Churro anyone?

February 19. 2010, under Blogr with No Comments

I’m a sucker for fried food and recently I had the opportunity to interview local churro stand owners Jeff Quiñones and his wife Nyvia Robles for the newspaper. As a reporter I have to be objective in my writing. This is why I have a blog, I can write whatever I want without fear that the editor isn’t going to like it because there is no editor, it’s just my mind and me.

Tropical Churros is located in Cabo Rojo Shopping Center in front of Pitusa on Carr. 100, Puerto Rico. What is a churro? A churro is a fried sweet dough pastry in shape of a horn of the churro sheep breed. In Spain, churros are commonly eaten with chocolate milk. The churro is a popular pastry in many Spanish speaking countries and other places have their variations. In Argentina and Brazil the churro filled with dulce de leche is very common. In the United States churros are usually sold at carnivals, festivals, and the circus, making it a popular street fair/carny food. Who doesn’t love unhealthy food at a carnival? I love eating cotton candy, sweet coloured popcorn, pizza, and fried food when I’m at a fair.

Tropical Churros has plain churros and cream filled churros, the cream filled ones are slightly thicker and hollow. There are 5 flavours to choose from: dulce de leche, strawberry, bavarian créme, guava, and cream cheese. My favourite is guava, it tastes like guava paste and it’s not too sweet, but the dulce de leche was really good too. I recommended a plain churro if you want the dulce de leche filling or else it’s a little too sweet with the cinammon and sugar. Strawberry was my least favourite, it tasted like candy. The quality of their coffee is most excellent. They buy it off Gustos Coffee, a local coffee company that buys 100% Arabica coffee beans from Adjuntas, PR. Jeff and Nyvia took varista classes to learn how to prepare and serve excellent coffee. They explained to me that it doesn’t matter if you buy quality coffee, if you don’t prepare it well, it’s a waste of good coffee and I couldn’t agree more.

Like any other food stand they have sodas, water, juice and an Icee machine. Their sodas are Pepsi brand or distributed by Pepsi, I’m more of a Coca Cola kind of girl if I have to choose but it doesn’t matter ’cause I drink Icee whenever I have that option. They use fresh milk (3%) for their lattes and soon they’ll have flavoured coffees like vanilla or hazelnut. They had french vanilla on the menu and the nice employee said that they didn’t have it yet. So I told the owners jokingly that they owe me one. They’re looking into a local distributor that offers a great variety of coffee products so I hope to see more flavors in the future.

When discussing future plans for their business, like any successful business owner they hope to expand to neighbouring municipalities and offer more churro products and maybe new ideas. Off the record Jeff told me of plans he wants to pursue and all I can say is good luck. It’s very important to support local business whenever possible.

If you’re ever around the area (like going to Boquerón beach or whatever), stop by and have a churro. I wrote 2 articles for different newspapers about the churro stand. 1 in English for the Economy section and 1 in Spanish for Gastronomy.