It is really quite difficult to write a headline for anything that contains the word chorizo and not make it look like a rather crude double-entendre. I mean I’m writing about food here, so smell, taste and all words related are obvious choices, but related to the word chorizo, they’re just too obvious… I guess I could have gone with an old Marx brothers line like: It smells like chorizo, it tastes like chorizo, but don’t let that fool you! It really is chorizo. Except that’s too long. Be all that as it may, let’s get to the heart of the wurst:

I’ve been wanting to make chorizo for a while now and I’ve been putting it off, contemplating how to achieve the right result. The problem is not so much the sausage itself, but the fat. Actually, the real problem is the pig. Well, the absence of it. I can of course pig out as much as I want in the privacy of my own home, but for restaurant I need a substitute that will bring the right fat content to the party. Not only does the meat need fat, it needs fat that will stay in a solid state and not turn to grease that leaks out, for that is the real beauty of the fatty part of our household oink: The green fat that no other animal has in quite the same manner. Except…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Oh, well, shall I just tell you then? The duck, my friends! You see, I think this obsession with using chicken or beef to make sausages is completely misguided while ducks roam the pond of this our fair city. Chicken is of course a complete disaster as a sausage. Chicken sausage (oxymoronic as that may be) always needs all kinds of weird chemical help to make it resemble the real thing in any way at all and beef normally adds a kind of springy stringiness to it that a proper sausage just doesn’t have. The duck, my friends, holds the answer to all your sausage worries! It’s got enough fat to keep your sausage moist (see what I mean about the double-ents?), enough taste to go around and a fair part of the fat in a form that doesn’t melt away at the slightest rise in temperature. In short, sausage perfection.

And so… The picture above shows me holding my first chorizo (hmmm…) and getting there was pretty painless: I hickory smoked five duck breasts without cooking them too much, then chilled them, diced them and added another six raw and unsmoked breasts with a generous flap of fat still on them and spiced the whole thing up. I’ve bought ready-made chorizo spice before and that was a huge mistake. The stuff tastes nothing like a chorizo and if you think the taste will develop while you fry your salami, you’re mistaken. If your spicy mix does not taste like chorizo right from the word go, then it never will. But never fear, Chris is here and so’s the deal: Paprika, cayenne (or better still espelette) pepper in more or less equal proportions by volume, then half of that in coriander powder. Voilà!

Salt, friends, pickling, brining, curing salt and the usual NaCl in a mix that tickles the tastebuds. Personally, I think a good chorizo absolutely needs to taste a little over-salted, so you low sodium freaks will just have to sit this one out. Marinate for as long as you like, but no less than three hours and grind, grind, grind. Once only, and not too fine either. And then the fun starts…

A proper Spanish chorizo is dried, not boiled (though, possibly raw and fried, but that’s a different sausage story) and there’s the rub: How do you dry a sausage in the tropics? First you have to find a very permeable, but not perishable casing. A traditional casing will slow the drying process in this humidity, so I decided to use gauze. About three layers of thin gauze will just hold the stuff and still not prevent evaporation. Now I’ve hung up my chorizo (see picture) and am waiting. It smells so good the kitchen staff are drooling, but it’s only just been a day and the thing is still… well…, yes…, flaccid. It’s hanging in our dry store and the air-con creates a gently breeze of dry air. You can see the smoked, cured duck breast next to it, which dries very successfully into very tasty prosciutto, so I’m hoping the chorizo will dry faster than it rots.

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? But we can’t mince words in the world of sausage production, where corruption of the flesh is a constant danger, to be fought with salt and dry air. And here, my story kind of fizzles out, while the sausage hangs. I’ll just have to keep you posted periodically. I’m guessing that it will take a month to dry, but it could of course be much longer.

Another year is over and I guess it’s time for retrospection. As far as I’m concerned, the milestones of the year were obvious: A black guy became president of the United States of America and an unemployed housewife became a megastar. The rest of the year was, one might be forgiven for saying, incidental.

The beginning of the absolute end of any hope for white supremacy in the US was, if you remember, heralded in by Mr Obama’s keynote address to the democratic convention in 2004. If you heard the speech, you will definitely remember it. It was an electrifying moment. But here’s a curious thing: I just re-read the speech and seeing it on paper (on screen, really) in the cold light of day, it didn’t at all make the same impression on me as when I heard it delivered by this tall, slim, definitely foreign looking gentleman with the odd name (and we didn’t even know about the ‘Hussein’). There is no denying that he is a great orator, a man who can move a nation. When I heard Obama speak that July, it left no doubt in my mind that the man was heading for the top job.

Another defining moment, though of a rather different nature, was the Youtube morning we all watched Susan Boyle strut out in front of the cameras to sing ‘I dreamed a dream’ for the judges of Britain’s Got Talent (or whatever it’s called). This slightly dishevelled, frumpy hausfrau, complete with cat, who dared to dream she could sing like Elaine Page had heads shaking, eyes rolling and England expecting the most thunderous failure of the year. Then she opened her mouth and out came a sound that was at least a decade younger than her face, a voice rang out strong,  true and clear and told the world there was hope for everyone.

The question is: Where do you go from there? It’s like starting the evening with fireworks and slowly working your way down. By the end of the night the guests leave feeling strangely cheated, despite your best efforts. Mr. Obama’s approval ratings are at an all time low and how can it be otherwise, when after the fireworks he’s dishing out the hors d’oeuvres? The similarities with Ms. Boyle are uncanny! She’s effectively started her career with the performance of her life and no matter what she’s going to do, she can never repeat it. No other performance of hers is going to be able to inspire the stunned awe of that very first one.

So both the president and the singer suffer the same fate. They delivered too much too early, raised expectations they could never meet and thus were destined to disappoint. So remember as the year runs on: The less people expect of you, the easier it will be to pleasantly surprise them.