Churros Con Chocolate

In my first year writing this blog which records my five year plan to see more of the world, I visited Europe three times. In June and July of last year, I visited Germany and Austria for a little over a week. Five months or so later, I took a three day trip to Iceland, which is an interesting spot to visit around the winter solstice. Then this past May, I took a long overdue journey to Spain. Not too shabby for a 12 month period. I picked up more stamps in my passport in the last year than I did in during the lifetime of my previous two passports combined.

In an odd twist of fate, each of my trips to Europe in the past 15 months has featured some sort of touchstone junk food related experience. I use the word "odd" because I generally think of junk food as some sort of uniquely American phenomenon. Turns out I'm sort of wrong. In Germany, I had the best pretzels I have ever had, gorgeous crusty outside but delicious inside lightly salted twists of dough served alongside a scrumptious spiced cream cheese mixture. The best I had were at Andechs Abbey about two hours south of Munich. They alone are worth the train ride and taxi ride to Andechs. If your taxi driver is listening to a radio station that plays "Macarena" back to back with Eddie Rabbitt's "I Love a Rainy Night" well that's just a bonus.

In Iceland, my junk food fix was satisfied at a hot dog stand where an estimated 50% of all Icelanders have eaten at some point in their lives. I love hot dogs; I'd eat them every day if I thought it would be remotely good for my health. And this one was good. I could have had another two or three. My 4 pm in the dark (after sunset) snack with all the trimmings in downtown Reykjavik made me feel like a native, especially with a  little snow floating in the air close to the freezing cold harbor after a fruitless whale watching (or not watching) trip.

Quite often, food forms the basis of some sort of focus when I travel but I swear I don't seek out junk food specifically. But sure enough, in Spain it happened again. One thing I had to try in Madrid was a breakfast of churros, which is essentially the Spanish version of a donut, although not so much. And if you are looking for churros in Madrid, the place to go is apparently Chocolateria San Gines.

Now you don't have to go to Spain to get some churros. The first time I ever heard of these things, which are essentially extruded pieces of dough fried in hot oil, was at a doubleheader in San Francisco's Candlestick Park featuring the home Giants against the (now Washington Nationals) Montreal Expos in May of 1998. My friend Steve and I were playing hooky from the AIA Convention for the afternoon and, from our sheltered existence in upstate New York, had no idea what the churro vendor was shouting about. We didn't try churros that day, but I'm sure they would have been good. I think the last time I had churros in northern Virginia where I live, it was at a grocery store, and they were pretty forgettable.

There's a big difference between a NoVA grocery store churro and one in the heart of Madrid, or so I hoped. I picked Chocolateria San Gines as my churro vendor of choice because they have been making these fried sticks of dough for over a hundred years. Since 1894 precisely. That's right, folks: this place has been cooking churros, which are basically their principal dish (their online menu features chocolate with six churros and chocolate with two churros and that's it!), since before Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the union. They have survived a couple of world wars (although admittedly there was not a lot of conflict in Spain during those wars) and an almost half century long dictatorship. They must be doing something right. So in my first full day in Madrid, I headed out early for some breakfast.

Churro eating strategy: early and late.

Chocolateria San Gines is located on Pasadizo San Gines, right around the church of the same name. The journey south from our hotel on the Gran Via was itself an endeavor which made the churros waiting for us at the other end that much more rewarding. Madrid is not a gridded city so the 20 minute or so trek south featured a series of lefts and rights, some backtracking and a whole lot of map consulting to get to the street where we would ultimately find the Chocolateria. The last left we took onto the street revealed the view at the top of this post: a narrow alley with a simple neon sign above a doorway advertising the restaurant.

A short walk down the alley (there's really no other word for it), a right and a quick left into the restaurant revealed a white tile and dark wood room packed full of customers with waiters hoisting trays of churros with chocolate and cups of coffee either around the main room or out to the street to tables with hungry customers in the alley. To the right is a winding staircase down to a basement level and seeing no available tables, we hurried downstairs into the cellar to grab a seat and waited to be served. Soon after we were seated, we were presented with two orders of six churros with a cup of hot chocolate each.

The churros I've had in the United States are sweet, like most desserts over here I'm finding. They are typically rolled in sugar and occasionally cinnamon right after frying, which gives them a taste which needs nothing extra to make them usually delicious. But the ones at Chocolateria San Gines are not rolled in anything; they stand on their own as fried dough and rely on the hot chocolate for the full churro experience. Now, just like the churros, the hot chocolate is not the drink we get at home but instead is a sort of bittersweet chocolate dip or thin syrup used to coat the churros before eating. You don't want to be sipping on this stuff; think about drinking a cup of nacho cheese or something, but not quite as disgusting. The combination of the unsweetened dough and the less than American type sugary chocolate is a decidedly less sweet breakfast than we would ever get back home. Not what I was expecting exactly but a fantastic start to the day without being overly cloying or filling.

The process of getting maximum value out of your churros con chocolate requires some thought. At the beginning of the meal, the cup of chocolate is full, meaning dunking your churro in the liquid yields a generous two to three inches of chocolate covering the eating end of the churro. But as you dunk and dunk, the liquid level goes down (and there's nobody there offering refills) so getting maximum chocolate value in each bite requires a different strategy, namely breaking of pieces of churro and saturating them in chocolate before each bite. I figured they gave you a spoon for a reason and this is probably it. This is the part of the meal that is the best and if I'd been thinking about it, I would probably have just eaten all the churros this way. Hopefully the dozen or so people reading this can learn from my mistake.

My churro experience in Madrid was brief but it somehow felt authentically European. Maybe it was the tight cellar packed with people eating the exact same dish in some strange show of solidarity or something. I'm convinced that I fared better underground; it made the place feel more rewarding after the treasure hunt type journey we took to get there. I'd recommend a trip and then a lot of walking to work off the six sticks of fried dough before you are ever really awake. I swear I'm not looking for junk food, but I'll be happy if every trip to Europe features one of these types of experiences.

The line when we left. Somehow I seem to have a knack for getting ahead of lines. No wait when we got there.