In Goa, One Sausage to Rule Them All

A choris vendor at the Mapusa Friday Market in Goa. Photo by Anthony D’costa.

It was nose-to-tail cooking before it became a culinary buzzword.

When I was growing up, the pig was an important feature of celebrations in villages in Goa, a small state on India’s west coast. It was fattened for the occasion. Every part of the animal was put to good use: the blood and offal for sorpotel (a spicy stew), the bones for the curry, admass, and the fleshy and fatty meat for pork curries and Goa pork sausages, or chouriços.

Chouriços de Goa, or simply choris (pronounced cho-rees), seeks inspiration from the Portuguese and Spanish chorizo but differs in flavor. Choris are spicier and use generous dosing of vinegar. In the book Tasty Morsels, Maria de Lourdes Bravo da Costa Rodrigues calls the chouriço, “one of the important elements of Catholic cuisine.”

The Portuguese ruled the state from 1510 to 1961. These colonizers brought Catholicism, as well as ingredients like chillies, tomatoes, cashews and potatoes, and changed Goan food habits.

Though pork is an important part of Goan Catholic food today, in the 1700s, it wasn’t so popular. Historian Fatima Da Silva Gracias’s book Cozinha de Goa mentions that regulations were introduced to halt locals’ food habits predated the forced conversion to Catholicism. Not eating pork was an offence punishable by the Inquisition, an agency of the Church responsible to combat heresy.

Over the years, Portuguese recipes found their way into Goan food, either in their original form or with local adaptations. One of the dishes of this was chouriços. Goans added chillies, Indian spices and local vinegar (instead of wine) to their version.  

Goa sausages (they are never called Goan sausages), thus, are intense. They are fiery, spicy, tangy and aromatic, with a color and aroma that linger on.  

Homemade sausages. Photo by Incendiary Kitchen.

Stuffing it Up

As with all good things, making choris requires time and patience. The recipes vary, but all contain pork, sea salt, red chiles, spices, ginger, garlic and toddy vinegar, which is made from coconut. Some even added in coconut feni, the potent local liquor made from the sap of the coconut palm.

In my ancestral home in Goa, we made sausages when my grand aunt, Micas, was alive in the 1980s. She was an excellent cook and marshalled the forces: The adults sat on the floor of our dining room, massaging the masala into the meat and stuffing it into cleaned cow/goat guts.

Stuffing is an important part of the process. It requires nimble fingers to push in the meat, ensuring there are no air pockets and the casing doesn’t break.

One long link, tied at the ends with thread, made one sausage. The finished product was strung around a bamboo rod placed high in kitchen, to get the smoke from the firewood stoves, or chulhas. The sausages were then dried in the sun and we children were tasked with protecting them from crows and other animals or flies. Drying produced a lovely wrinkly effect on the skin and aided in its preservation.

Sausages drying in the sun. Photo by Sean Xavier.

Goa sausages are part of purumenth, the practice of stocking up in summer for the upcoming rainy season. Sausages made in summer benefitted from the harsh sun.

Avinash Martins’s childhood summers were spent at his grandmother’s home in Velim, a village in South Goa. The chef at Cavatina Cucina, Goa, would help his Avo (grandmother) prepare for purumenth. Martins recalls the days dedicated to making choris.

Activities began early morning. Men were hired to come and slaughter the pig. They burned off the hair and then shaved it. The intestines were cleaned twice with water and then vinegar and left to dry. The meat was salted and kept under weights to cure. Every few hours, collected water was drained off.

“Two days later, she would cut off the skin, cut the meat into smaller pieces, marinate it with masala and coconut feni, stuff it and leave them to dry. Much of the flavor of the sausage comes from air drying and sun-drying—they impart much character to the meat,” he says.  

A lesser known version of the choris is kathichim choris, which follows the same process but uses the pork skin instead of meat. It is fried till crisp, something like a pork crackling, and eaten as a snack with drinks. Kathichim choris can still be found in Goa’s taverns. Some people even completely ignore the casing and just store the spiced meat in jars or bottles, simply called choris maas (sausage meat).    

What gives Goa sausage its unique taste is toddy vinegar, the fermented sap of the coconut palm.

“It’s the most important element in choris,” says Antonio de Silva, a famous sausage-maker in South Goa. “It is the best preservative and adds flavor. If you don’t have good toddy vinegar, it can ruin the taste of the meat,”

Da Silva’s family has been making sausages for three generations, selling them under the name Vailankainn. They’re made from a family recipe, and he has honed it over the course of four decades, sourcing the pigs from one farm and making his own vinegar.  

