Chorizo

chorizo

What it is

Chorizo was a pale sausage for its first several centuries: a sixteenth-century Castilian recipe lists pork, garlic, clove, white wine and salt, and nothing red. Pimentón came back from the Americas and the monks of Yuste in Extremadura worked out the oak-smoke drying that fixed its colour and flavour, remaking the sausage entirely.

In the kitchen

Start it in a cold dry pan: the pimentón is fat-soluble, and the orange fat that runs out is the point — pour it over potatoes or into rice rather than draining it away. Dropped into hot oil it scorches bitter in seconds.

Goes with

Potato Chickpeas Egg Onion Cider vinegar Clam

Same species

Andouillette Boudin blanc Natural casings Caul fat Ciauscolo Suckling pig

Also used with

Bloody milk cap Honeycomb tripe Cabrales Choricero pepper Cockle Faba asturiana

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