Learning about Colombian "chorizo"

Mr. Paisa Colombian style chorizo is made by Jim Food, a Venezuelan-owned company based in Miami. This brand name sausage is packed in Opa-Locka, Fla.

I am reluctant to call this a "chorizo," as that is a type of sausage name I reserve for Mexican or Spanish style sausages that are spiced and colored with some variety of dried red chilis.

It would be easier on consumers if Jim Food would call this "salchicha," also an acceptable Spanish words for sausage.But for Colombians (and I suppose Venezuelans), this is chorizo.

It has a different flavor profile, one that I had to experiment with. Since it is uncooked meat, I treated it like a Mexican chorizo, took it out of its casing and grilled with a little canola oil and some shallots, red hot pepper and mushrooms.

The result was palatable, but it wasn't great. Anyway, this is the dish:

According to Wikipedia, Colombian sausage is traditionally grilled and served with a side of arepa, which is something like a corn pancake with a gooey mozzarella-type cheese in the middle.

I found a really good looking recipe at GlobalGourmet.com. This one involves preparing a Colombian salsa called aji rojo. I'll have to try it sometime. It looks very appetizing.

Mr. Paisa is a rather ambiguous sausage. It says it has pork, green onions, spices and powdered garlic, among other things. The ones I cut open revealed a very coarse pork meat and pork byproducts. I wouldn't do that again. And I'm not to crazy about powdered garlic versus using fresh ingredients, but since there isn't any choice in Colombian sausages (you'll have to go to New York to find South American custom butcher shops), this will have to do.

The Colombian recipe at GlobalGourmet.com says Colombian sausages use garlic, green onions, cumin and cilantro. I've no way of knowing if Mr. Paisa had cumin, but it did have something.

I don't recommend chopping up this Colombian chorizo unless you've got some kind of sauce or salsa to put on it. Hence the aji rojo. Cut open and grilled, it dries out and its flavor profile as a stand alone is not impressive. But, guess what?

This sausage comes in a natural casing. You can just grill it a long time on a low heat. My third attempt at a tasty meal was my best effort. I had a pot of smoky, spicy red beans and that made the difference.

The sausage was grilled on low heat. Just kept rolling it around and kept it simmering. Again, I went with mushrooms, red hot chili and shallots for my veggies, but this time I had a pan that I poured the beans into and cooked them with the beans (red beans that were cooked with a chipotle chili, fresh chopped garlic and salt).

I boiled until the bean soup water that came with the beans was slightly reduced and I had a thicker, saucier gravy-style "soup" in the pan. It helps to mash the beans a little with a big spoon to spread the starch of the beans into the water.

I didn't cut open the sausage until it was cooked on all sides and served onto the plate. Now this is a Latin-style pork and beans!

Buen provecho.

Gaspar's: Since 1923 ... talk about lean

I went to the doctor this week, and one of his staffers, a petite young lady in a blue smock, put me through the indignity of standing on a scale.

After acknowledging the weight gain -NotTellingHowMuch - and going through the 'How do you dos' with a new physician, we discussed exercise and diet, among other things. So, no carbs at dinner time, he says. If you do carbs, consume them before or by noon. 

With that fresh on the mind, I tried a veggie dinner that evening with a small portion of meat. It was okay, but disappointing. Am I going to be disappointed with dinner for the rest of my life? Thinking not.

Second evening after the doctor's visit, I came up with this. It's got carbs, but on a really low scale.

Start with enough water to cover the bottom of a sauce pan. No oil tonight, but there is one level spoonful of starch (Carbs! Yes, I know, but it's just enough to thicken the water. Spinkle in a lot of basil flake and two dashes of soy sauce.

The vegetables:  What we have here is fresh chopped red bell pepper, cabbage, poblano, carrot, onion -- small portions of each. Oh, and one large clove of garlic chopped to bits.

This stews in boiling water-based sauce.

There's also a couple of spoonfuls of diced  tomato and jalapeno that came from a can of Rotel.

The sausage, and this is pure coincidence. I picked a Portuguese sausage, Gaspar's. A smoked sausage from North Dartmouth, Mass., this is one lean link.

I split a link and toss it on top of the veggies to heat it up. Looks something like this, but I'm having trouble with getting enough light in my new kitchen to get a decently exposed photograph (gotta work on that).

This is no Polish-style sausage. I've come across very few sausages this low-fat, and it doesn't even advertise itself as being lean.

One suggested serving size, 2 ounces, has 9 grams of fat and 1 gram of carbohydrate. "Suggested serving size," we know what that's good for. This package is three links at 16 ounces.

So, what I'm really eating, one link, is closer to 5 ounces and just over 18 grams fat.

It's dry, not greasy. But well-flavored, and paired with these veggies in this sauce -- I'm just saying it was a big improvement over the previous night!

I heated two corn tortillas (instead of the usual three or four I might have with dinner). Turns out, it was very filling.

One other thing. I called up Travis Poling -- shout out to an old buddy from San Antonio.  I was at Total Wine, and I needed advice on a good porter ale. Travis writes Beer Across Texas. He's our expert on all things beer, and told me his favorite porter is Meantime, an English brand I could not find at Total Wine.

Second option was Fuller's. That they had. And it really went great with this dish. If you like porters and you're looking for a healthier dinner offering, this should make for a satisfying evening meal.

More about Gaspar's. Manual A. Gaspar moved to the United States in 1912 armed with recipes for making traditional "linguica and chourico."