Sausages can be sun-dried, smoked or both. Da Silva has a smoking shed near his house with an open fireplace above which hang strings of sausages. He smokes them for two days. Smoking adds extra flavor to the meat and also keeps away insects as it dries the sausages.

It was a visit to da Silva’s set up that convinced Mumbai-based Joshua Pereira to try making smoked Goa sausages. Pereira uses his mother’s recipe, mixes toddy vinegar with coconut vinegar that’s made from coconut water. With this recipe, he cofounded Incendiary Kitchen.

“I smoke them using coal and coconut husks, on a low heat,” he says. “This heat is important—the sausages should not cook but just dry out. The coconut shells add a different dimension of flavour to the meat.”

These sausages are popular in Mumbai, especially during this lockdown and he sells 20 kilos a week.

“Everybody wants a piece,” he says.

Choris pão. Photo by Nigel Britto.

A Piece of the Pie

Local markets in Goa usually has one section reserved for the sausage ladies, women with baskets of coiled sausages, some strung up on display and others cut open for sampling.

There are two versions of the choris: One that looks like a regular sausage and the rosary sausages, which resemble rosary beads. It’s a fitting name for a dish that will make you give a prayer of thanks for its invention. There are also sealed, packaged versions from companies like Joao’s and Costa’s, which are found in shops.

Choris is an extremely versatile food. Tasty Morsels calls it an “ideal food, very handy when a guest drops in unannounced. It is easy to cook and can be served fried or plain boiled with potatoes and onions, or without.”

A generous dose of sausage can pep up boring dishes and add spunk to anything from steak sauce to a simple stew. The casing can either be discarded or slow-cooked and eaten.

The simplest and quickest preparation is a chilli fry, where it is cooked with plenty of onions, and a few potatoes. There’s the sausage pulao, feijoada (a stew of kidney beans, sausages and salted pork meat), beef roulade (beef steak, sausage, potatoes and carrots) and choris stuffed squid.  

Modern adaptations are plenty. The Goa sausage is a preferred experiment for chefs wanting to put a more modern or fancier spin on Goan food in a way that will still taste familiar to tough-to-please crowd.

Goan chef Vasquito Alvares’s experiments include a Maca Pav Steak, a steak made with sausage gravy (maca pao is the slang term used to describe Goans outside the state), and a choris pao lasagne. Chef Gracian de Souza has made a Goan Chouriço Ragout, and a Chouriço Pate with chicken liver mousse. Martins has made a Choriz and Cheese Frittata, a Choris Bao with dark chocolate; and a savory choris sorbet with lime and spicy plum jam.

One of the preferred ways to eat it is choris pão or sausage bread. This sandwich makes up the holy trinity of great Goan street food, together with cutlet pao (made of beef steak) and ros omelette (a coconut chicken gravy served with an omelette).  

You can find choris pão across the state, at street stalls and in restaurants. It can be eaten at any time of the day. No one eats just one. My fondest memories of choris pão are snacking on it after attending the feast Mass of Goa’s patron saint, St. Francis Xavier, whose body is interred at the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa. After Mass, we would gravitate to stalls selling roasted gram, sweets and choris pão. It made attending an early morning Mass on an empty stomach well worth it for us as children. 

The Goan love for choris can be established from the fact that everyone has their favorite source of choris, and their favorite place to eat choris pão. These won’t find their way into travel guides. We keep them to ourselves.

Once we find that perfect sausage, we remain quite loyal. We take it along when traveling outside the state, sealed and wrapped so the pungent aroma doesn’t escape.

Choris is sent as care packages to relatives abroad craving a taste of home. Da Silva’s sausages are sent by bus to customers in Mumbai and Bengaluru, and as cargo to London. Those who cannot source it from Goa will make their own or find local suppliers though most will agree the best sausages are made in the state.

It took Sean Xavier 14 years to fine-tune his sausage recipe and get it to “taste like the ones you get in Goa.” He started practicing back when he lived in Sydney and now sells them in Mumbai as part of his home catering business, The Real One.

As anyone who has ever eaten it will tell you, there’s nothing better than a well-made choris. It’s the taste of nostalgia, of afternoons spent watching over drying sausages, of houses enveloped with the aroma of cured meat and of family feasts.