Yesterday, Thursday, was the perfect day to taste the largest sobrasada cured sausage in Mallorca and, therefore, in the world. And that happened in the village of Sant Joan, as part of the patron saint festivities after celebrating the Condemna. The Centre Cultural de Sant Joan organises the festivities and was responsible for making the monster sausage.
As part of the “vermutada” hundreds of people gathered at the Can Tronca bar, where the Cultural Centre invited everyone present to taste a sobrasada weighing no less than 76 kilograms. In December last year, the Cultural Centre of Sant Joan celebrated its traditional “matances” (slaughtering). The pig was enormous, weighing 356 kg, and was enough to make a monumental sobrasada. This gave rise to the idea of making the world’s largest sobrasada, which had to be stuffed into the pig’s own skin.
Last week, the sobrasada went on display at Can Tronca with a bar placed between two figueroleres ladders (used to pick figs) and tied with several ropes from side to side so that it would not fall to the ground. Needless to say, there was great excitement and during that week many people came to see such a Mallorcan sausage.
This Thursday, those who were able to try it said that ‘it tasted excellent’. Experts in matances believe that the good flavour of this sobrasada is due to ‘being cured inside the pig’s skin, which is coated with fat, giving it a very creamy texture that is easy to spread, and a flavour that is incomparable to normal sobrasada’. The right side of the sobrasada was spicy and the left side was sweet.
During the vermouth party, they used up to a hundred loaves of bread to spread the sausage on, and many were able to satisfy their appetite with the traditional delicacy of pa amb sobrassada. Sobrasada is a raw, cured sausage from the Balearics made with ground pork, paprika, salt and other spices. Sobrassada, along with botifarró, are traditional Balearic meat products prepared in the laborious but festive rites that still mark the autumn and winter pig slaughter in Minorca, Mallorca 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.