Churro season is looming: The lowdown on these high-calorie winter treats

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. 

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.

Increasingly, though, churros are already chocolate-dipped – half the doughnut-y loop, or sometimes all of it, is dunked in a vat of melted chocolate after deep-frying and then plonked into the paper cone once it has hardened.

These less-than-elegant-sounding verbs go with the churro territory; we're not talking gourmet here. They're not a delicacy, they're simply a high-calorie, ultra-sweet junk-food fix you eat with your fingers or a plastic or wooden fork whilst traipsing from big wheel to tombola and from big dipper to throw-a-hoop-over-the-teddy-bear stalls.

Churros are kind of like the Benidorm of the food chain. They cheerfully wear their lack of class like a status symbol; half the population loves them and the other half pretends to hate them but secretly has to experience them at least once a year 'for the contrast'; they're a go-to in the winter months; their character changes radically at night: Whilst Benidorm goes from fun-and-tacky in the daytime to a thrilling, bright-lights-big-city-that-never-sleeps, glittering, booming, throbbing, vibrant ball of excitement and activity after dark, churros go from tasty-and-tacky in the daytime to genuine thermal comfort and a fast energy-injection when the cold night falls; they're a homely, familiar staple, and they're accessible to any individual budget, however small.

The history and origins of churros

We don't know. Who cares? All we know is that they're one of the essential food-groups, and that once you've got your greasy paper funnel in your hand, the contents of it will be history within minutes.

Spain does omelette sandwiches and Rich Tea biscuit milkshakes; Poland does both but with churros

You wouldn't expect churros to need much creative flair to sell like, well, hotcakes, but El Tesoro Café in Krakow (a Spanish name, which translates as 'The Treasure') dishes them up with garnishes of Nutella chocolate spread, whipped cream, Belgian chocolate, hundreds-and-thousands, crumbled Oreo cookies, almonds, coconut, M&Ms, walnuts, and even a few, similar vegan options.

But these are not even the most creative; you can get churro sandwiches and churro milkshakes at El Tesoro.

Rather than being two slices of bread or a split baguette-half filled with churros, the churros actually are the bread, and the filling can be a mix of fondant, batidam or sticky, flavoured cream, chocolate, or other types of gooey delights.

Bread with churros in the middle is not necessarily an outrageous idea. It's not at all uncommon to see bocadillo de tortilla or bocadillo de calamares on a menu in a bar in Spain – half-baguettes rather than sliced bread, but basically, omelette sandwich or battered squid-ring sandwich. The latter goes down a treat with some all i oli, or ultra-garlicky mayonnaise which is typically served on the side with a bread-basket in restaurants prior to the first course, as an accompaniment to patatas bravas (flash-fried potato cubes served with a hot, spicy ketchup), and sold in supermarkets in pots for home consumption.

As for churro milkshakes, again, these are not churro-flavoured milkshakes, but it wouldn't have surprised us if they were, given that any flavour of ice-cream can become a milkshake and usually does.

Crema catalana (custard with a hint of cinnamon and lemon, topped with thick caramelised sugar) comes in ice-cream format, and you can also get lemon meringue-flavoured ice-cream, and galleta María-flavoured, the Spanish equivalent of Rich Tea biscuits; all ice-cream parlours in Spain sell milkshakes, with or without whipped cream on top, 'of the flavour of your choice', so it's perfectly normal to order a Rich Tea biscuit or custard milkshake and the staff will have made these up to order without a second thought on hundreds of previous occasions.

The El Tesoro Café version of churro milkshake is a chocolate one with whipped cream on top, 'extras' like marshmallows or hundreds-and-thousands upon request, with churros either atop the cream, somewhere within the cream, just underneath the cream in the actual milkshake, stuffed into the milkshake end-first like a drinking straw, or all of these together.

Visitors to the Krakow café say friendly, smiling staff, an open fireplace with a chimney, and a cosy feel give you that wonderful sense of freezing-winter Schadenfreude where you're in a warm fug that feels warmer and fuggier still because of the knowledge that others are outside shivering in their gloves and scarves with red noses and numb fingers.

Back to Spain, churros are heading for a town near you

On the other hand, if all those additional sweet-shop decorations and cream and chocolate on top of the already-indulgent churros just feels like going a tiny bit too far and risks spoiling your appetite – rather like, instead of robbing a high-street bank, actually robbing the European Central Bank – the 'basic' versions, with or without the dipping chocolate and with or without having been partially dunked in 'real' melted chocolate, are likely to be omnipresent in Spain from about now.

If you hear of a Christmas market happening near you (and they could be sooner than you think; festive confectionery shelves are already starting to swell in the supermarkets now, nearly two weeks before Hallowe'en and with daytime temperatures in the high 20s), or a Mediaeval market (look out for those in the early part of next year, since they tend to be the 'bridge' between Christmas and Easter that helps break up the winter), or anything linked to the forthcoming Hallowe'en and All Saints' celebrations, such as a fairground or fête, the odds are high that a churro station will be out there somewhere.

It may be a dedicated churro truck, or it might be combined with one selling the usual chips, burgers and hot dogs, but either way, you're unlikely to have to shell out much to fill your face. 

Typically, you'll either pay a certain price per individual churro (which might be as much as €1, but frequently not), or for a full cone, small, medium or large; they're bigger and more filling than you think, which makes them cheaper still for the price, and a paper funnel filled with enough to make you swear you'll never eat again and turn you green at the thought of anything sugary or fried will normally not set you back more than about €5, or perhaps as little as €3.

Otherwise, you can get them in bags in the deep-freeze at most supermarkets and, as long as you've got the facilities to deep-fat-fry them and plenty of sugar to roll them in when they're still hot, and chocolate to melt to coat them in, you can recreate the entire experience at home.