My husband, sons, and myself have started watching Street Food on Netflix. If you haven’t started binging this and opening up your Chrome or Safari to search for these recipes, you need to STAT! The first episode will take you to Argentina where they make drool-inducing Argentine Choripan. After frantically digging around online for a good recipe, I found this delicious, now tried-and-true Argentine Choripan recipe from the Macheesmo blog. I have made some adjustments and would highly encourage you to try the Argentine Chorizo if all else fails, and it likely will.
Argentine Choripan
Ingredients
4 quality sausages (Argentine Chorizo or good Spanish Chorizo)
1 crusty baguette, cut into 4 pieces
Olive oil, for drizzling
Choripan Chimichurri:
2-3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons minced red onion
1/2 Serrano pepper, minced
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon water
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 bay leaf, crumbled
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 cup olive oil1 cup minced parsley
Prepare
No, but really, this is important. Some say the sausage is the most important (we’ll talk about that in a minute), but for me the chimichurri is where it’s at. It should be heavily seasoned with lots of garlic and spice.
You can absolutely mince everything by hand and end up in really good shape, but I like to pulse my onion, garlic, and Serrano in a little food processor.
After those things are pulsed, stir them together with the vinegar, water, and dried herbs.
Most importantly, and often left out: BAY LEAF!
Crumble one up and toss it in. It adds a great savory base flavor to the chimichurri.
Once all that stuff is in the bowl, whisk in the olive oil so it emulsifies and then stir in the parsley. I like my parsley pretty roughly chopped and I even toss in some stems. No big deal.
This was basically my finished chimichurri. If you eat it by itself it should taste strong.
Let this sit for 30 minutes at least while you grill the sandwich stuff.
Choripan Basics
Chori = Sausage. Pan = Bread. That’s what you need.
For the sausage, ideally you could find some traditional Argentine chorizo, Spanish chorizo will work just as great if you can’t find Argentine chorizo.
As far as bread goes, just find a good crusty baguette. Don’t overthink it!
Heat your grill to medium-high heat (or direct heat charcoal grilling) and toss on the sausages. Cook them for about 10 minutes, turning them regularly until they get crispy on the outside.
Now for the key trick: Hold each sausage with your tongs and use a good knife to slice about 3/4 of the way through each sausage.
Yes, this will cause lots of juices to escape, but that’s okay. We are ladling oily chimichurri over it later anyway.
By slicing the sausages in half though, you can press them down, cut side down, on the grill. This will crisp up the sausage beautifully and finish cooking it if it isn’t cooked through.
Don’t forget your bread also! Drizzle the baguette pieces with some olive oil and press them onto the hot part of the grill for like 30 seconds. Shouldn’t take long to char them up a bit.
You know the rest.
Sausage. Meet bread. Sandwich. Meet chimichurri.
CHOMP.
This simple sandwich is so much better than any of its parts. I’m biased by fun memories of eating these, but they are seriously one of my favorite grilled foods out there.
CHORIPAN for the win!
