"DC." wrote in message
...
OK krnntp, this isn't going to help but when we're in
Spain, we always like going out to the street corners looking for the old
Churros vendor. This is Spain's version of deep fried dough stick snack &
usually eaten at breakfast. OK first of all it's a little smaller &
sometimes it's shaped like... a horse shoe but with the 2 ends brought
together. After frying, it is either sprinkle over with sugar or you dunk
it
into 'artificially' thicken hot chocolate. I don't know what they do to
the
chocolate but it's extremely thick, maybe they add flour or cornflour etc.
I
don't really like it so we just dunk it in our coffee like many others.
Hope
this helps... or not. By the way.. in Spain, people drink something called
Horchata made from tiger nuts/chufas & is very similar to soya milk. Do a
google search on Churros & Horchata if you want to find out more.


Mexicans also eat churros, so I'm guessing KR knows about them from Mexican
places here in the States. (Although, in Cleveland? Have things changed
there? Are there more paisanos in Cuyahoga County now? I know there are a
lot more Koreans and Indians.)

Mexicans also drink horchata, and I'm actually sorta surprised to hear that
Spaniards drink it too. What are "tiger nuts," by the way? In Mexico, they
are water-based drinks thickened slightly with ground rice or nuts. In
Oaxaca, there is a vast repertoire of various horchatas--it's almost an art
form, flavored with all kinds of fruits and nuts. You are right
though--plain horchata is a lot like soya milk.

As for the thick hot chocolate. I've never been to Spain, so I don't know
how it is done there. But in the Bikol province of the Philippines, for
breakfast and as snacks, we dip binutong (glutinous rice seasoned with
coconut milk and steamed in a banana leaf wrapper) into thick hot chocolate.
The chocolate is prepared with freshly-roasted cacao beans that are ground
and mixed up with water and sugar (or at least that is how it used to be
made). We got this, of course, from the Mexicans, as that is where
chocolate comes from. It's really only in Oaxaca that that ancient
chocolate culture can still be seen in Mexico--we can buy Mexican chocolate
in the US, but not Oaxacan chocolate. They grind roasted cacao beans with
sugar, cinammon, and almonds. They then heat that up with water and froth
it up with a wooden frother called a molinillo. The interesting thing is
that this was how hot chocolate was drunk in Spain, in Italy, in France--
all over Europe--until the invention of cacao powder, in the early 1800s, I
believe. So, in other words, the French were also roasting cacao beans,
grinding them, and then frothing them up with lots of different spices in a
chocolatière with a molinillo. Here's a really beautiful set of molinillo
and chocolatière that I just found on the web.

http://www.artsmia.org/modernism/ima...ool.cfm?oid=55

The Oaxacan hot chocolate is not as thick as that in the Philippines--not
sure why. In that way, I guess the Philippines is more like Spain. But
it's not due to any thickening agents--I brought home several kilos of
Oaxacan chocolate and if I wanted, I could easily make a wonderful, thick
brew by just adding less water. I think it is because we are not dealing
with cacao powder, but with freshly ground beans that include the beans'
natural oils and fats.

I took a photo of some of the chocolate mills in Oaxaca. I'll try to post it
now for you, DC, over on alt.food.binaries.

Peter