This is another follow on from my Dutch Oven Loaf where I made enough dough left over to experiment with. This is one of those experiments…

It was inspired from my summer holiday in Portugal. I was driving around with my brother-in-law who lives there and he pointed out a van on the side of the road. He described that they generally sell bread with chorizo baked into it or roast the chorizo and mop it with the bread before slicing and serving it inside. Glorious!!! Unfortunately, due to having kids in the car and already being late for tea, hungry children meant that I never got to sample its delights!

So this is an attempt at some chorizo bread, with no reference on whether it was like that van on the hill, but it lived up to expectation and didn’t last long.

The other thing that I blows me away is how hot it must have been in that van. It was well over 40 degrees and this guy was baking bread in a metal box under the sun!

Step 1 - Prep the inside

• If your dough is in the fridge, take it out

• Slices up your chorizo into smallish chunks and fry off

• Lift the meat out and set it aside, leaving the fat in the pan

• Dice up your onion

• In the same pan that the chorizo was fried in, sweat off the onion and then set aside too

Step 2 - Roll it up

• Heat the oven to 210C

• Dust your board with some fine semolina

• Drop the dough onto it and make sure it has good covering of semolina

• Stretch it out into a long rectangle making sure it’s not too thin

• Add the chorizo across the bread leaving a gap at one end

• Next sprinkle the onions over the chorizo

• Finally roll up the bread towards the end with the gap and place it in a baking tin, leaving to rise in a warm place for at least an hour

Step 3 - The Cook

• For a really golden crust, brush the bread with milk (See the difference between the two loafs below, the one with the nobble hasn’t been brushed, the second has)

• Cook for around 30 minutes or until golden

• The bottom should have a hollow sound to it when you tap it. The oil from the chorizo will have leaked out and the bottom will be soaked in it and crisp

The golden crust…

Chorizo Bread

• Chorizo

• Red onion

• Fine semolina

• A portion of dough (See this post)