with it overnight – but the flavour is worth it.
