Spanish Sausage - Chorizo

[Eric Smith Fernandez]

Thanks for suggestions. My brother has a digital ounce scale so we can weigh out our ingredients. He suggested the same thing you did as far as the ingredients.

He said, "We should experiment with different spices and come up with our own recipe" He keeps raving about Andoullie from a country club he used to work at.

As far as chef's are concerned. I'm far from it. I was a kitchen manager @ an upscale family resturaunt called Ravanelli's. My younger brother, worked as the Resturaunt manager/kitchen manager at an affiliate to the aforementioned restaurant called Farmer's Rest/bakery, as well as a country club and a Five star fine dining establishment in St. Louis.

My mom, and sisters both work in the restaurants too. We all like to cook and have learned a lot from the owners who are chefs. None of us wanted a career in the culinary arts though. My brother is now an iron-worker and I'm a CSR for a trucking company until I have my teaching certificate.

As far as my finals. I hope to have aquired a B in my spanish Linguistics class. It was tough. I would like to chime in on the threads on language with what I have learned. I should have done better, but I work 45-50 hours a week and am single and have a house payment. (I"m not complaining, just justifying).

Cooking is just a hobby. If I did it for a living I would get burnt out. That's what happened before. I want to teach and share my culture with my future students.

[Bob]

Eric, if you look at yourself objectively, you have a great deal to be proud of. How you have managed work and school and still found time to make and smoke chorizos is a wonder.

Don't be afraid to chime on any conversation on this website, including the ones on language. I'm wrong about a lot of things all the time, and I'm still learning. I never am bothered by corrections from others - it's all part of the learning process.

I have long had a fantasy of owning and running a restaurant, but I'm a realist who is content to leave it in the fantasy realm. That would be far more work and disruption of my life than I want. All the chefs I know work far harder and many more hours than I do. I'm content to work the academic year and have enough free time to help run this website, go to interesting conferences, write fiction, spend time with my granddaughters, etc.

[Eric Smith Fernandez]

I made more chorizo last week. I made it with my brother. He has a digital ounce scale. It helped weighing out the ingrewdients. I used Bob's recipe with the addition of alot more red pepper to suit my tastes.

My brother, who is much more "atrevido" than me, put both cayenne and crushed red pepper in his chorizo.

I smoked them over cherry wood chips. They tasted great. I probably like apple better though.

I saw that they sell oak wood chips at Wal-Mart made from old Jack Daniels barrels. I will buy a bag and make some more chorizo this fall. I need to eat up what I have now first.

I think I'm going to buy a seperate curved stuffer as well. The one I have with both grinder and stuffer has a blade that has to be on there while grinding or the corkscrew will rub against the stuffing tube. It makes the meat a little too fine.

I'm definately up for a big festivle where we can have several different chorizeros and their different recipes on hand for tasting.

Maybe it could be as popular as BBQ competitions in the Southern States.

[Bob]

If you need "quality control" work with your chorizos, I am sure that I and many others will volunter to help out. After all these years, I still can't give a weight or volume measure for the chorizo ingredients. I do it all by smell and by eye.

I am happy that you have become a chorizo maker, and I am confident that you will pass the skill on to others. This is a very important part of preserving our culture.

[Maestro Tomberi]

All the years we have participated in the traditional slaughter of San Martín, we have made chorizos, and myself, since I was 14 (It rained since then!).

I recommend to not to private the corizo of an adequate; yet not excessive quantity of lard in order to make it juicy, since too few of it would leave it after the curation quite dry.

For the curation, what we do is to smoke the rolls of chorizo while they keep hung up of a cool and fresh room during... around 2 weeks, no more than that. After that period of smoking, you keep ot curing itself the time you desire: few time of curation makes them wonderful for cooking, while a more prolongated time makes them better for being eaten raw.

Finally, if you want to look for asturian chorizos in stores or to order them in the web, I strongly encourage to get chorizos from Grado and specially, Tineo.