The Gaspar Sausage Company Inc. has become the largest manufacturer of Portuguese sausage in the country, producing well over three million pounds each year.

Readily available at all major supermarket chains throughout New England, Gaspar's Linguica and Chourico can also be found in parts of New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida and Bermuda.

Buen provecho!

Los Galleguitos: real Spanish by way of New Jersey

I'm open to suggestions on what to do with Florida avocados. 
But that's another topic - more later.

So, two Asturians and one Galician get together in New Jersey in the 1960s and start up Los Galleguitos, a line of Spanish recipe chorizos.  I picked up a package of their 'chorizo primera' at a Sedano's (latin grocery) in Hollywood, Fla.

FYI, the province of Asturia is in northermost Spain. It's on the Atlantic Ocean side and faces the Bay of Biscay.  Galicia isn't too far away, also on the Atlantic side. It has a border with northern Portugal.

To my taste, Palacios (a Spanish import) is still the one to beat. But this one is decent, and by that I'm not sure if I mean I'm beginning to acquire a taste for the Spanish style chorizos or this Los Galleguitos brand is better than average.  I'm leaning toward "better than average," but I am getting used to Spanish chorizos.

There's no mistaking the differences between Spanish style and Mexican style chorizos. Mexican is usually fresh processed and soft; you still have to cook it. Spanish is pre-cooked, hard like a pepperoni and the spice mix is different.

There's something tangy about Spanish-style that takes awhile to get used to. Some are too tangy. I don't know how to describe them more accurately.  They almost have a citrus quality, but I couldn't point to one and say, "Orange!"  In any case, the Palacios won me over because it's so smooth -- that recipe doesn't have so much tang/tart to it.

Maybe another way to describe this is to use wines as an analogy.  Generally speaking, wines with too much tannin are less desirable. That's why wine tasters aerate -- get the wine to "breath" -- before drinking.

Los Galleguitos has that tang, but it's not as strong as I've found in some other brands. In other words, I can work with it.

I'm going for a Cuban sense of order with this breakfast (they like to separate their food items, whereas, Mexicans are more inclined to heap a lot of items together).

Low heat: take your time.  Okay, TRY to take your time.  Maybe you should wait until Saturday? Let the chorizo (chopped) simmer on a grill.  Three or four minutes go by, you're slicing onion, red bell pepper, poblano (you may have noticed by now that I never use green bell pepper), and add that to the heat.

You did put vegetable oil on the grill first?

Parallel to this, on a second heat source, your comal is hot and the corn tortillas as getting a tan. Freckle that flat bread up!

Last on the grill -- but not last on the plate -- is one egg that we'll cook over easy.  Otherwise, it's going to make a mess and confound our "separate but equal" presentation.

I like my eggs over easy almost running, so I flip them pretty quick.  No, they don't break.  It takes practice.

Now, about them Florida avocados. I've been buying them lately because the Hass avocados are so much more expensive here.  I'm used to Hass, never used a Florida until I moved to South Florida.  But they're not as buttery and making guacamole with these things is a challenge.  I think it's because they have more water content and this dilutes the potency you find in a Hass.

I have noticed that the Florida avocados hold up better in the fridge, though. Cover an open one with cellophane and it will last longer than a Hass.

Well, if I come up with a better recipe, I'll share it.  In the meantime, we have guacamole on the side! Pretend it's great.

I sprinkle a hard, salty latin cheese (cotija or something similar) over the egg ... and dig in.

Buen provecho!

Palacios from Spain: OMG! This is so good.

I'm not often pleasantly surprised with sausages that I don't buy from Texas or Mexico, but I have to say this Palacios Chorizo Picante is 'oh my God' good.

I found a 7.9-ounce Palacios sausage at a Publix grocery in downtown Fort Lauderdale. I'd never seen it before and I was curious, so I tossed it in the cart and kept moving.

This is an import. It comes from La Rioja, Spain. That's a rural area to the far north that really isn't close to anything people here might have heard of except for maybe Pamplona. Yes? No?

The ingredients are about as simple as sausage ingredients get: pork, paprika, salt, garlic. It says it's all natural and has no preservatives; I guess salt as a preservative doesn't count in Spain?

Whatever. Did I mention I really liked this sausage? I mean really. This simple recipe is to perfection. Just the right amount of everything. I would totally buy this one again. It says it's "hot" but I didn't find that to be the case.

On the other hand, I paired it with a homemade guacamole that had some spicy poblano pepper as an ingredient, so that might have masked its heat. But I don't think so! Not that I'm holding that against it, obviously.

This meal! It turned out really well. I'd rank it in my Top 10 of all the meals I've blogged about to date. And it's so simple! Let's start with cooking a pot of brown rice. That will take 45 minutes to boil, so don't even bother starting the protein portion of your entree until you've had the rice cooking for about 30 minutes.

But here is what you can do in the meantime. Take a quarter section of a Florida avocado (those big light green ones), and a quarter section of an average size tomato, and about a third-cup's worth of fresh onion, a tablespoon-sized section of poblano pepper and a thin slice (less than quarter-inch thick) section of lime.

Put all this in a blender, except for the lime section; just squeeze the juice out of that into the blender. Add about four good shakes of salt, put the lid on and blend. Now put your guacamole in the fridge.

Here's the Incredible Trio: a two-inch length of Palacios sausage, one egg and two healthy looking scallions.

By the way, these proportions are a meal for one. Double the quantity if you're inviting company.

Heat a sauce pan. Put your section of sausage on a cutting board and dice it up fine (almost to pea size bits).

