“There’s a thousand little things that go into making a great-tasting sausage, … It’s just attention to detail, every darn one.”

– Ralph Stayer, President, Johnsonville Foods

Buenos Aires – One of the cool things about being in a sort of multi-tasking lifestyle these days, i.e., I don’t have one job that I go to six days a week for twelve to fourteen hours a day… which is what working in New York restaurants tended to consist of, is that I have a lot of flexibility in both my time and what I do. In New York I never could have simply said one day, “hey, I think I’ll take a course in basic cheesemaking” or, “I keep hearing about all this molecular gastronomy stuff, let me go find out what it’s really all about” or “you know, my mother used to can vegetables and jellies, but never taught me how…”. But here, I have the time to do stuff like that, and I’m finding it more and more enjoyable to have myself actively back in learning situations. So when another expat friend and had gotten into several discussions about making homemade sausages, I suggested that we contact my “cheese professor” and see about taking his sausage making/meat curing course. A week later, we found ourselves in front of him out in Villa del Parque discussing the pH of meat, various types of preservatives, and lovely stuff like “how to clean and prepare fresh intestines for stuffing” (which I’m now glad to know how to do, and more glad to know where to go buy them already cleaned and prepared). A week after that, we showed up at his door carrying a 2 kilo bondiola (pork neck roast, what we might call the “Boston Butt”), a 1 kilo nalga (beef rump roast), and a kilo of fatback. Over the next four hours we went through step by step all the details of turning these into three dozen or so fresh chorizos…

Just finished stuffing the casings…

Hector demonstrating how to tie them off into individual chorizos…

All ready to be hung up and cured…

Having been left in a humid spot with good air circulation for 24 hours, the meat cures slightly – notice the darker color…

Henry likes his chorizos choripan style with scrambled eggs…

I like mine with a couple of fried eggs. Can this relationship last?

Absolutely delicious – regardless of egg style! The hard thing with stuff like this is going back to eating store-bought versions… unless you’ve got a really good butcher in the ‘hood who makes their own and makes them well.

This week, on to cured chorizo styles, like longaniza, cantimpalo, colorado, even salamis…