Clams and Chorizo in White Wine Sauce Recipe | EatSimpleFood com

Clams and Chorizo in White Wine Sauce

This clam and chorizo with white wine sauce recipe is packed with flavor. Clams and chorizo are cooked with white wine and clam juice and garnished with a touch of lemon zest and parsley. Grab a piece of bread for dunking.

Serve this clams and chorizo recipe with a baguette or over linguine or zucchini noodles.

Prepare Clams for Clam and Chorizo With White Wine Sauce
Clams need to be alive when cooked. Many places give you clams wrapped in a plastic bag, which they should not do, as the little guys need to breathe to stay alive.

Immediately open the bag and transfer clams to a bowl of ice when you get home and keep them in the refrigerator until ready to cook.

Dead clams will be open before cooking, so trash them. Clams that have not opened after cooking should also be trashed. Don’t try to pry them open.

Rinse clams before cooking. They are notoriously sandy. Soak clams in ice water with 1-2 tablespoon salt for 30 minutes and rinse off again.

Chances are that you will not be able to get all the sand off.

Any sand that’s left will stay at the bottom of the pot when cooking. When pouring your broth into a bowl, leave ~ ¼ of the liquid (and all of the sand) in the pan. This prevents a sandy broth. You can also strain the broth.

Variations On Clam and Chorizo with White Wine Sauce
Don’t have or can’t find clam juice? Use water or chicken broth instead.

Can’t find chorizo? Ok – use mild or hot Italian sausage.

Clams and chorizo is versatile. Leave out the parsley if you don’t have it or substitute thyme, sage, or basil instead.

Use Mexican Chorizo AKA Raw Chorizo with Clams
Mexican chorizo is raw chorizo and still needs to be cooked. The other kind of chorizo is called Spanish and it is dry cured and can be eaten raw.

Raw Mexican chorizo is crumbly in texture when cooking. The texture is not like Italian sausage which is hard to break up when cooking.

Serves 3 as a main dish or 6 as an appetizer

Ingredients:
• 1 Tbsp unsalted butter
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• ¾ pound of ground raw chorizo (AKA Mexican chorizo)
• ⅓ cup onions, diced
• 1 Tbsp garlic, sliced
• ¾ cup white wine
• 2 cups clam juice
• 24 littleneck clams, rinsed & scrubbed
• zest from one lemon
• 2 Tbsp lemon juice
• 3 Tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
• 1 baguette – (optional)
• salt to taste

Instructions:

• Rinse clams and discard any that are open. Optional: soak in ice water with 1-2 tablespoon salt for 30 minutes if clams are extra sandy.
• Bring a large pan to medium high heat and add butter, olive oil, chorizo, onions.
• Cook ~ 5-7 minutes or until chorizo is cooked through.
• Add garlic and cook 1-2 minutes or until fragrant.
• Add white wine and clam juice.
• Bring to a boil and add clams.
• Cover and cook an additional 5-7 minutes or until the clams have opened. Trash any clams that have not opened (they are bad).
• Remove clams to a large bowl as they open.
• Remove sausage with a slotted spoon (place in clam bowl) and pour most of the broth into your bowl, careful to check for any sand in the pan, just in case.
• Zest lemon first and then juice. Add 2 tablespoon lemon juice and garnish with lemon zest and parsley.
Serve with crusty baguette for dipping or serve over pasta or zoodles. Add salt to taste.

This is clams and chorizo in a white wine sauce. And this chorizo is raw chorizo. That’s also known as Mexican chorizo. There’s a dry um cured chorizo. That’s not it. Get the raw. You need to cook it. All right. So, we got these clams and we got them on ice. And first, we’re going to rinse them. And rinsing them gets the dirt off the outside of the shell, but doesn’t necessarily get it inside the the sand inside. So clams are notoriously dirty. We’re going to rinse them off. You see that there’s all this sand still left that’s already, you know, gone down the drain, and I still have some. So, we’re going to put about a tablespoon and a half, 2 tablespoons of salt into a bowl of ice water. Let that sit for 30 minutes. With the clams, you want to discard any that are open. That means they’re dead. Um, and then you want to after they’re cooked, discard any that haven’t that haven’t opened. That also means they’re dead. Um, so we’re just going to chop up this parsley. We zested a lemon and we cut off a little chunk of that. We got some onions, maybe a third, half a cup, however much you like. Um, I got about a tablespoon to I like a lot of garlic, so I put probably about a pound a tablespoon and a half to two tablespoons, but if you don’t like a lot of garlic, use a tablespoon. All right, so our clams are cleaned up and they still might be sandy. Just something you got to watch out for. Pan medium high heat. I’m adding a tablespoon of olive oil and butter and the chorizo. And chorizo is pretty crumbly. It’s not like Italian sausage that has a ton of fat and different things going on in there. Um, you do you cook that for 5 to 7 minutes and then you add the garlic and then you cook that for 1 to 2 minutes or until it’s fragrant. The chorizo needs to be cooked through at this point. If you need to add a little bit of olive oil to get into that garlic um to make it toasty, add a little bit more oil. All right. Now, I’m adding those two cups of clam juice. Um, each bottle is 8 ounces or a cup. I’m adding white wine. I’m adding just a little bit of salt. And I’m throwing in all the clams. Just looking at them, making sure that they’re not open. Again, if they’re open, they’re no good. Toss them. And then we’re going to bring it to a simmer and cover it. And you’re going to cook that for about 5 to 8 minutes. So, usually they’re they start popping open around 5 minutes, the smaller ones. And these are little neck clams. They’re bigger clams, too. it and those will need to cook longer. Um, and then just start taking them out as they cook. And you can go ahead and start taking that sausage out. And I don’t like to pour it all in in case there is any sand that didn’t come out. I like to kind of just spoon everything over and then just leave a little bit of the sauce in the pan in case there is any sand. And you can see that three of those 24 clams didn’t even open. So, you might want to get a couple extra clams. I think eight clams a person with a sausage and a baguette is great. All right. Hit that with a squeeze of lemon. Going to garnish this with parsley and lemon zest. And then serve a baguette on the side. You could also serve this over zucchini noodles or pasta or orzo. You could throw some orzo into that sauce. You could um uh throw some potatoes into that, too. We ate that the next day with potatoes as leftovers. You can find this recipe at eatsimplefood.com.