Huevos con Chorizo

In my book, there's almost no better quick meal than huevos con chorizo, whose name is its recipe. Here's your recipe: fry up some Mexican chorizo, add some beaten eggs, and cook until the eggs are set. Done. It does not get simpler than that.

Huevos con Chorizo

For me, while I love it any time, I find that huevos con chorizo works really well as hangover brunch food à la menudo and posole. Speaking of hangover brunch food, I should post on huevos rotos sometime, but that's more Spanish than Mexican.

In the case of the huevos in the photo above, it was dinner time and Ann and I were really hungry. I had no plan, but I had a pound of ground turkey in the refrigerator. While I would rather have ground pork, my cardiologist is happy with the turkey. It would be nearly impossible for most people to tell that the meat in my chorizo is turkey, rather than pork.

As for chorizo, I don't buy and pay exorbitant prices for something that I can make so easily. Just to be clear, we are talking about loose Mexican chorizo, not the incredibly delicious hard sausages from Spain. I don't have an exact recipe, but for a pound of ground meat (pork or turkey), I will start by sautéeing a finely diced poblano pepper and a half a large yellow onion until the onion turns translucent. At this point, I will add a pound of ground meat and break it up.

Next, I add seasonings: an ounce of ground mild Numex chile, a couple tablespoons of freshly ground cumin, 4-6 cloves of finely minced garlic, and a couple of pinches of Mexican oregano finely crumbled by rolling between my palms. At this point, if I want spice, I'll add something spicy, typically a couple of tablespoons of sambal oelek (crushed red jalapeños). There was no spice in this batch.

And then, I splash a couple of glugs of red wine vinegar in the pan, because chorizo without vinegar tastes weird to me. Adding vinegar is very traditional. Along with the vinegar, I'll generally add a small amount of water and let everything cook and meld together until the water is evaporated.

An Aside on Spices. If you're serious about cooking, consider buying a good spice grinder. I really do like my Waring Professional, but at $175-200, it is a splurge. For chorizo, I always grind cumin to order. I rarely grind my own chile, though. Ground chile is something that is best left to industrial equipment.

Also, Mexican oregano (Lippia graveolens) is not Greek oregano (Origanum vulgare). They taste very different. Go easy when using Mexican oregano; it seems much stronger to me. Also, it's typically not going to be labeled Mexican oregano. If you buy a Latino brand such as El Guapo, it will be labeled simply orégano, but it will be Mexican.

I buy a lot of El Guapo spices from the Latino aisle of my grocery store. This brand of spices is way less expensive than the traditional American brands three aisles over in the grocery store. As much cumin/comino seed as I use, I'd be broke if I had to pay what they're asking for it in the spice aisle.

Next come the eggs. Sometimes, I want more eggs than chorizo, sometimes more chorizo than eggs. It's a feeling thing. But generally, I will do about 8 extra large eggs to a pound of chorizo. The photo above is 6 eggs to a pound of chorizo, because I was feeling the chorizo more than the eggs, probably because we ate this for dinner rather than brunch. This being retired stuff is a bit weird in that we pretty much eat only two meals a day, a departure from work days of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

In a departure from tradition and now that it is summer and we have a counter full of ripe tomatoes, I felt like serving this batch of huevos on slabs of fresh tomatoes, with tortillas on the side, because what's better with eggs than fresh tomatoes and how many months a year do we have perfectly ripe tomatoes?

Anyway, that's your huevos con chorizo. It's a great, simple meal. And if you venture so far as to make your own Mexican-style chorizo, you might not buy pre-made chorizo again. ¡Buen provecho!

PS. I like huevos con chorizo so much that I have blogged about them before 8 years ago and totally forgot about it.