Now that your sauce pan is warming, pour in about a third-cup water and a slice pat of butter and then toss in the sausage and get it to diffuse its grease and reddish coloring (paprika) into the water-butter mix.

Quickly chop up the scallion. Just as the water boils, toss in the scallion and stir a bit. Do not let your fluids dry out, make sure that heat is medium.

You want just enough grease and moisture to crack in the egg, so it doesn't stick. Toss the yolk or don't, depending on your taste and health concerns. Stir until the egg is no longer watery.

I served the rice on the bottom from center to one edge, and layered the chorizo-egg-scallion over the rice.

Guacamole is on the side. I had mine with a porter beer, but I could see going with a red wine or sangria or just a fruit flavored water.

What do you think? Come on! You've gotta try it.

Buen provecho!

Fish & smoked sausage noodle soup

I can't say it enough, it doesn't take a big budget to make a big budget meal.

A can of sardines, a package of smoked sausage, some chopped onion and a packet of shrimp-flavor Ramen noodles and you're there.

Whoa! Did I say Ramen noodles? Okay, now I know (I know!) there are people out there that went through some lean times and were stuck eating Ramen noodles every day. I've heard about them. I've even heard it said some have sworn that once they started making a living wage they would never, ever, ever, ever ... EVER! eat Ramen noodles again.

Okay, so to you Ramen noodle haters -- hey, I felt that way about pizza for years -- I say to you, pick a different noodle. But my point is this is a low-budget meal.

So, calm down. Let's get started.

Open one can of sardines packed in olive oil; how painful was that to your wallet? Chop some onions, the quantity depends on whether you're cooking for one person or two, and whether either of you really likes onions, or not so much.

For the sausage, we're going to use Meyer's Elgin Smoked Sauage with Garlic. Why? Because I can, or could until I ate my supply of Meyer's. But any kielbassa style sausage with garlic will do.

Meyer's is called Meyer's Elgin because these sausage makers are from Elgin, Texas and Texans tend to identify Elgin with sausage. Their website is called 'cue-topia because they like to make cute with the word barbecue, as in the Utopia of BBQ, and not to be confused with Utopia, Texas, which is 177 miles southwest of Elgin and an entirely different story altogether.

Boil the Ramen noodles with the shrimp flavor seasoning and chopped onions. That takes, what, seven minutes? Now take your diced sausage bits (one or two links, depending on how fond you are of meat byproducts) and toss them in the soup, let that simmer for a couple of minutes to get the grease flowing.

The last item to go in is the sardines. You just want to heat the sardines, so turn the heat off and let the heat you already have simmering do all the work. This should take all of 60 seconds.

And serve!

Now don't that look great? It's righteously tasty, too.

Notice that I didn't even break up the sardine. It's about as whole as I could get it coming out of the can.

Oh, yes, and there's a salad involved. I made a big salad. It had romaine lettuce, tomato, chopped bits of dried fruit (apricot and plum), sesame seed, garlic croutons, olive oil and a twist of lime juice.

Buen provecho!

Kiolbassa expands Costco distribution

San Antonio-based sausage manufacturer Kiolbassa Provision Co. got into an additional 55 Costco stores in the upper Midwest by the end of July.

Kiolbassa previously sold its products in 17, Costco stores in Texas.

“This is three times as many Costco buildings as we are currently in, so it’s a huge opportunity for us,” said Michael Kiolbassa, president of the eponymously named company. “Our plant is capable of producing probably about 5 million pounds more than we’re producing, so there’s plenty of capacity to grow.”

The recent additions expand the company’s presence into the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas and Kentucky.

In May, it started distributing at 73 additional Sam’s Club stores in the upper Midwest and in the Southeast. It had been selling at 17 Sam’s stores before then.

Kiolbassa products are now available to about 1,255 stores. The company now distributes in 20 states.

Kiolbassa said the family-owned company has had an annual growth rate of about 17 percent for the past 20 years.

The company’s 25,000-square-foot Texas plant expects to produce 10.5 million pounds of sausage this year.

Using balsamic vinegar in a spaghetti and sausage entree

I'm moving. And I'm trying not to go to the grocery store. Emptying out the cupboards and the refrigerator, so I won't have so much to carry.

The spaghetti box is emptying out to, but I've got enough for a meal. The trouble is, I'm out of everything tomato. No fresh or canned tomatoes. No tomato pasta sauce in a jar. In fact, nothing obvious of any kind. I'm even out of onions. Time to improvise!

I do have fresh garlic, chop two cloves. There's a section of dried guajillo chili left, snip it into tiny squares. I have an unopened packet of Orale! azafran (a Mexican brand saffron). Sprinkle in about a tablespoon worth of azafran.

While the spaghetti boils, I heat up a saucepan and pour virgin olive oil across the bottom. Then I put in my garlic, guajillo and azafran into the hot oil. Stir a little, then get a bottle of balsamic vinegar and give it two hard shakes; don't use too much or the vinegar taste will overpower everything.

Pour in about a two-inch link of Pollok's sausage (really, any Polish sausage; Oh, I forgot to mention it's been sliced and diced to tiny bits first). Now stir, stir, stir, stir!

Burn off that balsamic vinegar, get it penetrating all of your ingredients. Stir, stir!

Take you saucepan off the heat as soon as the edges of the sausage get dark. And take the spaghetti off the heat as soon as it's al dente. Don't cook it until its all soft and fat!

Are we good? Everything's off the heat? Now, drain the spaghetti and toss it into the saucepan. Put the saucepan back on the heat and stir until everything is mixed uniformly.

