Chorizos and black puddings from Teror

For generations, popular dialect on this island has given its most appreciated local products the “surname” of the village which made them famous, providing them with a sense of a seal of quality. This occurs especially in the case of cold meats, in which the Canaries doesn’t have a particularly long tradition and which are limited to soft paste chorizos and sweet black puddings. In Gran Canaria (and around the rest of islands too) the “surname” for their most famous cold meats are given to the town of Teror, where some butchers –going back several generations now- started to make and sell it coinciding with the traditional period when pigs were sacrificed. Pigs were an essential animal in the lives of peasants not too long ago, and if they bred more than one they would sell the other one to local butchers who would come to the house of the breeder to sacrifice it and then buy the pieces they needed to make their product with. according to researcher and culinary expert Mario Hernández). These were adapted to an extent to the tastes and the ingredients available to those who made these products here.

Many small and family-owned meat establishments, who have incorporated these old recipes into their their practices, continue to flourish in Teror today. Although their produce reaches all the establishments in the food sector on the island (including bars and restaurants, who use them as ingredients in a wide range of dishes), for local palates, the sheer joy of biting into the popular chorizo from Teror wrapped inside a warm, oven-baked bread roll, especially on market day in the town every Sunday, is a truly culinary ritual which leaves a sumptuous, lingering taste in the mouth.

Yuri Millares, December 2017

These butchers became like pig-rearers themselves who made their cold meats at home and then took them to their own shops to sell them, they brought age-old recipes to their professional activities, which came to the Canaries from several different places (Italian soprassata, Portuguese morcela dolce,