Beef Chorizo

A surprisingly good substitute for "proper" chorizo!

I love the chorizo a lot, it’s probably one of my favourite ingredients of all as it has a very strong delicious flavour and a very moreish quality to it - but I haven’t found proper pork chorizo (i.e. sold as a whole sausage) anywhere here in Kenya yet, only the pre-sliced variety which is never as good.

So, while checking out a new bakery last week, I noticed that they had small delicatessen section inside selling a few of the usual delicatessen type products - olives, pickles, cheeses etc. and… beef chorizo! It looked the part, so I thought I’d give it a go.

As I said, I love pork chorizo, so I didn’t really have high expectations for the beef version, but I’m happy to say I was very pleasantly surprised. Also, I found the company name very clever and funny - “The Well Hung Butcher” :-)

The first dish I made with it was a fairly simple but very tasty sausage/tomato pasta. I fried onion, garlic and chilli in a bit of oil, added the sliced chorizo and fried that for a few minutes, added some freshly chopped tomatoes and some chopped sundried tomatoes, and stirred them in. That just needed a minute or two more to warm the tomatoes through, and then I just mixed it with some cooked pasta, garnished with freshly chopped coriander (again from the garden), some grated pecorino cheese, and some freshly ground black pepper:

As I loved the chorizo so much, I decided to make two more things over the next two days! Next, was a simple salad of fried chorizo, feta cheese, rocket and toasted cashew nuts, drizzled with a bit of extra virgin olive oil:

Next was my favourite of the three, and something I just kind of made up really… chorizo rice. For this, I fried onion, garlic and chorizo, cashew nuts again, and some green peppers, tomatoes and chillies from the garden:

Once the chorizo was ready (five minutes at most - it shouldn’t start to “burn” on the edges), I just stirred in some already cooked rice that we had left over in the freezer:

Served, again, with freshly chopped coriander from the garden and some freshly ground black pepper. Really delicious and moreish, like everything with chorizo in - so nice in fact that I made the same thing again a couple of days later! Enjoy :-)