churros
Talking about breakfst, there is one thing that actually is worth and unique as breakfast in Spain: Churros!
This extruded, longish, deep fried dough pieces are reminiscent of the Turkish halka tatlısı, sans the syrup. They are eaten by dipping them in thick, hot chocolate.
We first tried them some years ago in supposedly the best place for churros in Madrid and we couldn’t eat anything else for the rest of the day and the biggest part of the next day as well – so incredibly oily and heavy were they!
We did however realise that they need not be like this and can actually be very light and aromatic if proprerly made, when we tried them again in Baena, Andalusia.
After one of these awful and totally insufficient hotel breakfasts (we had more than 65km to ride through steep mountain roads that day…) we decided we needed something more substantial and so made our way to the churreria we had seen the previous day when entering the town.
Fresh, hot churros, ready to be dipped in hot chocolate!
Why did we decide to try again, after the first not-very-succesful experience? Well, we first noticed that the smell coming out of the kitchen was light and fresh and not one of heavy or overused oil. Then we thought we are going to anyway burn anything we eat during the day, lots of kilometres and cold… Finally we were surprised to see the establishment had created a serious bicycle parking space for its customers! (Still we were the only ones arriving by bicycle at that hour…)
Bicycle parking in front of the churreria La Rueda of Baena
It proved to be a good decision: The churros were light and crunchy and, dipped in nice, thick chocolate, exactly the kind of energy we needed to start another hard pedalling day! (Though the hot chocolate was nowhere even near the one we had in Modica, Sicily some years ago…)
One interesting aspect was also the fact that, as public space, the establishment did not only have a defribillator on a prominent place on the wall, but also an emergency device in case anyone chokes! It seems that choking is, after car crashes, the second highest cause of accident deaths in Spain…
In case you try to eat your churros too fast and choke…
Exiting the place, we were amused to read the writing on the door, calling for women with pestering husbands to “park” them there and then go for shopping or whatever without anyone bothering them! You can trust us, they say, we never lost a husband!!!
You can entrust them with your husband – they never lost one!
Just two days after coming back from our Spain trip, we had to fly to İstanbul. Imagine our surprise when we saw that churros have now become a new trend – we saw two places selling churros in Kadıköy! That, combined with our being tired from the flights etc., for a moment made us very confused as to our actual location – were we still in Spain, back to Greece or in İstanbul???
