How to Cook Fresh Chorizo

Or at least how I decided to do it...

I bought 3/4 lb of fresh chorizo from the local supermercado to make some arroz con gandules.

Last time I bought chorizo for arroz con gandules, I didn't know what the heck I was doing and simply cut the single link into little links and cooked them that way. When I did that, it left big hunks of natural casing-on chorizo which Rodney avoided while eating the rice. That wasn't quite what I was going for when I bought the chorizo.

This time, I squeezed the sausage out of the casing. While I washed my slick fingers, I had a 10" skillet heating on a burner over medium. No grease or fat of any kind in the skillet, mind you. Chorizo has plenty of that already.

The sausage was turned into the hot skillet...

And broken up into small pieces with a spatula, much like ground beef, but much more red and certainly spicier.

When it got to this point, though it still looks red and "unsafe" for consumption, I knew it was the spices deceiving me and drained the fat.

At this point, I continued on with my mise en place for arroz con gandules. Other than how I prepared the chorizo, I didn't change a thing.