Chorizo Salami

It feels like i've made chorizo a million times before, yet each one always turns out a little different, only because of several ingredients i usually just do by eye. This time i switched it up and weighed all my ingredients rather then measured which can alter a recipe alot. One persons tablespoon might be different from an others. There's a different chorizo recipe out there for every person who makes it. Never have i seen a recipe that was identical to the last one. Perhaps that's because the portuguese and spanish use it to describe any type of pork sausage usually containing paprika. I first made it about 3 years ago and have continued to make it in the last three restaurants i've worked for. It's evolved and only recently has my chef put it in recipe format. So i've used that as my base and basically have changed a few ingredients, amounts and the way its prepared. I've always hand chopped the meat and ground just enough pork and fat to hold it all together, but this becomes very very time consuming especially when your doing a large batch. We usually grill coins of it and serve it with some sort of octopus preparation, but i've always found it to be a little chewy and chunky feeling in the mouth, not to mention the ratio of hand chopped fat and pork belly outweighing actual meat. 

So that was my first thing i wanted to fix. The other thing i wanted to change or perhaps just minimize was the amount of pimento paste thats called for in this recipe. If you have never used or heard of portuguese pimento paste i suggest you source some out. It is great on so many levels and is best used while sweating onions, on eggs, steak, and in this case is the secret ingredient in my chorizo. I've found in the past if you use too much of it thats all you can taste and although thats not a bad thing, it doesn't have the balance i look for in a salami. I've also omitted the pork belly altogether, and changed the hand diced pork back fat to a small dice rather then a medium one. therefore it will be a lot more palatable, as i'd like to serve it cut a bit thicker on a bias rather then a thin slice. Although, in the past i have thinly sliced it from one end of the salami to the other and it looked beautiful. I also add some lean beef trim for body and to aid in a deeper colour as well as binding as i find beef binds better then pork when ground. 

When looking for pepper paste try to source out the Ferma brand or Melo's and you can choose whether to use hot or sweet depending on your taste. 

Chorizo Salami

3000g pork shoulder

700g lean beef, horse, or bison

700g pork back fat, small dice

200g pork back fat, ground

210g portuguese pimento paste, hot or sweet

24.1g kosher salt

7.5g black pepper, ground

26.5g piri piri spice blend, not the sauce

10g smoked paprika

1.6g cumin, ground

4.1g corriander seed, ground

15g dextrose

66g white wine, dry

88g fresh garlic, minced

1.8g dried red chili pepper, ground

11g instacure#2

Starter culture

Distilled water