The secret to making delicious Spanish churros at home

Recently, in a fit of extreme homesickness, I picked up some frozen churros from the grocery store. 

Confession: I don't like Spanish churros con chocolate. Churros are super greasy, heavy, and salty. Even when I sprinkle three or more packets of sugar on top, they are not sweet enough for my tastebuds. Sometimes they are served cold, like in a bar in Madrid (why???).* I like Spanish hot chocolate well enough, but it's kind of hard to sip due to the sludgy texture.

But somehow, these frozen churros called out to me from their hiding place in the frozen waffle section of my Typical American Grocery Store and tumbled into my cart.

(What can I say? When you spend a long time away from the place you love, you find yourself nostalgic for things you didn't even like in the first place.)

With zero expectations, I baked them up in the oven at home. The deep-fried smell instantly brought me back to late nights stumbling around the streets of Seville, way back before botellones got banned, and the centro de Sevilla turned into a hyperreal Disneyland for tourists.**

After baking them for way longer than the recommended five minutes, the churros actually tasted delicious. Like I was shocked. 

In case you're wondering what brand of churros I bought, it was Goya Frozen ready to eat churros. 

Because I added a secret ingredient: I dipped the churros in maple syrup. 

Controversial guiri opinion: Spanish churros are more or less a deep fried pancake.

My fellow guiris, dipping the churros into a little cup of maple syrup is TRANSFORMATIVE. To the point that I'm thinking of packing a bottle of maple syrup in my suitcase, just for Churros con Chocolate Sunday.

Which got me to thinking, what other Spanish foods could I adapt for the American palate? Without further ado, here are three of my Million Dollar (927,250 euro) Ideas for Spanish-American Fusion Cuisine:

1.Burrito made with paella rice.

2. Spanish tortilla, but replace the plain fried potatoes with home fries.

3. Choco tacos. I guess this is just a variation on deep-fried fish tacos, but i really like chocos and think they are very underutilized in American cuisine. 

Any other ideas? If this American-Spanish fusion restaurant ever came into existence, I'd put it in the old Cafe Nebraska space on the Gran Vía.*** 

Foot notes:

*The only thing I liked less than cold churros was the time I ordered a carajillo, purely out of curiosity after seeing many a gentleman order them at my customary breakfast spot in Bami. 

**If Baudrillard could have lived to see Sevilla transformed into a super-sanitized, resident-free space, I believe he might have written:

 “[Sevilla centro] is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of [Sevilla] and the [Spain] that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle”

Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184.

***RIP, the Café Nebraska capricho de brownie con helado de vainilla.