Longaniza de Valladolid (Yucatecan Smoked Sausage)

Longaniza de Valladolid is the smoked sausage of Valladolid in eastern Yucatán: a long, thin, unbroken rope of pork marinated in sour orange and achiote, stuffed into a narrow casing and smoked for hours over green wood until it turns a deep brick red. It is sold in coils, cut to length, grilled or fried (longaniza asada), and eaten with pickled red onion, beans, tortillas and habanero. Two things separate it from the rest of the Mexican longaniza family. The colour comes from achiote, the Maya seed paste, not from dried chiles; and it is smoked, where most Mexican longanizas are sold fresh. It is a colonial Spanish sausage seasoned with Yucatán’s own pantry, and it is one of the region’s best-known foods. Longaniza in Mexico is a slippery word — the general rule in the standard Mexican food dictionary is only that it is longer and thinner than chorizo and not tied into segments — so the central-Mexican chile-and-vinegar kind is given under Variations. I have not made this one yet; the formula is built from Yucatecan descriptions and standard cured-and-smoked practice, and it is untested.

Ingredients

MEAT BLOCK (2,270 g / 5 lb), % of meat weight

• 1,702 g / 3 lb 12 oz boneless pork shoulder (75%)
• 568 g / 1 lb 4 oz pork back fat or fatty belly trim (25%)

CURE (% of meat weight)

• 41 g / 1.4 oz fine salt (1.8%)
• 5.7 g Cure #1 (pink salt, 6.25% sodium nitrite) (0.25%) — 2.5 g/kg × 2.27 kg = 5.7 g; 2.5 g × 6.25% = 156 mg nitrite per kg = 156 ppm, the USDA ceiling for comminuted products

RECADO AND MARINADE (% of meat weight)

• 68 g / 2.4 oz achiote paste (recado rojo), commercial or homemade (3%)
• 91 g / 3.2 oz sour orange juice (or 2 parts orange to 1 part lime) (4%)
• 18 g garlic, crushed to a paste (0.8%)
• 6.8 g black pepper (0.3%)
• 3.4 g allspice, ground (0.15%)
• 1.1 g clove, ground (0.05%)
• 5.7 g Mexican oregano, toasted and rubbed (0.25%)
• 2.3 g cumin, ground (0.1%)
• 28–32 mm natural hog casing (narrow beef rounds are traditional), about 18 ft / 5.5 m, left as continuous coils

Directions

Key ingredients

Allspice · Black Pepper

1. In the collection: Annatto is the colour and the earthy flavour; the collection’s ingredient page explains the seed. Allspice is a native of this coast and belongs in the recado de especia.
2. Grind: chill the shoulder and fat to 30–32 °F / −1–0 °C and grind both through a 6 mm (1/4 in) plate. Valladolid makers once chopped by hand; the texture is medium, not fine.
3. Loosen the recado: work the achiote paste into the sour orange juice with the garlic, salt, Cure #1 and spices until smooth. Achiote paste is stiff and will streak the meat if it goes in as a lump.
4. Mix and cure: pour the marinade over the cold meat and mix until uniformly orange and tacky, about 2 minutes. Fry a teaspoon and taste: earthy, peppery, faintly bitter-citrus, mildly salty. Cover and refrigerate overnight. The cure is there because the next step is many hours of warm smoke.
5. Stuff as a rope: stuff into the narrow casing as one continuous length and coil it; do not twist links. Prick air pockets. Hang the coils, or lay them on racks, to dry at room temperature for an hour or in a 120 °F / 49 °C smoker with the damper open until the casing is dry to the touch.
6. Smoke long and cool: the Valladolid method smokes for about 12 hours over green (unseasoned) wood. At home, smoke at 100–125 °F / 38–52 °C with a steady, light smoke for 6–8 hours, until the sausage is a deep brick red and the casing is leathery. This colours and flavours it but does not cook it through.
7. Treat it as raw: chill it, wrap it, and keep it refrigerated up to a week, or freeze. Like the original, it is cooked by the person who eats it.
8. Cook: grill over medium coals or fry in a dry pan, turning, 10–15 minutes, to 160 °F / 71 °C. Serve cut in pieces with tortillas, refried black beans, pickled red onion, a squeeze of sour orange and habanero salsa.
9. Sibling recipes: the Caribbean longanizas use the same seed and the same citrus differently — Puerto Rican Longaniza and Dominican Longaniza.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. No weighed formula for longaniza de Valladolid is in print in the standard references. The ingredient list follows Yucatecan descriptions: pork, recado rojo (achiote with sour orange), and a recado de especia or “oriental” spice mix of black pepper, clove, oregano, allspice (pimienta de Tabasco), cumin and garlic; smoked about 12 hours over green wood (the Larousse Diccionario enciclopédico de la gastronomía mexicana gives “se ahúma durante 12 horas con leña verde”). The numbers are standard cured-sausage proportions. Deviations: (1) Cure #1 is added — many hours of warm smoke on raw pork is exactly the situation nitrite exists for, and traditional makers working at ambient temperature rely on salt and smoke alone; (2) the smoke is held at 100–125 °F for 6–8 hours rather than 12 hours at whatever the wood gives; (3) hog casing is offered because narrow beef small-intestine casing (the traditional one) is hard to buy. Untested.

Where longaniza de Valladolid came from. Longaniza is a Spanish sausage family and arrived with the colonists; achiote, sour orange and allspice made it Yucatecan. Larousse adds that it was historically made with venison as well as pork. Local writing credits a late-nineteenth-century maker, Felipe Pérez Vázquez, as the “Rey de la Longaniza” who fixed the style; that rests on local tradition, not a document. It was a December hog-killing product before it was a market one.

The longaniza problem. The dive’s Mexico page is right that the chorizo-versus-longaniza line is regional: sources say longaniza is milder, or hotter, or any meat, depending on where they are written. Larousse’s working rule is about shape — longer and thinner than chorizo and not tied into segments — and it lists regional longanizas: Ocosingo, Chiapas (beef and pork, black pepper and garlic, no chile), Chilapa, Guerrero (guajillo, vinegar, bay, clove), Actopan, Hidalgo (ancho, vinegar, garlic, cumin, pepper, oregano), Cocula, Jalisco (chilacate and citrus), Xalapa, Veracruz, and Valladolid. Toluca’s fresh longanizas are named in Manuel Payno’s novel Los bandidos de Río Frío (1889–91).

Variations — central-Mexican longaniza. For the fresh chile-and-vinegar kind of the central highlands, use the same meat block without cure, and replace the recado with 3% rehydrated ancho and 2% guajillo chiles blended with 4% cider vinegar, 0.8% garlic, 0.2% cumin, 0.3% black pepper, 0.2% oregano and 0.05% clove; 1.8% salt. Stuff as a long rope, refrigerate, cook within 2 days, and fry crumbled or in lengths. It is close to Mexican Pork Chorizo (Jeff’s) in a longer, thinner shape.

Sourcing and gear. Achiote paste (El Yucateco, La Anita) from Mexican grocers; sour oranges from Latin markets in winter, or the orange-and-lime mix. A smoker that will hold low temperatures — a cold-smoke generator helps.

Still open. A Valladolid maker’s weighed formula would settle the numbers; none is in print in the standard references. Whether the green-wood smoke was traditionally hot enough to cook the sausage is not documented.

The photo. The photograph is papadzules topped with longaniza de Valladolid, the sausage crumbled over a Yucatecan dish.

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