Salvadoran sausage: a work in progress?

I bought a package of "Chorizo Salvadoreno Hot Cuscatleco." Produced by Alimentos de Mi Tierra.

This company is based in the Bronx, New York, and has a distribution center in Miami, Fla.

It's a pork sausage and ingredients include onions, scallions, celery, salt, vinegar, paprika, cilantro, chili pepper and liquid smoke.

It looks like a Texas-style kielbasa link sausage. It is lightly ground pork, which is to say it is not so processed that the meat appears homogeneous. But it's not as clean as Texas pork sausage. Split it open and you find the gristle is close to 30 percent of content.

Cross section cut of Salvadoran sausage

I conducted several experiments with this sausage, none of them terribly successful. I first tried grilling it whole. This sausage smells great when you grill it. But once you bite into it, I can't say it lives up to the first impression.

You can forget the veggies in the ingredients. They are hardly noticeable. What is overpowering is the liquid smoke and paprika. It's too strong. And eaten straight, it's pretty salty.

I first served it up with yellow saffron Spanish rice, black beans and ripe avocado. It was okay, but I didn't think this was an experience I wanted to repeat.

Trouble is, I had a whole pack of this to consume. Hmmm?

Salvadaoran sausage with yellow rice, red beans

I repeated the same dish with a few minor variations. One plate included peas and carrots in the rice. Another plate was consumed without avocado. All of them okay, none of them great.

One test I have with link sausage is it should be edible for breakfast, lunch or dinner. What makes it a breakfast sausage versus a dinner sausage is more about the sides that go with it. But this Salvadoran sausage just wasn't something I could envision as a breakfast sausage.

My last effort was to make it a breakfast sausage. Now aware that the liquid smoke and paprika and salt were the challenge, I tried diffusing their flavors by dicing the sausage fine and cooking it in shallow water with fresh chopped onion, poblano and two dried mora peppers (a smoked, dried jalapeno).

I boiled off some of the water and I didn't add any salt; seriously, didn't need it.

Cracked two eggs, and stirred them in. I heated up my usual portion of white corn tortillas and made some refried red beans. What I had in mind was using the beans as a spread in the tortilla, the heaping the sausage, egg, veggies in as the main filling.

For a beverage, I had a Cuban coffee with ground cinnamon.

Morning breakfast looked pretty good.

Again, it was palatable. But the liquid smoke and paprika continued to dominate. This is an acquired taste, at least for me.

Even with the egg and tortilla, it really doesn't pass muster as a breakfast item. I might have it on occasion for dinner, but these recipes are a work in progress.

I'm not a fan of liquid smoke. If you're not going to smoke it in a traditional way, then you should probably leave it out. It is a spicy sausage, which I like, but there are other ways to make a hot sausage that come together better than this.

And the gristle is noticeable. All in all, I have to give this sausage a thumbs down.