This dish works as is. By that I mean you can eat it like this and it tastes pretty good (unless you had a heavy hand with that balsamic vinegar bottle! Yes, I've done that, too. Yuk.)

But you can also add a little something dairy, if you don't mind the extra calories.

Try one dollop of sour cream. Stir it in after it's on your plate. Then sprinkle all over with Parmesan cheese.

It looks like this, if you get your eyeball down in your plate.

The guajillo gives it just a little spice, but it's by no means too hot. And you add sour cream, you'll hardly notice the spicy, anyway.

My dish came out a little more oily than I expected, but I only used enough spaghetti for one modest-sized entree and I'm used to making enough for three meals.

At any rate, it's good!

Buen provecho!

Pollok's: some salty "Polski kielbasa"

Maybe I picked one out of an off-day batch. It's a small sausage shop in Falls City, Texas, but the Pollok's kielbasa I've been cooking with this week is the saltiest kielbasa I've ever had.

A suggest: easier on the salt. I know you've got to have it, but this one was a little over the top. Having said that, look, I run into this with chorizos often. Mexican/Spanish-style sausages are so strong that I always use them sparingly as an entree ingredient.

Pollok's sausage -- from Falls City

Trouble is, I normally have a meaty size portion of sausage, a link of at least four inches (or two links, if I'm really hungry).

This meal is a fairly standard version of huevos rancheros (Mexican-style ranch egg breakfast).

Chop fresh onion, tomato and canned jalapenos and leave them in a bowl.

Chop potato to your size preference for hash browns. I don't put mine through a grader, but you could. 

Getting to the fires, start by frying potato on the grill, then lay out your sausage links. Once the potato is near to cooked and your sausage is greasing out and blistering, crack two eggs and cook them eggs over easy.

Get some tortillas warming. It won't be long now.

As soon as the eggs are turned, throw the onion, tomato and jalapeno down on whatever space you've got left on that grill. (I hope you heated the tortillas someplace else, or that likely won't be any space left).

We should have turned the potatoes over a few times by now and they're ready to pass to a plate.

Next off -- same orders as when you put them down -- is the sausage.

Slide the eggs over easy off about a minute after you turned them over, or they'll get too hard.

 And this is what we end up with, a hearty breakfast:

If I had it to do over, I'd have served myself less sausage. Aside from this being a little on the heavy side, I was surprised at how salty the sausage came across.

Pollok's Sausage Plant and Deli is less than an hour's drive south of San Antonio. Their brand of kielbasa is sold in San Antonio groceries, but it's one of the less common brands.

Marcian and Mary Pollok came to Texas in 1854, six years after the U.S.-Mexican War. They came from upper Silesia with about another 100 families.

The family recipe went commercial when their son, Alex Pollok, started offering Pollok's sausage in his butcher shop in the 1920s.

It's passed on through the generations ever since and today the family-run business produces 15,000 pounds a week. It's sold from the Hill Country to the Coastal Bend, and the business employs 18 people.

V & V Sausage -- Flatonia's own

V&V Sausage, yet another well established Texas sausage, comes from  Flatonia, a little town off of Interstate 10 about half-way between Houston and San Antonio.

The company started in 1955 with Edward and  Alphonse Vinklarek out of the kitchen on a farm near Cistern, Texas. The next year, they rented a general store and post office, converting it into a processing shop.

V&V Sausage modernized and expanded in the early 1970s. Today, V&V Sausage is found in groceries and BBQ restaurants all over Texas.

I picked a jalapeno smoked sausage. It's a little spicy, but it's not the jalapeno you notice. The family recipe goes strong on the black pepper.

I'm trying out three meals here. One is a dinner and two are breakfast dishes.

Let's start with dinner. The vegetable is simple. Open a can of beans. Hey, does always have to be time-consuming?

Your choice: ranch pintos, Van Camp's Pork & Beans. Personally, I went with Bush's Baked Beans Country Style.

For a starch, we're making corn pancakes. Half-cup cornmeal, one egg and a quarter cup milk with a half teaspoon of baking soda and a dash of vegetable oil will grill up enough cakes for two.

Heat up as much sausage as you want on the grill and you're good to go. Easy enough?

Baked beans are kind of sweet, of course. I can see opting for a ranch-style cooked pinto bean if you don't want all that sugar.

This first breakfast is not sweet. It's spicy and hearty and simple. Just one vegetable: grilled onion.

I grill onion in equal proportion to the sausage, 'cuz I want plenty of it. Heat the diced sausage and onion together. Neither needs a lot of time on the heat. Add the egg after the grease is flowing and the onion gets tender, but don't let the onion burn.

Stir it all up and put it on the plate!

While you're cooking the main entree, see that sharp cheddar?  We're heating corn tortillas on a separate heat source. Melt cheese on the second heated tortilla, the lay the first tortilla over it.

Your quesadilla (a grilled cheese flat bread) is your side.

Put it all together.

And this is what your plate should look like.

Uhm: see below, then continue scrolling.

This second breakfast is sweet, because that's how sweet potato rolls.

Dice sweet potato small, like hashbrowns. Grill it first, it'll take a few minutes to cook. 

Add our spicy V&V Sausage, then add the egg.

I had mine with tortillas (of course) and hot sauce. You may want to pass and eat it as is or with a slice of toast.

Buen provecho!

An indefinable dinner pasta with salame

Ok, first, this dish works. But I've given up naming it.

