Sobrassada

Sobrassada

Home-made Minorcan sobrassada
Course	Sausage
Place of origin	Balearic Islands
Main ingredients	pork

Sobrassada (Catalan pronunciation: [soβɾəˈsaðə]; Spanish: sobrasada) is a raw, cured sausage from the Balearic Islands made with ground pork, paprika and salt and other spices. Sobrassada, along with botifarró are traditional Balearic sausage meat products prepared in the laborious but festive rites that still mark the autumn and winter pig slaughter known as a matança (in Spanish, matanza) in Majorca and Ibiza. The chemical principle that makes sobrassada is the dehydration of meat under certain weather conditions (high humidity and mild cold) which are typical of the late Balearic autumn.

After centuries of Muslim rule of Spain, pork consumption returned to the region in the Middle Ages. Paprika was added after the spice was brought back from the Americas in the 15th century. Sobrassada is thought to have originated and expanded, as a culinary concept, in the Crown of Aragon-controlled Western Mediterranean (Sicily, Balearic Islands, Sardinia) after the 14th century, as similar sausages are still made in this region.

In a traditional Mediterranean diet, containing little meat, as Majorca had until the 1950s, sobrassada and related pork sausages were the main and sometimes only sources of pork for Majorcans. Larger meat cuts such as pork or lamb roasts, pork steaks or beef cuts were largely festive dishes, or restricted to the well-off. Even today dishes such as porcella rostida, a whole roasted suckling pig, are only served on special occasions.