Longaniza: How to Make and Cook

En Español Recipe ↆ

Why we ❤️ it

In the Dominican Republic, you'll see the long, thin ropes of homemade longaniza sausages hanging from roadside stalls all over the country. Dominicans love longaniza sausage for its intense, spicy flavor and because it's the ultimate homemade campo food. Longaniza is a valued part of our gastronomic culture, referenced in well-known merengue songs and folk sayings.

You can also see here our recipe for making homemade longaniza, perfect for those away from La Tierrita.

How to cook longaniza

Longaniza is first and foremost popular as a fritura – fried street snack. You'll find longaniza as an ingredient in traditional Dominican dishes: fried with Tostones it's called Picalonga; it's used as an ingredient in the popular Sancocho, Chambre or chapea, and many more. We even made them into sandwiches!

Longaniza, with its intense flavors, will transform even the plainest of dishes into an extra-tasty feast without much additional expense.

What's longaniza?

Longaniza is a spiced pork sausage that was traditionally stuffed into a casing made of a pig's lower intestines, after being thoroughly washed and cleaned. Nowadays, commercially made longaniza is usually stuffed into an artificial casing. Traditionally the sausage is cured by hanging it out in the sun for several hours. The cured longaniza is then cut into medium or smaller pieces for cooking or frying. Raw longaniza (raw meat), which requires freezing, can be bought at supermarkets.

In Spain, traditional recipes for longaniza contain paprika and sometimes other spices like nutmeg and ground anise seeds. It tastes and looks like a thin, long salchichón. In most other parts of Latin America, the varieties of longaniza you'll find have much more in common with the Dominican version.

Dominican longaniza ingredients

Our Longaniza recipe calls for pork, garlic, agrio de naranja (sour orange juice), oregano, and salt, black pepper and lots of garlic. As with so many traditional recipes, every cook will have their own particular version, but the basic ingredients tend to be the same.

Longaniza is the second most popular Dominican sausage after salami.

History of longaniza sausage

Longaniza originated in Spain and made its way across the world with the conquest of the Americas. The spices used in longaniza vary from country to country, and within the countries themselves. It was also adopted as a standard food in the Philippines, also a former Spanish colony, where it's known as "longganisa" and there are hundreds of different versions. 

As mentioned earlier, longaniza is also eaten in many Spanish-speaking countries like Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and El Salvador, as well as in the Dominican Republic and its country of origin, Spain. The longaniza you get in Spain is made with paprika – which gives its red color – unlike most of its Latin American variants. Longaniza also has a lot in common with the Portuguese and Brazilian linguiça sausage.

Longaniza and homemade longaniza ingredients.

Longaniza vs chorizo

Although each contains similar ingredients, chorizo, and longaniza taste and look considerably different. Both types of this spicy pork sausage are made with pork, but chorizo is made with minced or ground pork meat, while longaniza is made with chopped pork. 

Longaniza is a very long and thin sausage, the length of the pig's intestine that is used for the casing, about a meter long. Chorizo sausages are much shorter and thicker than longaniza.

How to make homemade longaniza

This is a recipe that readers have requested many times over the years we have been writing about Dominican food. I'd never worked up the courage to try it, mainly because I wasn't going to work with tripe; it seemed like the kind of thing that would be hard for our readers living in urban areas or abroad to find. It then occurred to me that the casing adds little to none in the way of flavor.

We can get the flavor without all the work, and utensils needed to stuff it into casings. I am happy with the results, and while this will not work for all the recipes in which we use longaniza, it may work for others. You can also double or triple the ingredients to make great quantities and freeze them for later use.

Buen provecho!

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