This is a pasta dish, but I never heard of Italians cooking pasta in a curry-based sauce. Well, look at the finished product and judge for yourself:

The shiny bits in the plate, that's sardine. For a beverage, I went with an ice slush margarita in a wine glass (sorry, host doesn't have margarita glasses).

So, what's going on here? Well, I bought a Daniele Foods salame, labeled 'salame with wine.' Daniele Foods is in Pascoag, R.I.

What do we always do with salame? We put it in a sandwich. And maybe I should have stuck with that, but my experimenting went well beyond ditching the slices of rye.

I opened a bag of spiral pasta and spread out enough of it in a 10-inch sauce pan to completely cover the bottom (no second layer).

I chopped up a similar amount of fresh green beans and one carrot, and put in just enough water to submerge the contents of the saucepan. Turn on the heat and bring to boil.

While we're waiting for the water to boil, I chop up about half the salame and open one can of sardines packed in tomato sauce.

Back to the saucepan, sprinkle in a lot of curry powder, enough to create a powdery ochre sheet on top of the water. Now sprinkle in basil, shake it in almost as much as you did the curry.

In a cup, add a little water, enough to dissolved two tablespoons of starch, whisk and add that to the saucepan. Sprinkle in salt to taste.

After the pasta and vegetables have boiled for 10 minutes, add the salame and sardines. You don't want them cooking more than two or three minutes, just enough to heat them and diffuse some of their flavor into your contents.

By now, most of the water should have boiled out and you have everything saturated a thin curry and basil sauce.

This serves three people. It has a mild, savory taste. There is not enough fish in the saucepan to overpower it; in fact, the fish portion was very mild tasting. This salame is a little bland, but cut into quarter chunks, you have  pieces sizable enough that you can at least appreciate the taste.

One last note, notice I never mentioned hot peppers. I usually throw in some spicy seasoning, but I wanted to try this without any to see if it worked. It did.

Buen provecho!

Turkey chorizo: is the healthiest choice tasty?

I'm not a fan of some of the things that people try to do with turkey meat, but I have to admit (and I'm paraphrasing Elle Woods here) "it is not altogether unfortunate tasting."

Andy Garcia Foods, a San Antonio chorizo factory mentioned here previously, came up with Mama Garcia's Turkey Chorizo some time ago. My first and most natural reaction to seeing it on the meat shelf was probably, "Oh, hell no."

In the interest of science, however, I picked up a tube of turkey chorizo and consumed the contents over the course of three breakfast meals.

I've given a number of very similar versions of my hueves-con-chorizo breakfast recipes to the point of ad nauseum, but, again, in the interest of science, I have to maintain some baseline, so as to compare this chorizo to other egg-and-chorizo breakfasts.

Going with the usual ingredients: two eggs, chopped onion, tomato and hot pepper.

So, other than the turkey, what's different about this chorizo?

Well, I'll tell you! First, when you squeeze it out of the casing it is thoroughly consistent in density, or more accurately the lack of density. It doesn't have clumps of meat and fat like all other chorizos. It comes out, to put it politely, like toothpaste. Other images may come to mind, but let's not dwell, let's not!

Turkey, compared to any sausage I've ever tried, is kind of bland. I suspected, therefore, that this would be bland, too. So, I did something I never ever do when I cook with chorizo and I added a little salt while it was grilling.

I also grilled the vegetables at the same time. Chorizo only needs a few minutes to cook through. I stirred occasionally and added the egg last as usual.

It turned out adding the salt was a good idea. Once the meal was on the plate, it was tasting pretty good, but just a little short on salt (to my taste, and I'm usually more conservative with salt than most).

I'm not going to do the math, but here is a link to Mama Garcia's Turkey Chorizo nutrition facts. Lower in fat, blah, blah, blah. (Not something I worry about much, although perhaps I should, but there's plenty of folks out there that do).

All in all, it's a pretty good substitute for a pork chorizo. Put it this way, compared to a Mac Dee McNugget, you'll be way ahead.

P.S. -- The side with this is a bean mix of three-quarters pinto bean boiled in a ham seasoning with chopped chipotle and one-quarter cow peas.

It is a dah-yum good bean side for this or any number of meals. I've also had it with melted cotija cheese bits and guacamole for dinner tacos.

Buen provecho!

Migas with a "dry chorizo"

Migas is one of the most traditional Tex-Mex breakfast dishes and the main three ingredients are fried or dried tortilla chips, eggs and cheese.
In fact, you don't need anything else but a little salt to call that migas (pronounced mee-gas). The typical choice of cheese is a mild cheddar.
Most restaurants, however, will add a salsa to their migas. The salsa is a blend of tomato (or tomatillo), hot pepper, and onion. Or in lieu of a salsa, the cook will throw in a chunkier blend of the same ingredients (tomato or tomatillo, hot pepper and onion).
Since this is a sausage and chorizo blog, I'm going to throw in a little chorizo, although that would ordinarily be considered a side, as in "migas con chorizo al lado" (migas with chorizo on the side), or "migas con frijoles fritos al lado." (I'll skip that last translation).
The chorizo I'm going with is labelled a "dry chorizo" and it's made by Diana Foods Inc. in Miami, which is a subsidiary of Goya. I've tried a dry chorizo before, and they are very different from Mexican chorizos, so much so that I don't consider them the same thing at all.

Using these Spanish/Cuban-style dry chorizos, you have deal with them like you would a beef jerky: tough and salty. You almost cannot dice them fine enough. Cut it into very small pieces, keeping in mind the dominant taste -- other than meaty -- is salt and paprika.

