Well, to be fair, isn’t most sausage made out of lips and arseholes?
Must…resist…political…joke…
Chorizo recipes in México vary from family to family, butcher to butcher etc. Some have no chile at all and some are very picante. Some use achiote for seasoning.
If it isn’t hot enough for you, add some chopped chiles to the frying pan.
Here’s a good chorizo recipe by Zarela Martinez, if you’re interested. Works perfectly fine with ground pork, but if you can grind your own pork shoulder, even better.
I’ve never had chorizo that I would describe as “blazingly hot” and I live in a very Mexican neighborhood that sell many different kinds of homemade chorizos. The hot commercial stuff, the homemade stuff, it’s not that much hotter than, say, Tabasco.
Assuming you mean Costco, the chorizo I’ve gotten from them was Spanish. I was glad to have it - I like Mexican but I also enjoy Spanish food. We just slice it and fry it up and the kids eat the heck out of it.
When my grandfather was still alive he took me to a huge Mexican supermarket somewhere east of LA (but not necessarily in East LA). We went to the meat section and he showed me all of the chorizos and explained that just meant sausage and their was a huge variety of flavors and spiciness. Best part of that market was the little Mexican women frying up half a dozen tortillas at a time and packing them up for sale. The aroma was intoxicating.
Well, how many Mexicans live on the Upper Peninsula? Down here in SoCal (and in Mexico proper), I’m pretty sure I’ve actually seen the ingredients on chorizo packages that said something like salivary glands and esophagus. A lot of it has nothing that looks anything like ground pork. I suspect that consumption of weird organ meats is a lot more common around here. Hey, I’m getting a hankering for ojo tacos.
eyeball tacos
There’s also Argentine chorizo, and they don’t even know how to say chile. They call it Aji (with an accent over the i which I can’t make my keyboard write), and they don’t seem to put any of it in their sausage.
No, there’s a chain up here called Cost Cutter.
Then you’ve apparently not had Hungarian sharp paprika, which is fairly fiery. Also Spanish smoked pimenton comes in sweet, hot, and bittersweet. I use it in chili and other dishes. The stuff you buy in grocery stores (like McCormick) is a very mild version of paprika and is mainly used for garnish.
Chorizos often figure in Tampa Cuban cuisine (a key ingredient in garbanzo bean soup, for instance), and they are never hot. In fact, I’ve never even heard of a hot chorizo before. Not that hot flavor is shunned in Tampa Cuban dining – every such restaurant will offer a bottle of hot sauce at every table.
Paprika is not generally the main red pepper powder that would be used in Mexican chorizo (edit: sorry, I see you’re talking about Iberian chorizos–yes, that heat is probably paprika), but, as Chefguy says, paprika can certainly be spicy. The way Hungarian paprika is usually made is the peppers are dried and the veins and seeds are removed. When they are ground in the mill, a certain quantity of seeds are added back in to control flavor and heat. By themselves, most paprika chiles are spicy. When you buy paprika, there are a number of varieties ranging from sweet to hot/sharp (although in the US, you’re lucky if you find two: sweet and hot). The hot varieties have the bite of something like maybe cayenne. I wouldn’t be surprised if Spanish paprika manufacture has a similar process or grading (although I know it is well-known for being smoked.) edit2: And here’s some hot Spanish paprika.
I find McCormick paprika to be tasteless and useless. The most commonly found brand of Hungarian paprika is Pride of Szeged, which is sold in sweet and hot varieties. I don’t know how well it is distributed nationally, but it’s pretty common in Chicago. That brand is decent. Penzey’s and The Spice House also sell some very excellent paprikas. My preference is on the sweet Hungarian types. (And Hungarians, in my experience, generally prefer the sweet in recipes and add heat at the table.) While I like spicy food a lot, I favor the flavor and smell of a quality sweet paprika.
I have had Hungarian paprika on many occasions (half of my family came over from there) but IME, comparing it to Spanish paprika (or at least the Spanish types I’ve had) is like comparing apples and oranges.
