Chorizo: The Spanish Paprika Sausage, Its Types and Shapes
If Columbus had gotten lost somewhere else, chorizo would be white. The sausage the whole world now recognizes by its color before ever tasting it spent its first few centuries without a trace of paprika - it was as pale as any other salted meat in a casing, or black, if it had blood in it. The red came from an ingredient that sailed in from America, and only then did an ordinary embutido turn into the Spanish flag in your fridge.
Chorizo is a cured sausage made from ground pork, fat, salt and dried ground paprika called pimentón, which gives it its red color and a faintly smoky taste; it's the most common cured meat in Spanish cuisine. Alongside the paprika there's usually garlic, sometimes oregano; everything else comes down to the region, the shape and how long it's cured - which is exactly why this article is longer than most on this site.
What the Word Chorizo Means and Why It's an Insult in Spain
In Spanish newspaper headlines the word chorizo turns up next to sausages and next to politicians charged with corruption. The second meaning - a thief, mostly a petty one - shares nothing with the sausage but its letters: it comes from the Romani chori, meaning to steal, and the popular idea that bribes and sausages are somehow connected is a mistake the papers keep repeating. The origin of the sausage's own name is "uncertain", according to the Royal Spanish Academy - the word is shared by Castilian and Portuguese, where it was written souriço in the 13th century, and in a Castilian text it's first attested in 1601, still as churizo at that point. The Academy used to favor the Latin salsicium, which also gave us salsiccia and salchicha, and in 2014 it backed away from that theory. So the sausage you find everywhere in Spain officially has no idea where its name comes from.
From White Sausage to Red: The Paprika from the Monastery
Until 1492, sausages on the Iberian Peninsula were made the way they were made all over the Mediterranean - salted, dried, white or blood-dark. Paprika arrived with Columbus, and its first European address was the Hieronymite monastery in Guadalupe in Extremadura, where Columbus presented it to the Catholic Monarchs; the monks sent it on to other houses of their order, and at the monastery of Yuste, where Emperor Charles V later retired, they began turning it into smoked ground paprika - today's pimentón de la Vera. At the start of the 16th century the paprika made it into the sausage mix and chorizo turned red; nobody wrote down exactly how that happened, so the guidebook line about chorizo being here since before the Romans holds at most for salted sausages in general, not for the red thing you buy today. What is documented is when chorizo reached the royal court: in 1786 the future king Charles IV, then still a prince, had a sausage merchant from the village of Candelario near Salamanca, José Rico, immortalized, and the tapestry "El Choricero", based on a design by the Bayeu brothers, still hangs in the Hall of Ambassadors at El Escorial. A village sausage maker among the envoys - the Spanish monarchy knew what mattered.
Fresco, Curado, Dulce, Picante: How to Read the Label
Not much happens inside the casing, and yet what does decides everything. Pimentón is to chorizo what smokehouse smoke is to the sausages we make back home in Czechia: take it away and you're left with salted meat - and that is precisely what salchichón is, chorizo's pale brother, which has pepper and nutmeg instead of paprika. The rest of the recipe is pork with its fat, salt and garlic; caraway, oregano or wine are already regional signatures. By stage of curing you can buy chorizo fresco, fresh and raw, which has to be cooked or fried, semicurado after a few weeks of drying, and curado after months, when it's firm, dark and eaten as is; ahumado has been through the smokehouse on top of that. By the paprika it's either dulce, meaning not hot, or picante, and that's the first thing to look for on the packet - the word "dulce" doesn't mean a sweet sausage, only sweet paprika. As for the pig, there's serrano from white breeds, which is most of what sits on the shelf, or ibérico from black Iberian pigs, which costs several times as much; you'll also find chorizo made from wild boar, venison, turkey or chicken, though rarely at an ordinary counter. And the word extra on the label isn't advertising: since 2014 it's been governed by a royal decree on meat product quality standards, and only the top grade may carry it.
Sarta, Vela, Cular: The Shape Tells You How It's Eaten
A Spaniard can tell what a sausage is for from its shape before reading a word on the label. Sarta, also called herradura or horseshoe, is a thin sausage tied at both ends into an arc - about four centimeters across, briefly cured, good raw or cooked; it's the most common shape, and it's what I'm holding in the very first photo above. Vela means candle: straight, a little thicker, hung vertically to cure. Cular is stuffed into the large intestine - hence the name - runs up to seven centimeters across, cures the longest and is the priciest of the whole family; if you want "the better chorizo" for a board, cular is what you're looking for. And ristra is a string of small sausages tied one after another, usually fresh, meant for the grill or the pot. Packaged supermarket slices tend to come from sarta or vela, not from premium cular - a thick sausage and a long cure simply don't pay off in 100-gram packs.
