Slow-cooked Mexican Chorizo

Mexican Chorizo

By John Hofstetter • 9 years ago

Jul
2014

Slow-cooked Spicy Pork, Mexican Chorizo

We love chorizo. I’ve always loved both Spanish and Mexican chorizos. Spanish chorizo is a dry-cured hard sausage. Typically, Mexican chorizo is a spicy, raw pork sausage that crumbles when cooked. This recipe can be used the same as any other Mexican chorizo. You can stuff it in hog casings if you want. Here I just wrapped them in saran wrap. You can certainly use this chorizo for any recipe that calls for Mexican chorizo and it will work great. I modified this recipe from “Charcuterie, The Craft of Salting, Smoking & Curing“. It’s an awesome cookbook.

I’ve also always wanted a sausage that is somewhere between the crumbled quality of Mexican chorizo and the hard, cured quality of the Spanish chorizo. I looked through some recipes for smoking sausage and found that I could slow-cook the chorizo in the oven and get what I was looking for. Came out great. The slow cooking brings out a richer flavor. That’s how I cooked the chorizo in the main picture here.

Mexican Chorizo Recipe

Ingredients

5 lbs. pork shoulder/butt
6 slabs good quality smoke bacon
3 Tbsp kosher salt
2 Tbsp ancho chili powder
1 Tbsp hot paprika
1 Tbsp chipotle powder
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tspn pepper corns
1 Tbsp fresh oregano, chopped
1/2 tspn whole cumin
3 Tbsp tequila
3 Tbsp red wine vinegar or sugar cane vinegar

Preparation

Cut the pork into 1 inch pieces. Dice the bacon into small pieces and add along with the pork to a large bowl.

Heat a cast iron skillet over medium heat. Add the cumin and toast until fragrant. About 1-2 minutes. Add to a spice grinder or coffee grinder along with the pepper corns and grind. Add along with the salt, chili powder, paprika, chipotle powder, garlic and oregano to the pork and bacon. Run through a meat grinder. You can also just buy ground pork and add the dry seasoning right to that. Now add the tequila and vinegar and mix well by hand.

At this point you can stuff into hog casings or you saran wrap like I’ve done here (see picture below) You can cook this in a pan along with eggs or anything else that calls for Mexican Chorizo.

In the main picture above, I slow-cooked the sausage in the oven. Preheat the oven to 190º. Place the sausage on a foil lined pan and cook until the internal temperature of the sausage reaches 150º. The time will vary depending on the size of the suasage. The sausage I cooked took about 6hrs. It came out with a beautiful caramelized outside. Awesome.