Botifarra d’ou
Also known as Butifarra d'Ou
Catalonia, Spain
An egg-enriched Catalan sausage.
Overview
Botifarra d'Ou is a pale golden cooked sausage enriched with whole egg. It belongs especially to Dijous Gras, Fat Thursday, when Catalans traditionally eat eggs, pork and other rich foods before the Lenten fast.
Where it's from
The cut
How to recognise it
A slender horseshoe or straight sausage with a pale yellow-beige slice and a tender, fine-to-lightly-granular texture. Egg gives richness and colour without turning the filling custardy. The casing should be intact and the centre fully set.
- Casing
- Hog casing, 36 mm
Origins and history
The sausage is documented from at least the seventeenth century. Its link with Carnival is practical and symbolic: communal meals before Lent celebrated pork and eggs, the very foods that fasting customs were about to restrict. Production declined when public Carnival celebrations were suppressed, then revived strongly from the 1980s through the work of Catalan butchers and renewed interest in local food traditions. Today it remains one of the clearest edible markers of Dijous Gras, sold for only a short season and recognised immediately by its pale golden slice.
- Protection
- Unprotected.
- Seasonality
- The winter matanza.
Compare with. Botifarra
Serving and cultural significance
Eat it in slices with bread and tomato, add it to a Fat Thursday omelette, or serve it with other Carnival sausages. Its cultural meaning is inseparable from the brief season of abundance before Lent.
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
- cook and set
- Basis
- per 1000 g green meat
- Style
- Egg butifarra
Ingredients
- Pork lean, rear leg (base)100% · 1000 g/kg
- back fat42.86% · 429 g/kg
- White pepper0.2% · 2 g/kg
- Nutmeg0.05% · 0 g/kg
- Eggs, whole10% · 100 g/kg
Notes
- This is a cooked product. Cook thoroughly to a safe internal temperature and cool promptly; cooking does not kill botulinum spores, so keep the warm-holding window short and refrigerate.
In the Codex
What this product teaches, and where to read more.
Temple. Pillar, Hygiene Control