There are hundreds of recipes for chorizo out there, it has to be said that many of them clearly haven’t been made by the people that have written them! I personally would avoid any recipe that doesn’t have curing salt in it as a basic minimum.
However, in Spain there are dozens of recipes – almost as many as there are villages. Some of them produce sausages that are only semi dried and then oven baked, or sliced and cooked for toppings, or cooked in a cassoulet.
Then there are various recipes for Spanish sausages in the diaspora, particularly in Mexico. What we call paprika is termed pimenton in Spain, and comes from Mexico. The flavours of the Mexican pimenton is much hotter than the sweeter Hungarian version that we are used to.
So the Spanish sausage is somewhat different depending on their region of origin, unlike a British banger, which is much the same the world over.
Our first recipe is for a cooking chorizo, which basically means it has to be cooked before it is eaten. You can dispense with the hanging in this recipe, but not the cooking.If you are going to cook it on a pizza, make sure it is sliced thinly so it gets really hot in cooking.
Cooking chorizo
Ingredients
1 kg lean pork
1 kg belly pork
3 garlic cloves crushed
2 tsp dried chilli flakes
25 ml cider vinegar
4 tablespoons Sweet Spanish Paprika
25 g curing salt
3 tsp oregano dried
2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
Hog skins at 32 mm
This sausage is easy to make, notice no extra fat is added.
Chill the meat, cube and roughly grind using the medium plate in the grinder.
Add all the ingredients together in a large bowl and mix well. Leave in the fridge for 24 hours and then stuff into the skins, linking at 4 inches, 7.5 cm.
These are then hung in a clean space for three weeks, before cooking or freezing. They are not to be eaten without through cooking, either sliced on a pizza, in a cassoulet or individually. Can be eaten cold once cooked.