Faux chorizo (chourico)
Hm… the recipe for Portuguese Chouriço and Kale Soup sounds mighty good. I wonder if it can be successfully de-meated. Obviously, either Unchicken broth or vegetable broth would be substituted for the chicken broth, but the main ingredient is where it gets a little tricky.
The soup’s main ingredient is chouriço, a smoked pork sausage seasoned with paprika, crushed pepper, garlic, and other spices. The trick would be trying to get the right levels of seasoning on a sausage substitute. I found a page about how to make your own chouriço, which might be helpful. I think I’ll start directly with a store-bought imitation sausage and attempt to marinate it in a similar way.
It should be an interesting experiment. The soup sounds like it would be nice and warm and spicy, a good combination for cold winter nights.
We use TVP in our chili because it has that squishy feeling of ground beef. What about making a “broth” with the right spices and using it to cook some TVP?
I honestly know nothing about chourico, so I may be way off-base… but the recipe calls for removing the casing, so I’m thinking TVP may be just the right texture if you can cook it in the right kind of spice-mix.
Just an idea….
Go to Vegsource and check out the New Veggies board. Bryanna Clark Grogan, resident chef (and very excellent Canadian cookbook author!) has been doing a lot of experimenting with various ethnic sausage-a-likes.
I’ve tried some of them, and they are very very good, and not difficult at all. If you know the seasonings, I’m sure you could adapt them to chourico – or Bryanna is also very helpful to anyone who posts on the board.
More Soy Cooking by Marie Oser has a similar soup, Kale and Potato Soup.
It calls for 1 11.2 ounce package of Lean Links Italian soy sausage. El Burrito Mexican foods also makes Soyrizo a vegetarian chorizo which might work well!
Portuguese Chourico/linguica sausage texture is not that of ground beef, it’s not even that of italian sausages really hm.. Your best bet would be some sort of plain italian soy sausage (nod@Ann), and then season as well as you can to resemble. It *is* very ethnic and the flavor pretty much comes from preparing the meat from the get-go, rather than seasoning later.
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has been doing a lot of experimenting with various ethnic sausage-a-likes.
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Might be worth checking out.
I am looking for the secrect on how to make portguese sausage.