A side note here, I could not find a website for Diana Foods Inc. The Internet listings I did find referred me back to Goya Foods. This is a recurring situation I find with East Coast chorizo producers. Their websites either don't exist or they have a very modest presence on the Internet.

Food prep time! Chopping tortillas into sections, chopping chorizo, canned jalapenos and onion. (There is a second dish I make where I chop a tomato; I did one with and one without).

I would normally put a dry chorizo on the grill first. It's already cooked, but it takes a while to get the grease to run. However, since we have refrigerated tortilla bits, these corn tortillas need to fry a little.
You are not trying to make Doritos! It's common to fry them very hard, but don't. You just want harden the tortillas bits to a leathery texture.
Soon after the chips start cooking, toss to one side the chorizo.
After a couple of minutes, throw on the onion and jalapeno.
Next to last is the eggs, AND stir it all together.

Our last ingredient is cheese. I prepared two styles of migas here. One is with cotija, a Mexican white cheese and doesn't melt.

The other, and more traditional, is an American sharp cheddar cheese that does melt. Also, this dish has tomato.

Notice the proportion of dry chorizo with each compared to the other ingredients. It's a modest proportion -- 25 percent or less of the volume of ingredients before egg and cheese is added.

Any more and it's going to overpower the meal. It will be too salty, too heavy.

Migas with cotija cheese and homemade tortilla on side

Traditional migas with cheddar cheese

Traditional migas with cheddar cheese:

The tortilla chips are fried, but not crunchy! Don't overdo the grilling.

And buen provecho!

Smoking beans and veal

Veal and pork sausage has been a challenge for me. I've come up with a few recipes (see my previous Opa's entries) that were palatable enough. 

But comparing veal brats to other sausages, these don't come close to my Top 10. "It's not you, veal brat. It's me. I prefer the taste of grain and grass-fed meats over milk-fed any day."

I do, however, offer a couple more suggestions on recipes. One is to check out Opa's website for a dish involving simmering the bratwurst in beer. 

Or you can go with this: a spicy stew using pinto beans and chipotle. It's all about the bean soup. Boil a cup of beans in salt, cilantro seasoning, chopped garlic and one chopped chipotle pepper (this is also known as morita seca or roasted, smoked jalapeno). You end up with a smoky-flavored, tasty bean soup.

Don't ask me to explain the chemistry, but for whatever reason, veal/pork sausage goes really well with this dish. Open a George Killian red (or your choice of beer) and enjoy. 

I find that veal/pork sausage chopped into this (I did grill the brats first) provides a great balance. There is something sufficiently earthy about the smoky beans and spices that overcome that milky taste in the veal.

I guess it's kind of like what happens to milk in chocolate. Does that make sense?

Buen provecho!

I guess it's kind of like what happens to milk in chocolate. Does that make sense?

Buen provecho!

Chorizo San Luis: when you want a little more fat

Chorizo San Luis is another chorizo product from San Antonio-based Chorizo de San Manuel Inc.

I've written on Chorizo de San Manuel, which is a leaner sausage. And from this company, the lean choice is my favorite. But a lower fat chorizo is uncommon. Traditionally, chorizos are very greasy, so accommodate the public's preferences, Chorizo de San Manuel provides a few choices.

Chorizo San Luis: traditional chorizo with the grease

Nothing all that new with the breakfast recipe, though. This plate is lightly grilled chorizo. Put the hot pepper and onion on next, and the scrambled egg goes in last.

Well, almost last. I chopped some cotija cheese and mixed that in while the egg cooked. Don't overcook, don't let it dry out.

Top this with fresh chopped tomato and serve with greased up white corn tortillas. As long as we're going with a greasier chorizo, why not go all the way and heat the tortillas on the same greasy grill? You can work the fat off later.

Yes, there's a few extra calories, but it's not like I'm asking you to stuff yourself with chocolate cake.

Buen provecho!
And forget I mentioned cake.

A Tex-Mex Country sausage breakfast

Tex-Mex country sausage breakfast

Chorizo may be the preferred sausage in Hispanic households, but the "country sausage taco," (that's what we call it), has been a popular alternative for generations.

Any Polish pork or beef (or pork and beef) sausage link will do.

In its plainest form, you get chopped and grilled kielbasa sausage scrambled with egg. Onion and other fixings are optional.

This plate is a pork sausage chopped and grilled with scrambled egg and grilled, chopped onion and poblano pepper (the traditional peppers for a meal like this are jalapeno or serrano, but if you've been following my blog you know I prefer poblano).

The tomato is chopped fresh and put on the side.

As you can see, the white corn tortillas are getting heated.

The tortillas are store-bought. I've been wanting to give a recipe for making homemade tortillas, but it turns out that I suck at it. Okay, that's a little harsh. My homemade are edible, but I haven't gotten them to come out "a toda madre" (totally awesome). They're not like what I get at Garibaldis on Bandera Road. (A San Antonio hole in the wall that we frequent.)

Buen provecho!

Kiolbassa gets distribution deal with Sam's Club

Here's some welcome news. Kiolbassa sausage is expanding its territory.

Kiolbassa Provision Co. entered a distribution agreement with Sam's Club that will put the San Antonio-based sausage maker's products in 73 stores in the upper Midwest and Southeast, reaching into 12 states.


Kiolbassa brand sausage can be found in grocery stores such as H-E-B, Costco, Wal-Mart, Brookshire's, Albertsons, Super S, Lawrence Brothers, Grocery Outlet and several others across parts of Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, as well as Texas. Find a complete distribution list at www.kiolbassa.com/what-s-grilling.


