Spanish Chorizo for sale in Barcelona

Travelling to Spain this last summer I discovered a wonderful thing — the chorizo I was familiar with in Southern California but was never impressed with was a far cry from the Spanish chorizo available in nearly every store and restaurant in Spain.  The difference is astounding, and before describing the process I went through to make my own, I’ll outline the differences.

• The most glaring difference is the processing — Spanish chorizo is a fermented sausage, unlike what I now know is called Mexican chorizo, which is cooked.  Being cooked, the Mexican chorizo I’ve had tends to be greasy because you nearly always reheat it causing the fat to heat up and run out all over the place.  Spanish chorizo is like a salami so the fat in it is solid and less conspicuous.

• Spanish chorizo demands smoked paprika be in the ingredients list (notice how red the meat is in the picture).  This can be augmented, but it should be a large portion the spice mixture.  Mexican chorizo is more chili pepper based, typically with cumin and some paprika.  As you can see from this page of Mexican chorizo recipes, the recipes are all over the map but all lack smoked paprika.

• Finally, the grind.  I think every Mexican chorizo I’ve ever had consisted of finely ground meat surrounded by liquid fat.  Many times the meat would come out of the casing due to a lack of binding, which in turned dried the meat out during the cooking process.  Spanish chorizo however is a mixture of large chunks of meat surrounded by meat paste, even moreso than a sopressata. Hopefully, I’ve peaked your interest by now so on to the preperation.

I started with my reference books, and although I haven’t mentioned it yet because it seems like I’ve written about nothing but smoked and cooked meats at this point, but my go-to book for fermented sausages is “The Alchemist’s Book of Salami and Other Fermented Sausages” by William R. Mende.

Bill’s explanations are technical but clear.  His advice is well researched and includes information about fermenting sausages I’ve not found anywhere else.  Plus, he’s a really nice guy still doing this in his kitchen in Pennsylvania.  I highly recommend anyone making fermented sausage at home add his book to their library.

The second book I used was Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie book because I remembered they had their own Spanish Chorizo recipe in it.  Using the two books, I’d make something that was my own based on what I had in Spain.  Next post I’ll talk about my first attempt.

This is a great how-to book for making your own salami.

To keep the ground meat cold, I put ice blocks in a stainless metal pan and top it with another pan

Spices are mixed in, ready to stuff!

I diced up extra pork back fat to add to the meat farce.

The idea behind drying the meat’s surface before smoking it is simple — smoke doesn’t easily stick to wet meat, so by drying the meat’s surface and creating a pellicle (when the surface of the meat has a film look to it) the smoke will stick and penetrate further into the meat.  

Wrapped in Cheesecloth and Drying in the Smoker

Color is Developing

So, that’s my thinking on shortening the drying time.  Here are the preliminary steps:

1. Turn on your smoker to 120 degrees with vents wide open to allow it to cook off any condensation inside.
2. Pat the meat dry with paper towels, making sure to get as much visible liquid off the surface as possible
3. Before you dry a whole piece of meat, it’s advantageous to wrap it in something that makes hanging it easier or possible.  You can purchase stockinettes from Butcher-Packer.com or SausageMaker.com.  These are fine for average size hams and other whole meats. 
4. Do a quick soak in vinegar to make the stockinette easier to remove after smoking and drop the meat inside. 
5. In the case of the 28 pounder, it wasn’t going to fit into a ready-made stockinette so I wrapped it with two pieces of cheesecloth (dipped in vinegar) for complete coverage and trussed it with butcher’s twine.  If your ham fits in one piece of cheesecloth, all the better.  I created a handle on one end with twine and hooked my ham hook through it so I could hang it in the smoker to dry. 
6. Put your thermometer probe in the meat before or right after hanging it in the smoker.  I generally run the cord through the vent. 

Three hours later I was ready to introduce smoke.  Since the smoking process dries the air inside the smoker considerably and can potentially dry out your meat, it’s good to have a pan or bowl of water inside your smoker to keep the relative humidity up.  I use a one-quart stainless bowl full of tap water, but whatever fits in your smoker is fine.  

All smokers should have at least one dampener (adjustable vent).  Now that we are no longer trying to encourage moisture to escape and I want to keep smoke inside, I turned my dampener down to 1/4 open. 

Bring on the smoke!  I use the Bradley 6-Rack Digital Smoker, so adding smoke is as simple as putting biscuits in the tube and setting the digital controller to four hours.  I reset the oven controller to four hours at the same time and up the temperature to 150 degrees.  10 minutes after the oven reaches 150, I check to make sure it didn’t go past 160.  Once I’m confident the temp is under 160 I leave it to smoke. 

Smokey and Ready for the Oven

The final phase begins — we need to bring the meat up to a safe internal temperature by cooking it.  The type of meat and how you plan to serve the meat determines what temperature you should end at.  In the case of ham, if you plan to heat it up before serving it you could partially cook it now and finish cooking it before serving. 

Unwrapped and fresh out of the Oven

If planning on serving the ham right away or in my case giving it away to friends, it’s best to fully cook the ham to 155-160 degrees.  Either method should be completed at the lowest temperature possible. 

