What We’re Cooking This Week: Chorizo and Cabbage Corncakes

Jim Dixon wrote about food for WW for more than 20 years, but these days most of his time is spent at his olive oil-focused specialty food business Wellspent Market. Jim’s always loved to eat, and he encourages his customers to cook by sending them recipes every week through his newsletter. We’re happy to have him back creating some special dishes just for WW readers.

I had some chorizo—the Mexican-style spicy ground pork version, not the cured Spanish salami—and for some reason it made me think of okonomiyaki, the savory Japanese pancake made with cabbage and ground pork. Further rumination led to cornmeal, a legacy of Mesoamerica and distantly related to chorizo through the brutal history of the conquistadors. After the idea bounced around inside my head long enough that I started thinking about calling these corncakes something like chorizomayaki, I had to make some just to shut down the brain worm.

Since I’ve been making different variations of okonomiyaki for years, I was reasonably certain that a chorizo-cornmeal version would work. These just swap chorizo for the ground pork from the Osaka-style pancakes and supplement the flour with cornmeal. While I was tempted to use the traditional okonomiyaki toppings of shaved bonito, Kewpie mayo, dried seaweed, and the red pepper-sesame seed blend called furikake, I think these taste best on their own.

Recipe

½ pound pork chorizo

2 cups green cabbage, thinly sliced

3-4 green onions, sliced

1 cup cornmeal

½ cup flour

1½ cups water

1 teaspoon kosher-style sea salt

2 eggs

Extra virgin olive oil for frying

Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and mix well until it looks like thick pancake batter. Pour a little olive oil—just enough to barely cover the bottom—into a heavy skillet over medium heat. Make a test fritter by gently dropping a walnut-sized dollop of batter into the skillet, letting it cook for about 4 minutes on each side, and tasting it to see if it needs more salt. Adjust as needed and cook the rest of the corncakes in batches, adding a little more oil as needed.