Neither chocolate nor mango nor pistachio: Girona's xuixo wants to legally shield itself against substitutes

GironaIn Girona, they will soon change the idiom es ven com xurros to es ven com xuixos. All the pastry shops in the city, especially those in the center, have queues of people wanting to buy the fried sweets made with croissant dough. All means all. It's Flower Time, a top-notch tourist attraction for the city that shows that picturesque architecture can be even more beautiful if you decorate it with flowers. However, the surprise is that creativity or outlandish imagination has also reached xuixos, so you can find them filled with Oreo cookies, mango cream, pistachio cream (a suspicious fluorescent green), Maria cookies, Nocilla... It seems that with xuixos anything goes, but it is not so, because the Guild of Pastry Chefs, the Guild of Bakers, the Girona City Council and the promoter and inventor of the World Xuixo Contest, Salvador Garcia-Arbós, want to create the Xuixo de Girona guarantee mark so that only the one with pastry cream is the authentic one and with puff pastry, fermented and straight.

At the Tornés pastry shop, Helena Tornés explained to people entering on Wednesday afternoon that they had sold out of all the xuixos they had made –when it is Flower Season they make 40% more– and pointed out to them that the one from Girona is filled with cream. She was educating them, because customers had asked her where they could find xuixos from Girona. Her brother Josep Maria, the pastry chef, has won this year's best xuixo in the world competition, and he is a great defender of the authentic and of the pastry chef Xavier Puig, who wrote down the so-called "official" recipe a hundred years ago: 1,200 kilos of flour that is not too strong, two fresh eggs, 5-10 grams of salt, 100 grams of butter, 50 grams of sugar, three-quarters of a liter of fresh milk, and 50 grams of pressed yeast. He then explained how it was kneaded and, finally, detailed that with a pastry bag "an adequate portion of cream, which must be cold and previously made" was added. A pastry chef who had worked with Xavier Puig had worked in the Tornés workshop, and that is why Tornés knows the authentic recipe so well, in addition to making it daily with skill: the cream is abundant but does not spill out at the ends, it is thick and with a cinnamon and lemon flavor; the xuixo is filling but not cloying, because the size (100 grams) is good.Quality mark

Meanwhile, Salvador Garcia-Arbós confesses the joy he feels that the xuixo is the food that visitors and locals seek in Girona. "In Barcelona there is ramen, this trend has not reached us yet," he says with his usual sense of humor. He invented the annual competition and also the centenary, a celebration in which the history of this fried sweet made with croissant dough was explained. Curiously, one of the fashionable pastry chefs in Paris, with establishments where hours of queues are generated and which require security guards to control them, makes a type of fried croissant. It is what we call xuixo, but that name has not yet arrived there. The fact is that, with the good reception of the two events he has organized, the communicator is also the one who is moving forward, together with the guilds and the Girona City Council, the initiative to obtain the guarantee mark. "We can say that we have started to walk, that we are studying everything legally to have a specific regulation that details what a xuixo from Girona is," says Garcia-Arbós.If they obtained the trademark, then the bakeries that followed the standards would have a sticker in their window that would certify it. All in all, it is not an easy or quick task, because there are many legislative steps, but little by little they are doing them. It is the objective for which they work together: that the xuixo of Girona is only the one with pastry cream, made with croissant dough – and never with brioche dough – and fried. If the expression becomes a guarantee mark, perhaps it will be the way it can spread around the world. Perhaps then we can tell the pastry chefs in Paris that if they fry croissants, if they give them a tubular shape, then they must call it xuixo de Girona.