City Cottage 4 | Page 14

Chorizo

The archetypal Spanish sausage

This is one of the archetypal sausage recipes that people always want to make. It has become a sort of right of passage for the home sausage maker. It is an air dried sausage and as such is not so easy to complete in the wet UK climate. In order to make this sausage you need a clean, reliably uniform space that is neither too hot, too dry, too moist or too cold.

The way chorizo works is to combine many preserving functions into one sausage to make it safe. It has to be said this sausage is not cooked and consequently you need to get the whole thing right, otherwise you will have a product that is either inedible or dangerous.

Salting

First of all, the chorizo is quite heavily salted, using curing salt – don’t try to use any other form of salt – it has to have saltpeter as a part of the salt to be sure to deal with botulinum.

Microbial Starter (fermented starter)

A culture of microbes in the sausage is an important element in the development of this sausage. It is often bought as a Bessastart starter for chorizo, but if you ask for chorizo culture, you will get the right stuff. These microbes live off the meat sugars and give off lactic acid. This gives the sausage a bitter taste and also a degree of bacterial safety because the acid kills the bacteria.

You can also ferment chorizo by using a yoghurt culture, which is essentially live yoghurt added to the mixture, and it does work.

It is important to recognise that some chorizo are not fermented, they get the tang by the addition of vinegar to the mixture. These chorizo are always cooked prior to eating.

In order to ferment a chorizo, you need a drying cabinet or safe space. The temperature should be around 20 – 22 C in order to get the starter working, and then for drying at about 12 C, and the relative humidity should be around 75%. Serious sausage makers have drying cabinets, some of which cost many thousands of pounds. Still others use clean and sometimes adapted old fridges.

Spices

The garlic, paprika and other ingredients give some important protection from spoiling bacteria.

Air drying

The sausage is hung for long enough for a loss of about 30% of its weight by evaporation. This, along with the osmotic pressure imputed in the sausage from the salt and the spices means that the micro environment is unsuitable for microbial growth in the sausage. Where water is not available, there is no life.

Smoking

Some chorizo are smoked, others are not smoked. Smoking increases the osmotic pressure in the sausage, it provides complex aromatic molecules that are poisonous to bacteria.