Phagomania: Jerkin' it

Our adventures in the wide world of meat production continue with homemade chorizo, despite the unhelpful nature of some of our equipment and the unexpected warmth of some of our cupboards

Feature by Lewis MacDonald | 07 Aug 2013

Those of you wise enough to read last month’s escapades of Phagomania will know two important things. First, that we enjoyed the thrills of making bacon (and saying ‘making bacon’ a lot), including experimental and semi-successful Cuba Libre bacon.

Second, we promised the prospect of smoked bacon and chorizo. Well, lots of exciting smoked things actually. However the smoker is still in the process of construction, and you really can't rush these things. However, we do have chorizo. Homemade chorizo. And now you're not annoyed anymore.

If you are, along with the majority of the population, of the mindset that anything is made better by the addition of chorizo, you have come to your Garden of Eden. And here’s the scoop: making your own chorizo makes it vastly cheaper, and it won't look like the supermarket stuff that's both anaemic and luminescent at the same time.

Following on from last month’s bacon-making, myself and partner-in-crime Alistair (armed with a hefty delicatessen knowledge) put ourselves in the firing line for you, dear reader. The thing I forgot about when eating things like salami or chorizo is that you are essentially eating raw meat. What we are dealing with here are fermented sausages where the salt and ageing give us our lovely meaty goodness, but when you leave raw meat hanging about, the proposition of chomping on it feels a bit daunting. But we did it for you. You're welcome.

First things first: pork meat. We went for the easy option and bought minced pork. But with any good salami, you want those chucks of fat in there, so we bought pork belly slices and put them through a blender. For a better quality product you want to finely chop up shoulder meat. Next it is recommended to go for 25g of salt for every kilo of meat. We just went on visuals and tossed a load in there. Now for the key flavouring, lovely smoked paprika.

As some of you know, you can get some pretty fancy-pants and pricey paprika out there, but in the interests of making this advice useful to everyone/being cheapskates we grabbed some Tesco smoked paprika and used a ton of that. We also added garlic powder, chilli powder, ground coriander, dried oregano and sugar. As a bonus, we took some dried, finely diced smoked chipotle chillis and chucked them in there. Get your hands dirty and mix it up, and prepare for the most innuendo-rich paragraph in the history of food writing. 

As we were air-drying and not making fresh sausages, we went for an unusual but effective casing – tights. Hand stuff it and squeeze it in there, using gravity as your friend. You’ll end up with a freaky, long, thick, orange, dangling sausage on your hands. You can leave it to hang whole but if you know how to link sausages, this would be a handy timing to (ahem) whap out your sausage skills.

At this point, our two chorizo looked great, and as we watched our meat-packed tights swing we wished we had some regular sausage casings to cook up a fresh taster. But here’s where we may have gone wrong. We left it them dry out in a boiler cupboard. After a month of patience, the chorizo had really dried out. And I mean dry. Ever done the cinnamon challenge? Or the water cracker-eating challenge? Or been ship-wrecked on a desert island? That dry. Turns out we had successfully made jerky chorizo. Hey, it was pretty tasty stuff, if a tad overly salty. And no one died of food poisoning.

If you are interested in our experimental jerkizo then that’s great, try it, but I believe we should have  stored it somewhere with more circulation, such as a garage or even outside in a cage. For serious candidates, there are many well-deserving online guides but I’d recommend the Guardian's salami guide, with our above adjustments on the flavourings. But then they probably won't tell you to stuff your meat into a pair of tights – we're different like that.

Catch up on Phagomania's mini-series on making your own meat at theskinny.co.uk/food