Elk Chorizo

One of my partners has a friend in Arizona who goes elk hunting in that state and gave him some elk chorizo made from an elk he'd shot. My partner brought me a package of it. 

Elk photographed in Custer State Park, South Dakota.

Packaged elk chorizo

Chorizo is typically made of pork with dried and smoked red peppers, but there are many regional varieties, including those that contain meat other than pork, some that are sweet rather than spicy, and some that are cured and can be eaten without cooking and some that must be cooked. 

Elk chorizo out of the packaging. Note the orange-ish spice reflected in the juices. 

This particular chorizo was not in a casing and was raw, requiring cooking. It had spice in it, but I'm not sure what the spice was. The spice was quite strong. 

I think of chorizo as a breakfast food and decided to make it as part of an open-face sandwich with heirloom tomato slices, guacamole and hard-boiled quail eggs on a slice of bread. I also had some heirloom tomato slices that I combined with fried chicken eggs and guacamole.

Chorizo to the right with hard-boiled white quail eggs insert in spots. 

The chorizo had a very distinctive taste, unlike any chorizo I've tried before. I believe most of the distinctive taste related to the gaminess of the meat and not the spice used with it. I also mixed up fried chopped yellow onion with it. I loved the hard-boiled quail eggs which added a very nice texture and mild taste and would have liked even more of them added to the sandwich. 

The spice in the chorizo was not my favorite and I think I would have preferred the ground elk without it. But it was a different way to prepare the game meat and I'm sure a way of making it palatable to those who do not appreciate the taste of wild game.