Ata mārie everyone!

While the T20 cricket result hasn’t given us the sparkling start to the week we’d hoped for, it still felt pretty good to be a Black Caps fan watching such a stellar team play early this morning – and it also means that summer is well and truly on our doorstep!

At Freedom Farms we are also fans of the flavour bomb that happens when paprika and garlic meet pork that we couldn’t choose just one type of chorizo… we had to go and make two!

Our Smoked Pork Chorizo and our fresh Chorizo Sausages share key ingredients, but are made in completely different styles. Our Smoked Pork Chorizo is a Spanish-style chorizo – cured and then naturally smoked to result in a concentrated flavour and firm texture. Freedom Farms Smoked Pork Chorizo can be used straight from the packet, or cooked. Make like a Spaniard and nibble at it on its own or with crusty bread and cheeses like manchego, or in many dishes like stews, paella, and alongside seafood. Or read on for some of favourite ways to make the most of its concentrated favour and al dente texture.

We looked to Latin America when we developed our Chorizo Pork Sausages. These wonderfully versatile sausages need to be cooked through, as they are not cured. One of our top tips is that they’re excellent when taken out of the casings and treated like a tender, zingy, mildly spicy mince – no need to add much to them! In Mexican cooking chorizo often goes into tacos and soups and on top of tostadas and dips.

Smoked Pork Chorizo Inspo

• Beer-glazed chorizo bites – a party fave (and equally good for bubble nibbles!). Whisk together ½ cup beer, 1 Tbsp soy sauce, 1 Tbsp soft brown sugar. Slice 1 200g pack Freedom Farms Smoked Pork Chorizo into bite sized pieces, lightly brown then add the sauce and bubble up for 2 mins. Stir through 1 Tbsp tomato ketchup and cook another min to thicken sauce. Serve on mini skewers.
• Dice and add to baby potato salads with finely diced celery or fennel, chopped Spanish black olives, lots of chopped dill… and crumbled up crispened Freedom Farms Streaky Bacon, if you’re feeling extra decadent!
• Add generous slices to shakshuka.
• Cook whatever rice you prefer (we like a mix with brown, basmati and wild rice for salads), cool and toss with diced chorizo, cooked tender diced squid (steamed clams or juicy prawns work well here too), diced peppers, halved heirloom cherry tomatoes, sliced steamed asparagus, finely sliced red onion. Toss through a generous amount of dressing made with good olive oil, sherry vinegar, loads of fresh chopped herbs like oregano, parsley, sage, thyme, lemon zest and a little juice, salt and pepper.
• Dice finely, mix with panko crumbs, chopped parsley, lemon zest, and olive oil, and spoon over steamed mussels in the half shell. Top with a little grated parmesan and grill until golden.

Chorizo Pork Sausage Inspo

• Choriqueso –  A dip of melted cheese with crisp-browned chorizo sausage filling layered on top… what’s not to love?! Designed to be scooped up with tortilla chips or crusty bread, it’s also great poured over rice and beans or spooned over crisp roast potatoes or wedges.

• Choripan – an Argentinian street food favourite – take a good crusty roll or baguette, and stuff it with chorizo cut in half lengthways and grilled till golden brown. Douse with chimichurri – perfection.

• Take out of the casings, brown in a hot oiled pan, breaking up the sausage meat with a wooden spoon. Use as a pizza topping - amazing with marinated red peppers, olives, and melty mozzarella.

• Take out of the casings and brown in a hot oiled pan with softened onion and garlic, breaking up the sausage meat with a wooden spoon. Add a bottle of tomato passata, chopped capers and black olives, bubble up and cook till sausage meat is cooked through, then toss through penne or other pasta of your choice, along with plenty of chopped flat-leaf parsley. Scatter over lots of grated parmesan.

• Remove casings, keeping filling in sausage form. Take a sheet of ready-rolled butter puff pastry, sliced in half – enough pastry to roll up filling with a bit of overlap. Scatter the centre of the pastry with grated havarti cheese and chopped pickled or fresh jalapeños, line up sausages on top, head to tail along the length of the pastry. Roll up pastry, sealing the edge by gently pressing, brush all over with egg wash, grind over black pepper and salt, and bake at 190℃ until pastry is golden and sausage is cooked.

