Chorizo al vino

Chorizo is fantastically savoury, and makes a great tapas dish just frizzled up in its own oil in a pan, with no adornment. But if you feel like doing something a bit special with it, your chorizo will be even better cooked and marinated in red wine, creating gorgeously boozy, smoky, spicy, porky juices to dibble lots of bread in.

It’s worth preparing a couple of cured chorizos at once, even if there aren’t that many of you eating – this recipe keeps well in the fridge, the flavours becoming deeper and richer, so you can bring the dinner table to Spain again in a couple of days’ time. Once again, I don’t recommend that you use your best wine for this. A Spanish vino tinto (bog-standard red wine) will be absolutely fine.

To serve four to six as a tapas dish, depending on how many other dishes you are serving, you’ll need:

2 cured chorizos (I prefer a spicy one, but if you don’t like chillies, choose a mild chorizo)
1 bottle red wine

Prick the whole chorizos all over with a fork, and put them in a saucepan with the whole bottle of wine. The pan should be small enough to allow both sausages to be covered with the wine. Bring the wine to a gentle boil and continue to simmer it for twenty minutes with the lid on.

Remove the wine and chorizo from the heat, and set it aside with the lid on overnight at room temperature for the flavours to marry.

When you are ready to eat, remove the chorizo from the pan, reserving the wine, and chop it slantwise into chunks about 1½ cm thick. Put the pieces of chorizo in a large frying pan with half the wine, and cook over a high heat, turning the chorizo frequently, until the wine has reduced to a few tablespoons and the chorizo is crisp from the heat and dark from the wine. Pour the chorizo, the wine reduction and the savoury oil released by the cooking into a dish and serve with plenty of bread to mop up the delicious juices.

12 Replies to “Chorizo al vino”

  1. Where do you get your chorizo from? Do you have a Spanish deli nearby? Surely not a supermarket (I’ve only ever seen the drier variety of chorizo in mine)?

  2. Waitrose carries a good cured chorizo, but you have to go to the deli counter and ask for it. Cambridge readers can also go to the Cheese Shop in All Saints Passage for chorizo and other Spanish ingredients.

  3. Hi Mary! It’s funny you should say that…my husband used to live in Austin, and swears blind that we’d enjoy it there much more than we do in the middle of the damp Cambridgeshire fen we currently live in.

  4. Just did a google search for Chorizo in red wine because I sampled it at a friend's house over the weekend and wanted the recipe. And here I am stumbling upon you – what a great blog. Have just linked to you on mine! Yep, chorizo in red wine is AMAZING – and thanks for the recipe x

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