Homemade Mexican Chicken Chorizo Sausage

Been wanting to make my own sausages for ages. The recipes I like to try out, usually from Emeril Lagasse, often call for different kinds of sausages, (Spanish or Portuguese) chorizo, andouille, or Italian (both hot and sweet). Sweet Italian sausages are still relatively easier to find, but not so much for the rest. In fact, I’ve never seen halal andouille anywhere. Add to that my new-ish resolution to take better control of what goes into the food I feed my family, so I finally got around it today.

This is a recipe for Mexican chorizo, based on the recipe from Honest Cooking. It’s usually not stuffed into casings, but I really wanted to start building my sausage-making skills, so I decided to stuff ’em anyway.

I didn’t know whether this would be a fleeting thing or a lifelong adventure, so I started off with a dirt-cheap plastic sausage stuffer from China bought on Lazada. The casings I bought online as well, a soy-based collagen casing which didn’t required any soaking unlike conventional hog or lamb intestine casings.

What an interesting experience! I watched videos of the process online and thought it may be a tad complicated controlling how much meat goes into the casing without bursting it, but it turned out pretty easy to gauge by touch and felt rather natural for me. The cheap tools I had got the job done without having to cost a bomb; my only complaint was the capacity of the sausage stuffer was quite small and I had to refill it several times to finish off the batch of sausage, but this was a very small annoyance. I might invest in a bigger capacity stuffer at some point, let’s see how it goes.

Start with your whole spices and large pieces first. In a mortar and pestle, add the cumin seeds, coriander seeds, peppercorns, sea salt, and cloves. Depending on the size of your mortar and pestle, you can grind the whole spices in two batches to ensure a finer grind.

Pound and grind the ingredients.

Break the bay leaves and into small pieces and add to the spices. Continue grinding and pounding into a fine powder.

Add the garlic powder, oregano, thyme, cinnamon, chili powder, paprika and cayenne. At this stage your mortar and pestle might be more than 1/3 full, so you may need to grind any remaining large pieces in smaller batches.

Stir and grind to combine.

In a large, chilled mixing bowl, add the minced chicken and vinegar.

Sprinkle half of the spices all over the meat. Using glove-protected hand, work the spices into the meat. Add more spices and continue working it into the meat until all are used up.

At this point, you can shape the sausages into patties, or pack them in freezer bags in portion sizes of your liking. This is how Mexican chorizo is typically stored, but you can also choose stuff the sausages into casings.

Lightly oil the nozzle of your sausage stuffer. Slip your casings onto the nozzle, leaving a tail at the end about 6 inches long.

Add a portion of the meat mixture into the barrel of the stuffer.

Start pushing the meat mixture into the casing. Once a portion of the meat starts coming out of the nozzle, let out any air pockets and tie off the tail in a double knot.

Begin stuffing the sausage, controlling the flow such that the meat mixture fills up the casings firmly enough but not to the point of stretching it too much.

Keep stuffing the casing until all the meat mixture is finished. Cut off the excess casing, leaving a tail about 6 inches long. Do not tie if off yet.

If you like, pinch and twist the sausages into links. Determine the desired length of sausage, and pinch on both ends. Twist the sausage link away from you three times. Repeat for another length of sausage link, this time twisting three times towards you. Repeat for the remaining length of sausage. I usually portion my links to about 100 grams each.

Use as desired.