As the third-generation Kiolbassa to head the San Antonio-based sausage manufacturer, company President Michael Kiolbassa explains that his family name, which means sausage in Polish, goes beyond a mere icebreaker. It’s a marketing opportunity written into his family’s DNA, says the 48-year-old Kiolbassa, whose family traces its roots to the first migration of Polish immigrants to mid 19th century America.

The Kiolbassa brand has grown to become a market leader in Texas using its "Real Meat, Real Smoke, Real Sausage" tagline to symbolize its commitment to quality and freshness against national competitors.

Founded in 1949, Kiolbassa brand sausage is made with choice beef and pork, fresh spices, and is naturally smoked. It has no fillers, no MSG, and is gluten free. In fact, it has the lowest sodium content among its national competitors, a bonus for health-conscious consumers fixing more meals at home.

“Generation after generation, Kiolbassa brand sausage has been the choice for consumers who demand quality and expect excellence,” says Kiolbassa. 

The 25,000-square-feet Texas plant will produce 10.5 million pounds of sausage this year. Sam’s Club in-store demos will encourage shoppers to sample Kiolbassa.

“If it’s not the best sausage you’ve ever eaten, we’ll give you your money back. Guaranteed,” says Kiolbassa, adding that the company’s growth has been built on that commitment.

Kiolbassa’s popular high school tailgating tradition airs on Food Network’s “Unwrapped.” A complete list of products, recipe promotions are 

at www.kiolbassa.com.

Two dishes with Dziuk's fully cooked sausage

To the southwest of San Antonio, about a half hour out U.S. 90 West, you come to a quaint Hill Country town called Castroville.

Founded in 1844, Castroville is called The Little Alsace of Texas because the first settlers were from Alsace, France. It is a small and scenic town. Castroville is also home to Dziuk's Meat Market.

Like just about every other building in Castroville, the meat market is built from the yellow limestone that quarried from strip mines all over the Hill Country.

Dziuk's opened in 1975, which would make it one of the more recent sausage-processing butcher shops in Texas. It soon became a local favorite and is today a landmark tourist destination for meat-lovers in the region.

Dziuk's sausage from Castroville

Although, Dziuk's is in a French Alsatian town, this is a Polish family. Edwin Dziuk started the first Dziuk's Meat Market in Poth, Texas. His parents were farmers in the Poth area, but with all due respect to the Dziuk's, who goes to Poth? A tiny town for to the southeast of San Antonio, it's really off the beaten trail.

The Castroville store is the one the Dziuk's are known for, but I think they still have a shop in Poth.

Once established in Castroville, Dziuk's became one of a very few Texas meat shops known to make Alsatian-style sausage. Of course, they also make Polish-style and other meats. Dziuk's is popular with wild game hunters, who bring their kill in for rendering.

I'm showing two dishes today, both served up with Dziuk's beef and pork Polish-style sausage.

I'm not doing a dang thing with this sausage but grilling it up and putting it on the plate. What I spent most of my time doing here was baking a Tex-Mex cornbread (the main ingredients being corn meal, cream corn, chopped poblano pepper, smoked cheddar cheese).

Serve with a vegetable. I used a mix of diced tomato, corn and okra.

Simple, quick, tasty, healthy. What more can you ask for?

The next dish took a little more time because I wanted to cook beans. So, I soaked pinto beans for a couple hours, then drained and put them in a crockpot for cook for several hours with a couple cubes of cilantro salt season, chopped fresh garlic and (very important) two chopped dried peppers; I used morita seca, as it is known in Florida.

This is smoked jalapeno, a/k/a chipotle. This gives the pinto beans a smokey, spicy, full-bodied flavor. And paired with Dziuk's sausage and Tex-Mex cornbread it makes me feel like I'm right back in the hills, eating at an old picnic table and catching the Hill Country air and sights.

I chowed on this with a dark beer, a Yuengling Bock. Based in Pottsville, Pa., Yuengling is the oldest brewery in the USA, and they make great beers!

Buen provecho!

Chorizo de San Manuel ... mmmm!

Chorizo de San Manuel, this is the good stuff. (Making smiley face)

Chorizo San Manuel

The spice blend in San Manuel is so well balanced. A lot of chorizos emphasize the paprika and you have to do things to tone it down - like, for instance, use less sausage, bring in a lot of vegetables.

Another complaint with other chorizos is they are very greasy and you have to drain them.

San Manuel is not the leanest chorizo, but it is pretty close. San Manuel comes from Edinburg, Texas (I went to college there), and it is about as close to the Mexican border you can get before you have to say it was 'made in Mexico.'

San Manuel is so well made, I'm going to do a really simple dish. The only thing going in the skillet besides eggs is about a quarter of a can of Herdez salsa verde (this is mainly tomatillo, onion and a very small amount of serrano pepper; it's a mild salsa).

Pierce the yolk and toss most of that down the drain, if you're concerned about cholesterol.

San Manuel chorizo in skillet with salsa and egg

I'm heating several corn tortillas on the comal while I cook choriezo and egg in canola oil on medium to low heat. Stirring in the salsa until the chorizo and egg are cooked, but still moist.

Also going forward in the kitchen is the coffee. There's a pot going with Cuban-style ground and a quarter scoop of cinnamon.

Heated up a third cup milk and poured in the coffee.

Okay, this is ready to go to the table, and now I actually have a dinette table to put it on, (just bought one).

