Ingredient

Chorizo

Chorizo comes in two forms that need completely different treatment. Cured chorizo is firm, sliceable and ready to eat. Fresh chorizo is soft, raw and must be cooked. Buying one when a recipe means the other is the single most common chorizo mistake, and the pack does not always make it obvious.

Telling them apart

Cured / curado

Firm, dry, deep red, sliceable, sold whole or sliced in packs. Fermented and air-dried. Ready to eat as it is, and used like a salami.

Semi-cured / semi-curado

Softer, shorter cure, usually cooked. The everyday Spanish cooking chorizo.

Fresh / cooking chorizo

Soft, raw, in a sausage casing, sold chilled. Must be cooked through. This is what most recipes calling for "cooking chorizo" mean.

Mexican chorizo

A different tradition entirely — raw, soft, often much spicier, seasoned with vinegar and dried chillies rather than paprika, and typically squeezed out of its casing and crumbled. Not interchangeable with Spanish.

Dulce and picante

Sweet and hot, referring to the paprika used rather than to sugar. Both are Spanish and both are common.

The test

If it is firm enough to slice thinly and hold its shape, it is cured. If it squashes, it is fresh and needs cooking.

What makes it chorizo — and the oil

The defining ingredient is pimentón, Spanish paprika made from dried and often smoked peppers. It is what gives chorizo its colour, its smoky sweetness and much of its character, and it is why chorizo tastes nothing like an Italian salami despite a similar construction.

Pimentón comes in dulce (sweet), agridulce (bittersweet) and picante (hot), and the smoked kind from La Vera has protected status.

The practical consequence for cooking is the oil. Fry chorizo and the fat renders out stained deep orange-red and carrying the paprika, the garlic and the smoke. That oil is one of the most useful things a pan can produce.

Do not pour it away. Cook the chorizo first, lift it out, and use the rendered fat to fry your potatoes, onions, eggs, rice, prawns or bread. A dish built on chorizo oil tastes of chorizo the whole way through rather than only where the pieces are, and this is most of what separates a good chorizo dish from one with sausage in it.

How to use each

• Cured, sliced thin, as a tapa with bread, olives and cheese. Bring it to room temperature — cold chorizo tastes of much less.
• Cured, diced and fried, to render the oil for a dish. It crisps rather than browning soft.
• Fresh, in chunks, fried hard then simmered — with chickpeas, in a stew, with lentils, or in a bean dish.
• Fresh, in cider or red wine — the Asturian and Riojan classic, simmered until the liquid reduces to a glaze.
• With potatoes and eggs, in almost any combination. Chorizo and potato is one of the great cheap pairings.
• In a paella or a rice dish, though purists will tell you it has no place in a Valencian paella, and they are right about that specific dish.
• With seafood — chorizo and squid, chorizo and prawns, chorizo and mussels. The smoke and the paprika suit shellfish remarkably well.
• Crumbled into a pasta sauce or a soup, where a small amount seasons the whole pot.

A note on buying and keeping

A whole cured chorizo keeps for a long time — that is what curing is for — and hangs happily in a cool larder or lives in the fridge. It firms and darkens with age, which is not a fault. A white bloom on the outside of a traditionally made one is usually the intended surface mould, as on a salami; fuzzy coloured growth is not.

Fresh chorizo is a raw sausage and keeps like one — a few days in the fridge, or frozen.

The skin on cured chorizo is edible but tough, and most people peel it off before slicing. On fresh chorizo it holds the sausage together and stays on unless you are crumbling it.

Quality varies widely. Look for a high pork percentage, pimentón named on the label rather than generic "paprika", and as short an ingredient list as possible. FoodHQ does not publish safe cooking temperatures or keeping times. Those are set by a food safety authority rather than by a cookery writer, and in the UK the Food Standards Agency is the one to consult.

Common questions