Gooey Goodness

If the smell of this being pulled out of the oven doesn’t make you swoon, we don’t know what will! With all the baking ourselves calm we’ve been doing since Covid derailed our daily lives again in August, we’re getting through a lot of eggs! This recipe, which uses just two eggs, is handy when you only have a couple of eggs left before a stock-up shop. To make this gluten-free, swap out the oats for quinoa flakes.

Aucklanders – this is a great tin-filler for those extended bubble picnics – don’t forget the thermos of nice strong tea to go with!

Chewy peanut butter chocolate slice

Ingredients
2 Freedom Farms eggs
¾ cup soft brown sugar
⅔ cup smooth peanut butter (we love Fix & Fogg)
70g butter, melted and cooled somewhat
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup ground almonds
½ tsp baking soda
¼ cup oats
Pinch flaky sea salt
100g Whittaker’s Dark Ghana chocolate, roughly chopped

Method

1/ Heat oven 180℃.  to Grease and line a 20cm square baking dish or tin.

2/ In a mixing bowl beat together eggs, sugar, peanut butter, butter, and vanilla until well combined and creamy.

3/ In a separate bowl combine ground almonds, baking soda, oats, salt.

4/ Fold almond mixture into butter mixture until combined, then stir through ⅔ of the chocolate.

5/ Turn mixture out into the lined baking dish and spread out, gently pressing to even it out and smooth the top. Scatter over remaining chocolate and gently press into the dough.

6/ Bake for 25 minutes or until just turning golden on top. Remove from oven and let cool for 20 minutes before slicing and transferring slices to a wire rack to cool completely.

Five Good Things

1/ We’re always intrigued to see what experiment local ‘fermenter and condiment maker’, Russell Holder is going to post next on his Instagram account @rmholder. A recent take on garum (an ancient Roman fermented fish sauce) saw him making use of an excess of prosciutto close to its best before date – we’d love to know what this pinkly fascinating concoction ends up tasting like!

2/ At the end of September Aucklanders bade farewell to On Do, a sculpture by Korean-New Zealand artists Seung Yul Oh – if you’d seen it in you’ll remember it as a tangle of noodles lifted by chopsticks. It was installed in 2015 to offer distraction to motorists caught up in Dominion Rd roadworks (hence the orange barrier around the sculpture), but was only ever intended to be temporary. We reckon food is a great subject for public art (we also love Janet Lilo’s Kārangahape Rd bananas) and hope to see more of it!

3/ Milk is back! (For some us it never went away) New York’s Grub Street reports that the yen for plant mylks may just be waning as cafe customers seem to be asking for good ol’ dairy with their daily grind – and not the skim stuff, either.

4/ Speaking of milk, Hilary (GM) has been enjoying Bella Vacca (delivered, in glass bottles) and Anna (brand storyteller) gets hers every couple of days from Scarecrow deli (Durham Farms, in swappa glass bottles). The milk market is seeing more diversification, with the recent announcement by Synlait that they’ll be offering milk in stainless steel swappa bottles in two South Island supermarkets.

5/ English language cookbook publishers are moving with the times and starting to include more foreign language characters and translations to better reflect the cultures authors and cuisines being written about.

One Last Thing.

Christmas is 41 sleeps away. We’ve started fielding lots of questions about hams… if they’re not there already, your local store will most likely start getting deliveries this week. Hurrah! We know lots of us have some amount of uncertainty about what this festive season will look like. Here is what we know for sure:

• Lots of smaller Christmas gatherings can be just as much fun as one big one.
• Thank goodness our Christmas is in summer… we’re looking forward to balmy summer evenings outdoors, days at the beach or the lake, kayaking, walks, and PYO berries!
• Over the coming weeks we’ll share with you our tips for enjoying a very special Freedom Farms Christmas ham… no matter what you're planning for the holidays.
• Getting vaccinated is one of the best tools we have for making sure we can get back to doing the things we love, together. Everyone in the Freedom Farms team is fully vaccinated, and we really hope you are too.

That’s all from us. Stay safe, and be nice to each other. Don’t forget to share The Omnivore with other foodies in your life. See you again soon 👋