Sobrassada

Sobrassada is a raw, cured sausage from the Balearic Islands made with ground pork, paprika and salt and other spices. Sobressada, along with botifarró are traditional Majorcan sausage meat products prepared in the laborious but festive rites that still mark the autumn and winter pig slaughter in Majorca (Spain).

Sobrassada: ingredients and varieties

Sobrassada is made with a choice of pork loin, pork bacon (xuia), minced and mixed with paprika, salt and (in modern times) black pepper. Then the mixture is put into a pork intestine, and hung from a pole for some weeks till it is cured. Small, thin sobrassadas are called llangonissa, bigger and thicker ones are called cular or pultrums, and the largest type are huge pork bladders called bufetes.

Llangonisses can be eated grilled like sausages, but the rest of the varieties are typically spread on bread or incorporated as ingredients of local dishes like llom amb col (pork loin with cabbage).

Sobrassada is protected by a regulatory board controlling the quality standard. Mallorcan Sobrassada is a Protected Geographical Indication as Sobrassada de Mallorca and also in a Porc Negre ("black pig") subvariety.

Botifarró

Botifarró is a pork intestine filled with coarsely groung pork cuts, including liver, and spiced with salt, pepper and anissette seed, which gives this sausage its peculiar flavor. Then the sausages are boiled, and they are consumed fresh. Botifarró is typical from Majorca but very similar varieties can be found in the Tarragona, Castelló, València and Alacant provinces.

Short history of sobrassada and Majorcan penchant for pork

Other pork products typical from the cuisine of Majorca are camaïot, veria negra and xuia (pancetta)

After centuries of Muslim (non-pork) culture, Majorca quickly regained the path to excellence in pork culture in the Middle Age, with the key ingredient paprika been added after the discovery of America in the XV century. Sobrassada is thought to be originated and expanded, as a culinary concept, in the Catalan-controlled Western Mediterranean (Sicily, Balearic Islands, Sardinia) after the XIV century, as different forms of the same product persist in this region still today.

In a traditionally low-meat Mediterranean diet, as Majorca had until the 1950s, sobrassada and its affiliated pork sausages were ususally the main and exclusive pork meat source for Majorcans. Larger meat cuts like pork or lamb roasts, pork steaks or beef cuts were largely a festive dish, or restricted to the well-off. Still today, one of the most valuated dishes for a special occasion in Majorca is a whole-roasted piglet called porcella rostida

This article is licenced under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Sobrassada".