Chorizo sausage is the default in many Spanish speaking countries, and everyone seems to have a different version. Chorizo is a pork sausage popular in Mexican cooking, made from pork, chili pepper and other spices. Chorizo is that fragrant, delicious, spicy sausage that hails from Spain. Do you actually have to cook chorizo? An extremely flavorful Spanish style burger made from beef and Spanish chorizo sausage, topped with caramelized onions and smoky red pepper ranch sauce and shavings of Manchego cheese served in sweet brioche buns. Traditionally, it is cut up into mixed dishes such as huevos rancheros, but you can cook links of chorizo just like you would any other link sausage. In this article, we look at the different kinds of chorizo and discover how they can or should be prepared. Here’s an overview of some of the most popular methods. Boiling is one of the easiest ways to make sausage links at home. Chorizo can be bought as a whole sausage of either soft cooking chorizo – which must be cooked before eating – or a firmer, drier cured sausage that can be sliced and eaten without cooking . It is also sold thinly sliced, like salami, to be enjoyed raw as tapas. For the most part, Spanish chorizo is a hard, dry cured sausage, while Mexican chorizo is fresh, and tends to be pretty soft, almost spreadable — best uncased and mixed with eggs and such. Sausages are a versatile food that can be cooked in many ways. Boiling. To cook sausage in the oven, I preheated a conventional oven to 350°F and sprayed a nonstick baking sheet with canola oil. Since my smoked sausage was fully cooked as-is in the package, the purpose of cooking it is to thoroughly heat it through and add that desirable crispiness. But is this tasty sausage something that you can eat raw?