Training & Nutrition

Recipe: Easy and Delicious Chorizo Sausage Stew

Here's a delicious recipe for chorizo sausage stew to add to your repertoire

If you fancy something hearty for a post-ride meal which requires minimal effort to make, then chorizo sausage stew is definitely for you – rhyme!

Riding your bike in the UK can mean going out in all weathers, and coming back tired, hungry, cold and often wet! A warming stew is a perfect antidote. This one is so easy to prepare, that you can even cook it up the night before so you’ve got it ready to go when you get in.

The chorizo sausage does all the hard work, giving the stew a smokey, spicy flavour, and it’s packed full of vegetables. It’s also pretty cheap.

I found this is also the perfect dish for mass catering. It’s easy to scale up, and very satisfying if you’ve had a long day in the saddle.

It also makes a fantastic soup. If you’ve got any left over, blend it down, add a little more stock and serve with some fresh bread.

Ingredients

100g chorizo, cut into chunks.
5 tomatoes
3 red and yellow peppers
2 chopped potatoes
tin of chopped tomatoes
3 onions
2 cloves of garlic
750ml vegetable stock
a generous dash of olive oil
black pepper

Method

Roughly chop the chorizo, onion, peppers, tomatoes and garlic. I like to make the stew quite chunky, but go smaller if you prefer.

Fry up the onions and garlic in the olive oil in a large pan on a medium heat. When the onions begin to turn translucent, add the chorizo and black pepper and cook for another few minutes. You’re looking for the oils in the chorizo sausage to start to melt out and colour the onions.

Add the peppers, potatoes and fresh tomatoes. Stir, then add the stock and tinned tomatoes and give it another good stir.

Pop a lid on the pan, and cook slowly on a low heat for about 30 minutes, or until the vegetables are cooked. The longer you cook it, the richer the flavour. You can also bung the pot in the oven and cook it as a casserole at this point.

Serve on its own, or with a green salad, mashed potato or brown rice.

You can also easily transform this dish into one that’s suitable for vegetarians and vegans. Substitute the chorizo for a generous dash of smoked paprika (about 1 teaspoon), make sure the stock is vegan and add a few more veggies – hey presto!

The healthy bit:

Packed full of vegetables, you’re getting a good proportion of your ‘five a day’ veggies in this dish.
Tomatoes are well known as a vegetable that packs a significant nutritional punch. They contain vitamins A, C and K, plus essential minerals like magnesium and potassium. They’ve also got antioxidants covered, as they are a source of lycopene and beta-carotene.
Red and yellow peppers have much of the same vitamin content as tomatoes, so you get a double whammy of these vitamins.

[We know that technically both tomatoes and peppers are in fact fruit. But for the sake of convention we’ve referred to them as vegetables. Also, we weren’t sure that a hearty fruit stew would have sounded as attractive.]