Chorizo Asturiano

To make a good fabada, you need a good compango. To assemble a good compango, you need a good chorizo asturiano. So off to that great Spanish obsession, the charcutería, we go. The Spanish equivalent to the deli in the States; this is the place you go to get your embutido, your fiambre, your queso. Everyone has a preference for which charcutería is the best in the village, neighborhood, city, region, and country. People will recommend stopping in a town or village solely on how good their opinion of the deli there is.

Asturias is no different from the rest of Spain in this regard. People here are pretty particular about the quality of ingredients in their food, and their sausages and cold cuts are no different. And don’t get me started on the obsession with quality cheese! Part of the reason for this is how adapted to local tastes the sausages in Spain are. Asturian chorizo is pretty unique from the other chorizos of Spain. However, that unique property will be familiar to most Americans. Like Americans, Asturian smoke everything!

What Is It And Why Do I Care?

The Chorizo Asturiano quality mark from ASINCAR.

Nowhere is that more evident than than in chorizo asturiano. The semi-cured specialty of the region tasted both familiar and new when I first bit into one in 2014. With a snap and and a firm but yielding inside, it reminded me of the vaguely named “smoked sausage” one can get in diners all over the States. That diner sausage, split in half and friend on the griddle, has hints of “Italian sausage” and Kielbasa in its heritage. That was the familiar bit, the memory it stirred. But, also full of sweet Spanish paprika (pimentón) and identifiable chunks of alternating meat and fat, this was undeniably a chorizo. That was very foreign to my American palate.

I was intrigued by this marriage of the familiar and the foreign, and I have remained so. I’ve learned a lot about sausages in the intervening years, and a little about the Asturian – Appalachian food exchange that took place throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. I’ve learned about heritage pigs and backyard smokers. And through this unique sausage, I’ve come to see a microcosm of what I talk about on this site. Hernando de Soto took pigs to Georgia, the Carolinas, and across the Appalachian mountains into the eventual Tennessee. Dried chiles made their way back to Spain and eventually became the pimentón that no chorizo can exist without. Hundreds of years later, Asturians moved to the Appalachian mountains to work in the mines and found local people there who ate as they did and drank as they did, and loved pork and apples in equal measure.

And now I’ve gone from the Appalachians to Asturias for precisely the same reasons; work, apples, pork, and a food culture that is both familiar and foreign. That’s why a little smoked sausage is so special. To me at least.