Sunday, June 24, 2012

"Mexican Hot Sausage" (not!)

There's something in the Latino groceries of Broward County in Florida that is labelled Ranchero Chorizo Mexicano Hot Sausage, and it is manufactured by National Packing Corp. in Bronx, NY.


The listed ingredients, in order, include: pork, water, salt, guajillo hot peppers, jalapeno peppers, oregano, paprika, soy protein concentrate, annato, spices, sodium phosphate, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrite.

There are so many things wrong with this that I don't know where to start.  How about this: Don't buy it!

One serving is one 4-ounce link and it has 810 mg of salt.  Maybe that should have been my first clue.  If you need that much salt to make 4 ounces of pork sausage palatable, there's something wrong with your recipe.

The angry Mexican in the sombrero is not a flattering depiction of the culture, but I could overlook that if this was actually Mexican chorizo.  It is nothing of the kind.  This is a cooked sausage.  Mexican chorizo is  raw and you cook it at home.

And the spice blend is completely crazy.

I honestly do not know what this is supposed to be or what the inventor was thinking.  National Packing Corp. has no website that I can find in Google, so they're no help.

My best guess is someone knew something about making Spanish chorizo, which can have paprika as a spice, and thought if they added guajillo and jalapeno peppers to some knock-off Spanish-style recipe that it would pass for Mexican something-something.

And it has oregano! WTF? It's like the inventor couldn't decide whether to go Spanish-style, Italian-style or Mexican, so he/she decided to mash them altogether and hope for the best. This is the opposite of the best.

By the way, annato is seed that is just used for coloring.  Hence, the orange color.

It just tastes wrong. And there's too much paprika. How bad is it? I could smell the paprika in my urine.

I don't know what to do with the two links I still have. Don't let this happen to you.

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