The First Slices

1. Make up your cure, either a brine (wet) or a dry rub / dry pack
2. Put your whole meat into the cure for a long enough period of time for it to absorb the cure
3. Rinse off the meat’s surface
4. Dry, smoke & cook the meat

Neal Fraser and the Hog Butchering Class

1. The Cure.  Because I intended to smoke and cook this ham bone-in, I used a brine to cure it.  The curing time for such a large piece of meat would be quite lengthy using a dry rub, and since this was not a piece that I planned on drying like prosciutto I believe it was the best method.

I have a 10 gallon brining bucket.  This time I was glad I have one so large, but you need whatever size will allow you to cover the meat with brine.  Taller than its width is generally the best, and a 5 gallon food grade bucket with lid is a good option.  The key to making brine is judging the amount you need to make to cover the meat.  Probably the best way to do this is to measure cold water into the bucket and put the meat in to see if it is fully covered before adding the salt, cure, sugar and spices.   Once you know how much water you’ll need, take the meat out and add the salt, cure, sugar and spices based on the recipe you are following.  In my case, I needed four gallons of water to cover the ham in a 10 gallon bucket.  If you are spray-injecting, make sure you have enough water in the bucket for complete coverage and for injecting into the meat.  I then added the following:

1400g Kosher salt
168g  (11 Tbs)  Instacure #1 [sodium nitrite]
500g  White sugar
540g   Brown sugar
360g   Dextrose
160g   Black pepper, cracked or ground
2/3C   Juniper berries, ground

This gave me a light level of salt yet still a savory ham not sweet at all.  Great juniper berry flavor and light pepper.  If I was to do it again, I would probably add 100g of white pepper and take the juniper berries up to a full cup for even more flavor and pepperiness.  I might substitute out the white sugar for more brown for even more flavor.  Feel free to change the variation on the sugars, but I would stick to the overall sugar amount (1400g) to balance out the salt.

I then added about a gallon of ice cubes to keep the brine temperature down.  The amount of ice is not critical, but you want the brine water as cold as possible so when the meat goes into it the temperature of the meat doesn’t rise above 40 degrees.

Once your brine is ice cold, the next step is to inject the meat with the brine.  Injecting the brine using a meat brine pump cuts the curing time in half.  This cut my cure time down to seven days.   The rule of thumb is to inject 10% of the green weight of the ham with brine.  Here I have a 28 pound ham, so it is calculated thus:

28 lbs x 16 oz = 448 oz                This gives me the ham’s green weight in ounces
448 oz x 10% = 44.8 oz                 This is how much brine I need to inject into the ham
44.8 oz / 4 oz = 11 full injections                      I have a 4 ounce injector, so I divide the total brine amount by the amount it will hold to get the number of injections

Don’t make the same mistake I did the first time — don’t weigh the ham and then try to increase the weight by 10% by injecting brine!  It gets messy and you’ll have a lot of holes in your ham.  The injection amount is meant to be a guide to injecting enough into the ham to give the meat inside enough contact with the cure.  Some will invariably leak out while you are injecting it — that’s to be expected.  Just try to get it evenly distributed through the meat and make sure you get a few up against the bone.

Once you’ve pumped the required amount of brine into the meat, submerge it in the brine.  You may need something heavy on top of the meat such as a plate or heavy pan to force the meat under the surface.  Cover the brine bucket, and stick the whole thing in the refrigerator.

Seven days later I took the ham out of the brine and scrubbed the surface with a nylon scrub brush.   Once scrubbed, the ham was ready for the next stage — wrapping it in cheese cloth to dry, smoke and cook it.

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Hey Fred! Got so caught actually cooking my pig parts that I totally forgot to email you.  Anyhow, wanted to send you a few photos about my progress with the “nasty/tasty bits.”

Pig Tail and Trotter

I made a fried pig tail, and cooked the trotter. Verdict: tastes delicious but the effort and resources that went into actually cooking it it might be better saved for the restaurants. I’ll eat mine at Lazy Ox from now on.  Shaving and burning bristles off were also a… treat? I made a handful of fried pig skins.   Super delicious and will definitely be making more. They’re like extra bad-for-you chips. And the Country Rib Roast I split apart and just did a basic rub with pan fry, and a panko fried chop.  It was excellent!

Fried Pig Skins, Pork Rinds, Cracklings, or Chicharrón

Currently 10-days in on the guanciale curing/drying process. Just strung it up to dry in my fridge this last weekend. It’s kind of hilarious because I ssentially have a hunk of raw meat drying in my fridge. Not sure how this is going to work out but it looks like it’s going along beautifully so far. I used a banana hook to hang up the meat in the fridge and put a bowl of rice grains underneath to help keep the air dry. My rationale was that if rice will dry a cell phone why not absorb humidity in the fridge? Yes? No? Hi.Larious either way. Would appreciate your advice if you’ve ever made guanciale. No clue what I’m doing here, just making it up as I go.

Guanciale in Christina's refrigerator

Haven’t tackled the porchetta di testa yet, it’s still in my freezer. Thinking about doing that in the next couple weeks. Not looking forward to shaving it.

Loved the class, had an amazing time!  Let me know if/when you do another class. Maybe Hog Butchering 201 is that we all get our own small pig to butcher?  Hands-on learning.

Cheers!
Christina