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You know, I actually thought I was clever for about 3 or 4 milliseconds when I came up with this title, but wouldn't you know that somebody else has already laid their claim. They were actually making sausage, too!

I want to write a little about two Portuguese sausages: Chouriço and Linguiça. Chouriço is actually a family of sausages with a fairly wide (and interesting) range: among them are a sausage that is made with cubed onions and another one that is made with the cartilage and bones in pork ribs and vertebrae. It is basically pork and pork fat with salt, paprika, and wine, stuffed inside the skin of the intestine and then dried over wood smoke. If that doesn't make you salivate, you don't know what food is!

Most of the Chouriço that I ate growing up was very dry; so dry that when you cut it, even the inside of the sausage wasn't wet. This dry "version" is exquisite in pretty much anything: it's almost required for what must be the national soup of Portugal, caldo verde (shredded collards/kale and potato soup). It imparts it's spicy, smoky flavor onto almost any dish, and honestly I haven't tasted anything containing this sausage that wasn't improved somehow by it.

The Chouriço that I have found thusfar in the Ironbound supermarket Seabra has been very wet; so wet that it sweats it's fat out and becomes sour very quickly (within days). I'm not sure if this is just another type, or if it is just failed sausage, but I highly suggest you get the dry version; the flavor is about twice as strong, it lasts practically forever, and it is heavenly cooked up in a cute little dish such as that above meant for cooking sausage with Aguardente. If anyone reading this knows the secret password I have to use to get the fantastic, dry stuff, please leave me a comment!

Linguiça is something that I did not have growing up, so I don't know what it's supposed to taste like, in the best of circumstances. I was told that it was Brazilian, which makes it sort of taboo in some traditional Portuguese families, but in fact it seems to be a sausage that is popular throughout Portugal and most former Portuguese colonies. It is not smoke cured, so it's not okay to eat it without cooking. Unlike Chouriço, it is almost always made with two of my favorite things in the world: onions and garlic.

The garlic in the Linguiça that I had this past weekend seemed to impart a sweet flavor. The sausage is extremely juicy (probably because it was made a day or two before I purchased it), and the grease it sweats during cooking is white, like what you get from cooking chicken, and more like what you'd expect from a white-meat sausage. The onions imparted a very strong flavor and along with the pork the flavor experience as a whole has a spicy (not "hot" spicy, but spices spicy) flavor that is almost sour. It seems perfect for just chomping on, and especially well suited for grilling and eating in a nice Portuguese roll.

Sausage just doesn't deserve the bad wrap(!) it's gotten for being high in fat. It can be balanced in to any dish and used in small quantities, because most sausages have very strong flavors from sitting with their spices. Wet sausages go well standing alone (with a starchy carb like potatoes or bread and a dark green leafy vegetable like those common in Portuguese cuisine) or as part of a sausage & vegetable stir fry (onions and peppers, or eggplant work well here), and dry sausages like Chouriço or Salpicão work well in small quantities in sandwiches.