Trying Black Sausage

So it's Day of the Dead time of year here in Guatemala, Día de Todos Los Santos and Día de Los Muertos, and that means FIAMBRE!! Fiambre is a traditional dish served at this time and is basically a big platter of cold meats and stuff. So the grocery stores get all these new types of sausages and processed meats and things in, and a lady sets up at the back of the Despensa to dole out tasty foods by the pound. I wish I could afford to buy some fiambre but it's like Q80 for a half pound or something. It looks delish! Like a cold cut platter with veggies and mystery stuff. 😆

I decided to buy a special sausage not found very often. It is chorizo negro. (Spanish pronunciation: cho-REE-soh NEH-gro, not cho-ree-zoh nee-gro, by the way.). You guys might recognize chorizo as a spicy sausage, normally found in Canada and the U.S. as more dried and cured like a Pepperette. Here chorizo is very common and seems to refer to the type of spices included in the sausage. It's fat and moist and round and we ate it a LOT until we got kinda sick of it. The only other regularly available sausage is longaniza (LONG-gah-nee-sah), which is milder and whiter.

"Bert" was apprehensive. He said, "What's in it that makes it black?" Turns out, it's just food coloring!

As with all sausages and hot dogs in Guatemala, remove the casing! They're not edible. They're actually plastic.

Something a little disconcerting about eating food that's GREY. 

Here's my opinion of chorizo negro. It's GOOD! Are you surprised? Ha ha! It is very weird to eat something that's black or grey, but it smelled delicious right out of the package. It's precooked and ready to eat (listo para consumir), so I ate a slice of it cold. Flavorful and spicy! Bert then fried some up in a pan and we ate them on buns, like a sausage dog, with mustard. They had a nice cumin taste and other miscellaneous spices. I really enjoyed them. I will buy them again, for sure!

So here's the wisdom from this: don't be afraid to try new stuff. It could be awesome. 😊

P.S. If you've been wondering where we've been, we've been busy designing T-shirts. What?? Yes, t-shirts! It's our new side hustle. You can check out some of our designs here on Redbubble and some more here on Amazon. Redbubble ships worldwide; Amazon is only for the States.