Lucky dip - chorizo

"the addition of Spanish chorizo or Italian ’nduja (a spreadable Calabrian salami) is pretty much a cheat’s way to make anything delicious." Yotam Ottolenghi

I must be feeling tired - apologies - I resorted to the lucky dip technique and then immediately felt guilty because what I picked was one of those little 'free' booklets - this one from Gourmet Traveller and entitled Spanish inspired.

I felt guilty because on my 'to do' list is something on my son's last Robert Carrier Christmas present, Great Dishes of Spain. I promise it will be dealt with soon. I had temporarily forgotten about it.

My lucky dip book is a booklet really and has very little introduction or travel porn, which is a little odd considering the magazine is Gourmet Traveller so travel is at least half of the story as far as the magazine is concerned. This, however, is just a small collection of recipes with no words of introduction - just the recipes and the pictures. And what did I pick but Chickpea and chorizo soup? The link will take you to a blog which has chosen to publish the recipe I am talking about.

Gourmet Traveller does not seem to have it on their site.) Not all that inspiring thought I - it's the sort of soup that I make up all the time. Although I probably don't do it with chorizo much as it tends to be a bit spicy for my husband. And we don't eat chick peas a lot, though we should and I quite like them too.

So I thought I would take the opportunity to look into chorizo - which is found on all of our supermarket shelves these days, but which was unheard of in my youth. I'm not sure when Spanish food, and tapas and chorizo in particular became a big thing. There has always been a small but active Spanish speaking community in Melbourne, well since WW2 anyway - maybe since Pinochet's Chile. Possibly there are more South Americans, than Spanish. I don't know. The community used to be centred on Johnston Street, but I suspect it's moved. We now have tapas bars and upmarket Spanish restaurants like Movida all around the place. Eltham has a tapas bar called Small Plates, though it doesn't seem to be all that popular.

"Romantic nostalgia in Spain has a smell. It is the smell of chorizos hanging in attics and kitchens. The taste and aroma of a piece of chorizo… evokes powerful ancestral and family memories of the day of the matanza, when the family pig was killed and everyone had a part to play in the preparation of hams and sausages for drying”. Claudia Roden

Well I won't dwell on all of that - the Italians are the same with their salamis, suffice to say that chorizo in Spain and Portugal is made from pork - chopped, flavoured and smoked or sold fresh. There are the two types - fresh and smoked. And these days you can get both kinds, though not necessarily in your supermarket. But maybe even there. I confess I haven't really looked. And I also suspect that, like the English, we now have our own Australian artisan producers. And like everything artisan it's probably pricey but worth it. Chorizo is also flavoured with paprika which gives it it's colour - sometimes spicy, sometimes not.

The Mexicans on the other hand seem to be a bit more adventurous in the sense that their chorizo is sometimes made with meats other than pork and is even sometimes vegetarian - green as shown here. Theirs also tends to be spicier. Probably in America there is a tendency to go the Mexican way. Here we go Spanish.

"Chorizo, depending on whether you buy it from a specialist shop, a Spanish market stall or a supermarket, will vary enormously in taste, texture and quality, but can be relied on to send waves of vibrant, husky warmth through a cheap bean or dried pea stew." Nigel Slater

And speaking of Nigel Slater I found that he had a recipe for a chickpea and chorizo stew - not a soup - although there was not a lot of difference between the two recipes. Interestingly, the main difference was that the soup had rather more flavourings and rather more vegetables, so you would think that was the stew and Nigel Slater's was the soup. Delia had at least 11 recipes using chorizo, including a similar bean and sausage stew/soup and Jamie Oliver does even better. Taste tops them all with over 400 recipes. Which just shows how something that was unknown in white anglo societies some twenty years ago is now a common or garden ingredient that we all know about.

So what's next?