Huevos con chorizo en tacos

I sprinkled a little cotija cheese on top and added a little more salsa. Now I can make breakfast tacos.

Buen provecho!

Here's more on the San Manuel story:

Since 1975, Chorizo de San Manuel has maintained the highest control of uniformity in quality and flavor. The main ingredient of the chorizo is the pork meat. We use only top quality cuts of pork which are purchased in large quantities and deboned in our own plant. 

The next ingredients that make our chorizo unique are the spices. We prefer to purchase the whole spices such as black peppercorns, garlic, a combination of chilies and other ingredients which are ground on site by our staff. 

WE DO NOT USE ANY ARTIFICIAL COLOR, FLAVOR, PRESERVATIVES, OR ADDITIVES! This means you get the best tasting chorizo that is 100% NATURAL.

Gumbo! Can Earl Campbell get along with perch?

I don't have any andouille sausage. Andouille is hard to find in Florida. Ah, but I do have some Earl Campbell's Hot Links!

Made in Waelder, Texas, which is located west of the center of the Houston-San Antonio-Austin triangle, Earl Campbell's Hot Links are a spicy sausage that will pass as a good substitute to andouille. But this is primarily a seafood gumbo I'm working on today.

I've said it before, it bears repeating, I often use sausages as a secondary meat, sometimes like a seasoning - the way you would use bacon bits. This is more of a secondary meat than a seasoning, though. Think of it as the "supporting actor" role in a movie. 

Here's most of what's going in the pot: 

There's more than 12 ounces of perch fillet going in the pot. I'm only using one link of Earl Campbell's Hot Links. 

I didn't get it in the picture, but there's about an eighth of a chunk of whole onion going in, too. Chopped up, of course.

From the produce section at the supermarket, I bought a single  container of okra. Chop it up!

Boiling water. I believe it was six cups for the box of Zatarain's Gumbo Mix with Rice.

Funny thing is the recipe on the box does not mention or take into account all this okra and the whole can of diced tomatoes. Heck! No way I'm making gumbo without okra and diced tomatoes.

I'm slicing a sausage link up and slicing perch fillet into bite-size bits and thinking, all that okra and diced tomatoes is going to add water content. It might dilute the seasonings in the gumbo mix. 

So I added two tablespoons of starch, a handful of rice and I added three shakes of soy sauce and six shakes of red pepper flake. I also took one dried guajillo pepper and shredded that in; this is more for flavor than heat - the red pepper brings the heat.

It all worked out fine, except for one thing. the gumbo mix with rice fell into the water in one clump. I expected it to pour out of the box, but it went blump! (That may not be a word, but that's the sound I heard.)

So, now I'm stuck working this clump like I would mole - stirring, mashing with the cooking spoon, around and around, over and over. Eventually, I got it all separated. 

Seafood and sausage gumbo in the pot

The fish goes in last. That way it doesn't overcook.

This makes a lot of food! I easily had enough for six. 

My daughter Shasta told me a story about how you can't make a little bit of gumbo. Her sister-in-law made a pot. It was too much for her family, so after a couple days, she took the pot to Shasta.

Shasta's family had gumbo for a few days, then she took the pot back, and it still had gumbo!

Gumbo's great. And I was in the mood for it. But unless you want to eat it all week or freeze some of it for later, you may want to throw a party.

Gumbo~!

Buen provecho!

Looking at veal sausage: Opa's Bratwurst

Being perfectly honest, I'm probably not the best person to critique this sausage. Opa's, a sausage maker in Fredericksburg, Texas, makes a variety of great sausages.

Bratwurst, however, is made with veal and pork. Veal is one of those meats that pushes my limits - both in taste and on some gut moral level. I'm a meat-eater, but baby calf conjures images of a life unfulfilled.

I don't really get the effect on me personally. Blame it on PETA? I've never had a problem eating cabrito (baby goat). I've even gone on the ranch and slaughtered my own cabrito. But male dairy calves going to slaughter is somehow a stretch. 

Then there's the taste. Veal has a distinctively bland dairy taste. It's like "uncured" meat, if that makes any sense. I assume this is because the calves primarily depend on mother's milk? Whatever the reason, it's noticeable. 

And on that unappetizing note, I get in the kitchen!

Opa's Bratwurst

I tried two dishes, using the same rice with vegetables as a side. the rice was boiled with chopped chipotle pepper. It was white rice, but the chipotle gave it color. And I threw in some frozen peas and carrots and a pinch of salt.

Both dishes are really simple. The first one involved a fresh, ripe avocado, which is cut into sections and symmetrically laid to either side of a grilled bratwurst. This is laid atop a quesadilla (two toasted corn torillas filled with cheddar cheese; it's like a grilled cheese sandwich but fewer carbs).

It was ok, but bratwurst wasn't the best choice for a sausage for these ingredients. A regular all-beef sausage would have worked better. 

For my next dish, I tried going with something more traditional. I took a slice of multigrain bread and put it on the grill with the brat and some poblano pepper strips.

I heated up sauerkraut. Lay the bread on the plate, add mustard, lay on the brat and smother that with sauerkraut. 

The poblano goes with the rice side dish. Going for taste points, I found this worked much better. Bratwurst is meant to go with bread and suaerkraut. I don't think you can get away from that. Putting a rice and veggie dish on the side is about as adventurous as you can get.

I've always seen brats in a bun with mustard and sauerkraut. If there was a side, it was usually German potato salad, but I'm trying to stay away from potatoes - that's a carb load too far. 

Bratwurst on bread with mustard, sauerkraut.

 Buen provecho!