DESPITE its variations on the much-lauded Mediterranean diet, its wealth of home-grown fruit and vegetables and ever-growing population of Michelin-starred restaurants, Spain is not all culinary virtue – in fact, one of the nation's most-famed snacks, churros, probably has near-zero or even minus nutritional value and makes up for this deficit in saturated fats and refined sugar.
Time to get dunking - you can restart the diet tomorrow (photo: Madrid Pour Vous)
Warm, tempting, filling and a hedonistic pleasure, churros are slowly catching up with paella, tortilla (potato omelette with optional onions), and chorizo spicy sausage as the most-likely Spanish-style foodstuffs to be found, or copied, outside of Spain.
And in Krakow, Poland, an entire café specialises in them, but in ways you'd never normally encounter them on home soil.
Churros explained
Anyone who's been in Spain during autumn and winter fiestas, or when there's a fairground on in their town, will have seen churro-sellers and probably struggled to pass them without reaching into their purses. Made from doughnut-like batter, but long and thin and swished into loops when they come out of a spout, deep-fried and coated in enough sugar to wipe out an entire cane plantation on the average Caribbean island, then served up in a paper cone to absorb the grease and eaten whilst still hot, churros are one of the upsides of the colder months.
Traditionally, they are dipped in a small pot of a chocolatey sauce – not melted chocolate, as such, but a warm substance of a custard-like consistency flavoured with chocolate and which, if you're tempted to re-enact the churro experience at home, you can buy in litre cartons from most supermarkets and heat up on the stove or in the microwave.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com