Chori-Pollo: "It tastes like chicken."

Chori-Pollo, a chicken meat-based chorizo from Toluca Mexican Style Food Products in Baltimore, Md., is a novelty in the realm of chorizo offerings.

Que Rico Chori-Pollo by Toluca

Kind of like soy-based chorizos, Chori-Pollo isn't what most people think of when they have chorizo in mind. The standard chorizo is made with pork, and some aficionados consider beef chorizo a "high end" version; chorizo producers certainly charge more for the beef.

Toluca uses traditional Mexican spices with its chicken chorizo, but there's no getting away from the fact that it's chicken. It tastes like chicken, not that there's anything wrong with that.

This dish was put together with white onion, red bell pepper, queso fresco and eggs. We cooked black beans with a ham hock and then mashed them with milk and butter to have mashed beans (refried without the lard) as a side.

By the way, cooking black beans with a meaty ham hock--can't go wrong. It's delicious.

A few observations about cooking with Chori-Pollo. One, it is not as greasy as a pork meat and there's really no grease to drain. In fact, I used more cooking oil and butter than I would have otherwise to keep the onion and bell pepper (and later the eggs) from sticking and burning.

Two, the color contrast is startling. The chicken meat is so light colored that once you break it up in the skillet, it almost looks like the egg is already stirred in.

Mix in the egg and cheese (queso fresco) last. I made enough to serve four, so I used three links and four eggs.

If you've been to this site before, you've noticed I'm generally not specific about ingredient amounts. I've found everyone has a different opinion on how much of any one thing they want. I like a lot more onion and bell pepper than some, and I tend to go easy on the eggs.

I topped this dish with a little bit of salsa.

Buen provecho!