Of course: Spanish paprika is smoked. That part of my answer was actually directed to another poster further up the thread. I meant to include the name in my answer but was distracted by a shiny object.
My boss told me there’s an ‘authentic’ Mexican grocery near where she lives, and it’s kind-of on my way home. (At least, it’s in the same general direction.) If she can remember the name of it, I’ll stop in and check it out.
I never said that you couldn’t make chorizo with salivary glands and esophagus. I can buy it, even here in the UP. But the stuff that’s mainly those kinds of cuts tends to be low quality. Maybe you’re getting super high quality esophagus chorizo; I don’t know. But there’s nothing that says “chorizo = salivary glands.” Chorizo is just a style of sausage that tends to be spicy and includes powdered chiles and other Mexican or Spanish spices. I personally think that higher quality cuts of meat make a better sausage; having said that, I’m sure you can also make good sausage from offal. But the run-of-the-mill stereotypical “lips and assholes” sausages are mostly done that way to cut costs, not as some sort of really wonderful charcuterie.
Heck, when it comes right down to it, Mexican Chorizo is a very different thing that Spanish Chorizo. Mexican Chorizo is a raw sausage; Spanish is a cured and dried sausage. Very different beasts.
And yeah, I know my sausage. I not only cook for a hobby - a MAJOR hobby - but I lived 10+ years in Colorado and New Mexico. I know my chorizo, regardless of what frozen tundra I call home. 
Yeah, I was going to mention the difference between Mexican and Spanish chorizo. I know Johnny L.A. is from L.A. and maybe San Diego, so I was assuming that he was talking about Mexican chorizo. That said, I’ve never had Mexican chorizo that had any semblance of ground pork meat. It seems to be about 1/3 fat and an extremely fine texture, so I was assuming that it was made from offal.
Wikipedia mentions:
and
All the chorizo I’ve had around here is fresh, and either in links or just in a pan in the carniceria display case. So I’m sure that chorizo comes in different styles, I’m just unconvinced that the offal version is inferior. I’ll ask some Mexican friends how their moms make it.
There’s a range. The butcher where Mom buys makes three classes of un-dried chorizo (dulce, picante y de cuidado - “sweet”, “hot” and “call the ER”); Palacios makes at least two “heat” grades. Those are Spanish un-dried chorizos, the kind you’re supposed to cook before you eat it (as opposed to the dried chorizos which don’t need to be cooked, not to be mistaken with other red sausages which may or may not need to be cooked… damn, now I have a hankerin’ for a chistorra sandwich!)
Sausage made from ground meat is typically beaten into a pastey kind of stuff before stuffing into casings, so yeah, the texture isn’t like ground meat at all. It should be very fine. And 25-30% fat. Yum, fat.
I’d be interested in what your Mexican friend’s mother’s say, too.
And, like I said above, I’m sure there’s offal versions that are quite good. Anything you’re getting from a decent carniceria is probably good. But I’ve also had the salivary glands-and-esophagas chorizo that was spongey and watery when cooked, definitely NOT what I remember getting in Mexico/New Mexico/Southern Cal/etc.
Born in ‘L.A.’, San Diego 'til I was 15, then L.A. County, then L.A. proper, then the PNW. So, yeah. Mexican chorizo.
The only place I had chorizo down South is in restaurants/diners/cafés/buffets. I got a job up here, and there was a Mexican woman who would come round with a basket, selling breakfast burritos. Her chorizo was hot. The stuff I bought at the supermarket looked a bit like pork sausage, only red, and wasn’t in cases. The sausage my coworker picked up for me from the carnicería was in a long case (and wrapped in a spiral). It had white lumpy bits throughout that might be taken for snouts. but they’re big chunks of fat. L.A./Orange County chorizo I had was swimming in fat. The carnicería chorizo was fattier than the supermarket stuff, but not as much as SoCal’s.
Chorizo is so common in my area that Bob’s Big Boy has chorizo and eggs as one of the offerings at their weekend breakfast buffet. They use a medium-heat version that I am sure is snout-free.