Celebrate Sausage S01E20 - Spanish Chorizo

welcome back and thanks for joining us today on celebrate sausage we're going to be making spanish chorizo stay tuned [Music] spanish chorizo is one of those sausages that falls into the advanced category it's a fermented fully dried fully cured sausage and if you've ever had spanish chorizo you'll know what i'm talking about it's delicious it's heavily spiced a lot of different unique paprikas is what not only gives it its color but it gives it its amazing flavor this sausage can be spicy or sweet depending on the paprikas that you use and in today's video i'm going to show you how we make this fermented fully dried fully cured spanish chorizo to make spanish chorizo we're going to be using pork and back fat i'm using 70 lean pork and a 30 back fat ratio if you happen to have pork shoulder that cut works beautifully as well because it already has a great lean to fat ratio i'm going to make sure that my meat is properly chilled before we grind it and when we grind it we're going to be grinding it through a 10 millimeter course plate i'm grinding my meat and fat together let's take a quick look at the spanish smoked paprikas that we're going to be using one is a sweet paprika and that's what dulce means while the other one picante that means spicy so we're going to be using a combination of both of those once we're finished grinding we're going to go ahead and add all our spices this is our paprika our salts our cure number two and that's gonna really help with the flavor but it's also gonna help with the binding properties because the salt is gonna start to pull some of the myosin out of the meat which is gonna act like a glue when we go to mix it so this is gonna go into the fridge at least six hours overnight is better it's now the following day and 30 minutes before we are gonna mix our meat we need to prepare our starter culture this starter culture is called flavor of italy it's sold exclusively by the sausage maker and it delivers incredible flavor to prepare this starter culture we're going to mix a little bit into some distilled water and then let it rehydrate for 30 minutes and then it's ready to use this is going to add beneficial bacteria to our meat so now that our meat has been seasoned it's re-chilled we're going to go ahead and mix it and add our starter culture we're going to mix this for a couple of minutes on about a medium speed until our meat mince is nice and sticky and then we're going to stuff it [Music] so [Music] now that our chorizo has been put into casings it's time to weigh it we're going to target about a 38 to 40 percent weight loss and that's what i've done here i've put my actual weight and then my target weight and once i hit my target weight then it's done that's the amount of moisture that it's lost at this point our chorizo is going to ferment and this little bit of minced meat was in my stuffing horn we're going to use that to test our ph so i'm just going to set that in the same area that i'm going to be fermenting the bacteria that are in the starter culture that we're using to ferment like to be in an area between 75 fahrenheit and 85 fahrenheit with a relatively high humidity so you can place this anywhere you want as long as those conditions are met in my case it's just going to hang in my kitchen after 24 hours it's time to test the ph and we're using a ph meter from a para instruments because it's not only incredibly easy to use but it delivers accurate results which is what we're looking for when making salami when you're making salami the safe zone is anything under 5.2 but with this starter culture we want to shoot for 4.9 but anything in that range is perfect and as you can see i'm in the 4.9 range and now we can begin the drying process so the hard work is now behind us and to dry this we want to place our chorizo into a modified fridge or a basement where we can maintain a 55 degree fahrenheit temperature with an 80 humidity until we reach 37 to 40 percent weight loss i'm going to be placing this chorizo into a modified fridge and if you'd like to know how to build one of these very easily then be sure to check out that link in the top right hand corner here in a minute though i'll show you the different things that i use in order to maintain the right temperature and the right humidity to maintain the right humidity we start with a dehumidifier because there's plenty of humidity in the air and not all dehumidifiers work the same but the evadry 1100 is a superstar and one we recommend if you plan on making salami as far as humidity goes we increase the humidity when that's necessary by using an ultrasonic cool miss humidifier both of those units and the refrigerator are controlled by these two simple controllers from ink bird this green unit controls the refrigerator it controls the heating and the cooling in my case i don't need to control the heating so i just have my fridge plugged up to it and we set it to 55 degrees fahrenheit this blue unit controls the humidity and we have the dehumidifier and the humidifier plugged up to it and we have that set to 80 percent and now we wait generally you're not going to find chorizo with an exterior mold covering so what i normally like to do is a couple of weeks into the drying process i'll take a paper towel that's been soaked in white vinegar and i'll just go ahead and clean any of that mold formation off of that chorizo this is going to do a couple things this is going to remove any existing mold but it's also going to inhibit future mold and this is completely optional if you do have beneficial mold growing all over your chorizo and you want to leave it that is completely fine as well because of the diameter of this salami it only takes about five to six weeks so we're going to wait a couple more weeks until we hit our 40 weight loss target that's going to give us a nice firm chorizo and once we hit our target it's time to go ahead and slice it open it feels great it smells amazing and i can't wait to taste [Music] this is my favorite part of the entire process and if salami has taught me anything it's taught me patience being able to use seasonings thyme and bacteria to turn meat into edible masterpieces what's cooler than that let's give it a taste incredible sweet a little spicy flavorful there's a slight fermented flavor coming from it it's amazing okay i gotta admit there are a lot of steps and there is some special equipment that you're gonna need in order to make this fully dried fully cured fermented sausage but if you ever get to a place in which you wanna know what's next this is definitely a rabbit hole you should entertain it's challenging it's fun it does require patience a little bit of special equipment but the end result is absolutely delicious this spanish chorizo is one of our family's favorites it's incredible you can find the recipe for it in the description box below and if you have any questions about fermentation drying curing or the process in general be sure to leave them in the comments section thanks for joining us don't forget tomorrow same time same place we got a brand new sausage and a brand new recipe we'll see you then [Music] [Music] you

Channel: 2 Guys & A Cooler

Views: 18,208

Rating: 4.9219089 out of 5

Keywords: Celebrate Sausage, How to make sausage, sausage maker, easy sausage recipes, cured meats, smoked sausages, How to make salami, spanish chorizo, easy salami recipe

Id: UNBBg4i84m0

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TwoGuysandaCooler]

Well, here we go. One of the more commonly known salamis on the planet gets demystified!! This salami takes 4-6 weeks to make and extremely delicious. This is the full blown process from grinding, stuffing, fermenting, and drying. The real trick here is to have a drying chamber. If you want the recipe you can find it here: http://twoguysandacooler.com/spanish-chorizo/

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