Smoked Beaver Chorizo

For how much fresh chorizo we make every season, we’ve never had the thought to smoke it. Which is surprising, because we love chorizo and putting things in the smoker. So naturally we had to try it out. This sausage is garlicky, spicy, and heavy on the smoke. It’s perfect with anything involving cilantro, limes, or avocados. It's also fantastic on pizza, over eggs, or eaten barehanded standing next to the grill.

This sausage is similar to our fresh venison chorizo recipe, except for a few things:

There is the obvious swap from venison to beaver, though you could make this with any red meat- venison, duck, or goose come to mind. Then, there is the addition of the curing salt, which is needed during the smoking process as a safety measure against botulism. Finally, the use of a fine/medium die for the grind, which, in our opinion, yields a better texture when stuffed and smoked.

Smoked Beaver Chorizo Recipe

As always, we use metric measurements and go by percentage weight for our sausage recipes. We do this to make the recipes easy to scale and replicate exactly, batch after batch. If you’re thinking of getting into sausage making and don’t own a kitchen scale, please do yourself the favor of buying one. They’re inexpensive relative to the cash outlay of all the other equipment you’ll need to pick up, and will save you a lot of effort in terms of scaling recipes into imperial measurements. To measure your ingredients, first weigh the meat you are using, and then calculate the weight of all the other ingredients based on the weight of the meat.

Prep time: 3 hours

Ingredients:

Beaver meat, trimmed, cubed

30% pork fat, cubed

2% salt

0.3% instacure #1

1% sugar

1% fresh garlic, minced

0.5% mexican oregano, dried

0.5% cumin

0.5% dried chipotles, ground

0.25% cayenne pepper

4% dry red wine

4.8% canned chipotle peppers (pureed) 

Method:

Mix all ingredients except wine. Grind through the fine/medium die of your meat grinder. Add wine and mix well with a wooden spoon or in a stand mixer, 1-2 minutes on low-medium speed. 

Stuff into hog casings and twist into 6-10” links. Prick with sausage pricker or sterile needle.

Place uncovered in the refrigerator for 1-2 hours, ideally hanging, or evenly spaced on a wire rack so the air can circulate around them & allow them to dry. 

Preheat the smoker to low heat (165-180F), moderate smoke.

Smoke until internal temp reaches 150F, then immediately chill using an ice bath. Allow to hang or set on a wire rack to drain and cool completely.

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