Overview
Botifarra Dolça is one of Catalonia's most surprising sausages: pork seasoned with sugar, cinnamon and lemon rather than garlic and pepper. It may be sold fresh or dried, but the Curesmith formula is the fresh version, cooked with apple, bread, wine or a caramelised pan sauce.
Where it's from
The cut
How to recognise it
Fresh Botifarra Dolça is pale pink and glossy, with a smooth casing and a coarse but tender pork filling. Lemon should lift the aroma, cinnamon should be warm, and the sugar should caramelise during cooking without making the sausage taste like confectionery. A dried version is firmer and grey-pink.
- Casing
- Hog casing, 32 mm
Origins and history
Its exact beginning is unknown. Catalan food historians have suggested a connection with the sweet-and-savoury cooking of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, because cinnamon, lemon and sugar belonged naturally together in medieval Catalan kitchens, but no surviving document proves that origin. What is certain is its place in the pig slaughter of Empordà farmhouses. The sausage moved from household production into local butcher shops, surviving as a distinctive taste of the Girona districts rather than becoming a national standard.
- Protection
- Unprotected.
- Seasonality
- The winter matanza.
Compare with. Botifarra
Serving and cultural significance
Cook it slowly so the sugar forms a mahogany glaze. Traditional accompaniments include apple, toasted bread, sweet wine and the syrup produced in the pan. The sausage belongs to a Catalan taste for dishes in which meat, fruit and spice are deliberately brought together.
Recipe and cure
This is not a finished recipe. It is a window into how this meat is traditionally cured. Before you follow any process, please run it through one of our curing calculators, so the salt, cure and timings are right and safe for your own batch.
Make this — the measured Curesmith version →The cure below is the traditional reference. “Make this” opens the measured Curesmith home recipe, scaled to your batch.
- Meat
- pork
- Cut
- collar, belly and jowl blend
- Salt (%)
- 1.8
- Fermented
- No
- Smoked
- No
- Maturation
- fresh
- Basis
- per 1000 g green meat
- Style
- Sweet butifarra
Ingredients
- pork (base)100% · 1000 g/kg
- pepper0.2% · 2 g/kg
- pimenton, sweet0.3% · 3 g/kg
- cinnamon0.2% · 2 g/kg
- honey2% · 20 g/kg
- sherry3% · 30 g/kg
- cream3% · 30 g/kg
Notes
- A fresh sausage: keep cold and cook soon.
In the Codex
What this product teaches, and where to read more.
Temple. Pillar, Hygiene Control