After reading descriptions of chorizo (see our earlier thread on it), I’m convinced that it starts out bad. Refrigeration just keeps it from getting worse.
I realize that makes me sound like an ethno=centric philistine, but the descriptions of chorizo ingredients just gross me out.
The Real Life version: Well, I’m not familiar with it either, but if it’s a hard dry sausage like pepperoni, it’ll keep for a LONG time in the fridge, like weeks, as long as you keep it wrapped up so it doesn’t dry out. But if it’s the other kind of sausage, the “not dry” kind, like link sausage, then, uncooked, I wouldn’t let it sit longer than a week.
What CFSAN says: (the official version)
And, FTR, Cal, all sausage has ingredients like “lips” in it, it’s not just chorizo. That’s what they mean by “meat by-products”.
Vist the USDA’s “Fresh Sausage Operations” website.
http://www.fsis.usda.gov/OFO/HRDS/SLAUGH/DepProce/fresh%20sausage/index.htm
DuckDuck, lips and other by-products I can stomach (intentional). It’s the salivary glands and lymph nodes – no joke – that gross me out.
I don’t get why chorizo got the short end of the stick. Regular sausage doesn’t get explicit with its ingredients, but for some reason chorizo’s ingredient list starts with fat and lymph nodes. MMmmmm. Still tastes good. I’d be curious to see an accurate ingredient list for Jimmy Dean sausage. (“fat, lymph nodes, snout, anus,…”)
You might need to be more specific. Spanish chorizo is solid, hard and fairly dry, I imagine it lasts virtually forever. Mexican chorizo is more like spiced ground meat in a sac, and I wouldn’t keep it around more than a couple weeks.
mischievous
P.S. These may not be the “offical” names for these two types of chorizo, it’s an observed difference based on what region of the country I’m in.
Hmmm… I hope my wife’s not still trying to kill me (the albondigas didn’t work)… we routinely leave chorizo in the fridge for up to a month, since that’s our grocery-shopping frequency. We do freeze the regular sausage links, though.
I don’t remember the brand or the “type” of our chorizo, other than it’s “Mexican Chorizo.” But it comes wrapped in individual little wiener sacks. Maybe this keeps them safe, since we only open one at a time?