Linguiça Calabresa
Smoked pork sausage with Calabrian chilli, created by Calabrian immigrants in São Paulo. Stuffed in a horseshoe, smoked over hardwood, it has become one of the most produced sausages in Latin America.
| Lean pork shoulder | 700 g |
| Back fat | 300 g |
| Fine salt | 22 g |
| Pimenta calabresa (Brazilian Calabrian chilli, in flakes) | 10 g |
| Sweet paprika | 8 g |
| Fresh garlic, crushed | 12 g |
| Ground black pepper | 2 g |
| Grated nutmeg | 1 g |
| Dry white wine | 40 ml |
| Hog casing (Ø 32–36 mm) | — |
- Preparation: Cut the meat and the fat into 3 cm cubes. Chill to −2 °C.
- Mincing: Mince through the 6 to 8 mm plate.
- Seasoning: Dilute the Calabrian chilli and the paprika in the white wine. Add this paste to the minced meats with the salt, garlic, pepper, and nutmeg. Knead for 3 minutes until a uniform red colour forms.
- Maceration: Refrigerate for 24 to 48 hours, stirring once a day.
- Stuffing: Stuff into the hog casing, forming horseshoe sausages of 20 to 25 cm. Tie at the ends.
- Smoking: Cold-smoke for 12 to 24 hours over eucalyptus or beech wood, then in hot smoke (70–80 °C) until 68 °C at the core.
- Use: Grill whole at the churrasco, slice into rounds for pizzas, or add to the feijoada (the emblematic Brazilian stew of black beans simmered with various pork meats) and the feijão tropeiro (a traditional Brazilian dish of red or brown beans sautéed with cassava flour, bacon, linguiça calabresa, eggs and collard greens).
The linguiça calabresa is the result of a complete transplant of a charcuterie tradition: the stuffing technique is Portuguese (the word linguiça derives from the Latin lucanica via Portuguese), the aromatic inspiration is Calabrian, the chilli is South American, the smoking wood is Brazilian. Its creation is set in São Paulo's Bixiga district in the 1930s, where Calabrian immigrants drew on the salsiccia di Calabria of their region of origin. The families raised pigs in the backyards and made home sausages.
The Brazilian pimenta calabresa is not the Italian peperoncino (Capsicum annuum), but the pimenta dedo-de-moça (Capsicum baccatum), a South American chilli dried and reduced to flakes, whose aromatic profile is close but distinct. This substitution, dictated by local availability, gave the product its name and its identity. Brazilian regulation defines it as a product made exclusively from salted pork, with a hot taste obligatory and smoking optional.
The two-stage smoking, cold for the colouring, then in hot smoke for cooking to the core, separates it from the linguiça toscana, an unsmoked fresh sausage that forms the other great family of Brazilian linguiças. The calabresa, pre-cooked by smoking, keeps for several weeks.
Today, it is the best-selling charcuterie ingredient in Brazil. It is found in feijoada, in churrascos where it is grilled in a horseshoe, on Brazilian pizzas, where it is the most requested topping, and in feijão tropeiro of Minas Gerais (beans mixed with cassava flour, bacon, and sausage). The large brands (Sadia, Perdigão, Seara) produce it at several hundred thousand tonnes a year.
The book
All 144 recipes and their histories, gathered in a single volume.