Spanish Chorizo

The first time I had a really good authentic Spanish Chorizo was when I was in Valencia Spain.  It was cut up small and sauteed as the base of a Paella, the national dish of Spain.  The flavors in this dish are amazing, and me being the food geek that I am, have to make as many of the components of a dish.  Only downside is that it will take weeks to get everything ready, to put the dish together.  There is a great blog out there, that I have mentioned before called Wrightfood, he has great how to recipes, not only Charcuterie by the way.  When I saw his post on Spanish Chorizo, I had to give it a go, and put my twist on it, of course.  You will have to excuse the lack of prep pictures in this post.  The first step to making a good sausage is your ingredients.  I got the pork from Newman Farms, and the Piment D'Espelette, here on amazon.  The Piment is the key to this salumi.  Very rich, smokey, and delicious.  See the Mis en Place below.





• 1700g Pork Shoulder
• 207g Pork fat back
• 52g Kosher salt
• 4.5g Cure #2
• 7.6g Dextrose
• 11.4g Black pepper ground
• 32g Piment D'Espelette
• 2g Hot Peperonchino Powder
• 10g Fresh garlic, grated on a microplane
• 1Tbs Bactoferm TSPX
• 30mil Distilled water with a pinch of dextrose.
• Hog casings, soaked a min of 30 minutes in tepid water with a Tbs of distilled vinegar.

First step in making any type of fermented sausage is to ensure everything that is going to be in contact with the meat is very, very clean, and cold.

Slice your pork shoulder, and back fat into long strips and place in the freezer until almost frozen.  During this time, assemble all of your other ingredients.  Add your starter culture to the 30mil of distilled water with a pinch of dextrose to wake the culture up.  Always make sure you use distilled water, never tap water.  Place your meat grinder parts in the freezer.

Grind the meat and fat thru the fine disk of your meat grinder, into a bowl that is sitting in ice.  Once again, the cold is your friend here.  If your meat mixture gets to warm, your are not only going to get a nasty fat smear, but also can be introducing bacteria into your salumi.

Add all of your ingredients to your meat mixture and mix at a low speed until very well incorporated.  Keep mixing until you start to see a small white film building up on the side of the bowl, this is the fat emulsifying with the meat mixture and getting nice and tacky.

Stuff this mixture into hog casings and create about a Twelve inch loop, to hang. Reserve a small amount of the meat mixture, wrap in clear film and hang with the salumi in the cure chamber to test the PH.  See below.

This is the Chorizo pre mold culture and fermentation.  The sausage got sprayed with M-EK-4 Sausage mold, and went into the fermentation Chamber for 35hrs at 75 degrees F and 80-85%RH.  Using a PH test strip check to see the PH of your meat.  Mix a small amount of meat with distilled water and test.  Once this is below 5.3 you are ready to hang the salumi.  Here is a post fermentation pic.

You can see that it has already firmed up quite a bit and has started to bloom with good salumi mould.  This will hang in the cure chamber until it has lost at least 35% moisture and is firm to the touch.  I was very happy with the mould culture that I used.  This is how it looked a week later in the cure chamber.

The Chorizo is on the far right, with some Peperone in the middle.  This stuff is turning out great.  Making some tweaks here and there but overall I am diggin it.  Have had a couple epic fails, and some great success.  The latest version of peperone was ready last night and is freaking amazing.  I will post an updated recipe soon.  In the mean time, Source local and Love your meat.!!