Rioja, Cantimpalos, Pamplona and More: A Map of the Regions
Chorizo is Spanish the way "sausage" is Czech: the word works everywhere, the recipe nowhere. Only two have EU protection: Chorizo Riojano from La Rioja and Chorizo de Cantimpalos from Segovia, both registered between 2008 and 2010. Riojano is the classic sarta from La Rioja; Cantimpalos is a belt of seventy-two municipalities below the Guadarrama mountains, where sausages were already being dried in the mountain air around 1900 and where the Feria del Chorizo has been held on the last weekend of April since 2000. The rest of the map is tradition without a stamp, but with firm rules: chorizo de Pamplona from Navarre is wide, finely ground and, unlike almost any other, mixes pork and beef half and half; León smokes over oak, and Ávila and the Cantabrian chorizo de Potes rely on smoke as well; Salamanca around Guijuelo makes ibérico from black Iberian pigs; Galician smoked chorizo is what holds together both caldo gallego and the carnival lacón con grelos. The oddest of the lot is chorizo de Teror from Gran Canaria - soft, spreadable, made with white wine, born in the 1930s as a way to use up meat in butcher shops with no refrigeration; in the Canaries it comes with gofio, toasted flour, but there's none inside the sausage, whatever travel websites claim.
Chouriço, Criollo and Csabai: Who's Family and Who Just Looks the Part
To be fair, chorizo is a national sausage only on the Iberian Peninsula - Spain shares it with Portugal, where it goes by chouriço, is more heavily smoked, carries less paprika and more wine, and with the French Basque Country, where the local Espelette pepper stands in for pimentón; Portuguese cuisine and French cuisine both have a genuine claim here; this is no import. Across the ocean, only the name traveled. Mexican chorizo is a raw ground mixture with chili and vinegar that gets squeezed out of the casing into a pan before it's eaten; Argentine chorizo criollo has no paprika at all and ends up grilled in a roll as choripán; Filipino chorizo de Bilbao was invented in Manila by a merchant of Spanish descent who simply named it after his family's home town. Order chorizo on holiday in Mexico expecting slices from Rioja and nobody has cheated you - you've just been handed a different food with the same name. And two sausages that look like relatives and aren't: Calabrian 'nduja from Italian cuisine is spreadable and burns with chili, not paprika, and the Hungarian Csabai sausage found its way to paprika on its own - through the Balkans and the Ottomans, not across the Atlantic.
How to Eat Chorizo: Sliced Raw, in Cider and in Flames
Cured chorizo doesn't get cooked. It's sliced and eaten with bread as a tapa, in a bocadillo or off a board next to cheese and olives - that's its day job. Fresh chorizo is the opposite, an ingredient for the pot: there's no cocido without it, no Asturian fabada and no Riojan potatoes, patatas a la riojana, and in Asturias they stew it in cider as chorizo a la sidra. The showiest preparation is chorizo al infierno, chorizo in hell: pieces on a skewer are doused with liquor, set alight and turned over the flame right at your table until the fat starts to drip - León and Galicia both claim it, and the cook in the photo below was doing it on metal skewers right behind the bar. One rule holds from Galicia to Andalusia, though: chorizo has no place in a real Valencian paella. When Jamie Oliver put it in one in 2016 and bragged about it on Twitter, he united a quarrelling Spain for a day - I write about paella and other Spanish rice dishes elsewhere, and here I'll just say that chorizo in rice does exist, it just can't be called paella. Only order ibérico chorizo at a bar if you're willing to pay double; for a tapa with bread, plain curado from a sarta does the job just as well.
A Sausage Instead of a Fridge Magnet
I don't associate chorizo with any one place. I buy it in a supermarket in Spain, every single time, and take it home - it's my Spanish souvenir instead of a magnet for the fridge. I usually come away with a basket full of whole sausages and a few packs of slices alongside them, so I can compare at home. A whole chorizo starts at 3 EUR, a 100-gram bag of slices at 1.50 EUR; put ibérico on the label and the price doubles and then some. It isn't the most elegant souvenir, but unlike a magnet it gets eaten once you're back and doesn't embarrass anyone on the fridge door.
