Ingredients
Total meat plus fat. Everything below rescales.
Meat & Fat
Cure & Seasoning
Cure Safety
No curing salt in this one. Keep it refrigerated and cook it through.
Equipment
There is no pork fat here: olive oil and broth-soaked bread carry this sausage. The beef, veal and chicken are simmered first, ground, and folded through the seasoned bread, so the filling is already cooked when it goes into the casing. Traditional alheira is then cold-smoked for days. We leave that out on purpose, because holding a cooked, moist filling in warm smoke for two days without curing salt is not something we will recommend at home. Fry it until the center reads 74C and serve.
How To Apply It
Simmer the meats and keep the broth: it goes into the bread, which does the binding that fat does in most sausages. Grind the cooked meat coarse and fold it through the soaked, seasoned bread with the olive oil until it holds together.
Instructions
Cover the beef, veal and chicken with water, bring it to a boil, then simmer until the chicken reaches 74C. Drain, keeping the broth.
Tear or slice the bread into a bowl and pour the hot broth over it. Once it has softened, mash in the salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne and garlic.
Grind the cooked meats through a 10 mm plate.
Fold the ground meat and the olive oil through the mashed bread until the mixture holds together.
Fill 32 mm beef or collagen casings and twist into 20 cm links.
Refrigerate the links and cook them within 1 to 2 days, or freeze them.
Fry in olive oil over medium heat, turning often, until the skin is crisp and the center reads 74C.
Then What
This version is not smoked, so treat it as a fresh sausage: keep the links in the fridge and cook them within 1 to 2 days, or freeze them. Fry in olive oil until crisp outside and 74C in the center.
About This Recipe
Alheira dates to the late 1400s, when Portuguese Jews forced to convert made sausages of poultry and bread so their households appeared to be making pork sausage like everyone else's. Christian cooks later adopted it and added pork. Alheira de Mirandela, the product made in that municipality, has held PGI status since 2016.
Curing salts are toxic in quantities you could measure casually with a spoon. Weigh every dose and mix it through evenly. Adapted from Alheira de Mirandela; all wording here is our own. We have not made this one ourselves yet, so treat the timings as a starting point.
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