Authentic Cantonese Sausage, at home (自制广式腊肠)
The sweet Cantonese sausage is awesome fried along with some veg, excellent topped over a claypot rice - or even just tossed on a bit of white rice in the rice cooker directly.
Lap Cheong is… awesome. It's an excellent sausage – the perfect thing to fry up with some vegetable, and incredible to top over some Cantonese claypot rice. But despite its inherent deliciousness we've always hesitated to use the ingredient in our videos, because.. quite frankly? We've always been pretty disappointed with the quality of the Lap Cheong available outside of Asia.
Because in most Western countries, there's basically always been pretty much a straight up ban on importing pork products from China. So - the Lap Cheong available in the west is produced in the west, and in our personal opinion those big North American brands just... haven't made very good Lap Cheong.
Now I know. That sentiment always seems to get a bit of pushback. So before we show you how to make some sausage, let’s show you a bit about what to look for in a great Lap Cheong real quick.
So there are a lot of ways to judge a Lap Cheong – personally, I'd put them in three main categories. The bad, the proper, and the good. The difference between bad ones and proper ones is how they handle the lean. Bad Lap Cheong are a meat emulsion, with a couple fat cubes hanging there awkwardly. While the difference between a proper Lap Cheong and a good Lap Cheong is how they handle the fat.
For a great Lap Cheong, when you cook it, the fat will kind of become transparent, and it all comes together into this one snappy bite when you bite into it. As we call it, "爽口无渣" (a “crunchy bite” without mealiness) in Cantonese. This is handled by using proper cuts of meat instead of scraps, properly drying it, and in some cases even starting off with candied pork fat, Bing Yuk (冰肉, meaning “ice/crystal meat”).
So right, we're gunna be going that candied pork fat route, starting from the ham cut of the pig.
Cantonese Sausage with Candied Pork Fat
Pork: 350g lean (ham cut or loin) and 150g fat (ham cut or fatback).
Casings: ~30mm dried hog casings, ~6ft.
For the lean marinade
Salt, 7.5g.
Sugar, 30g.
Prague Powder #1, 3g.
Light soy sauce, 20g.
Fenjiu or Rose Wine, 15g.
Water, 75g.
Process:
Separate 350g lean pork and 150g fat. Dice each into pea-sized pieces. Re-weigh each to make sure you're still at 350g/150g after trimming.
Make the candied pork fat: blanch the pork fat for ~2 min, rinse and let it drain for a minute or two. Lay in a bowl with alternating layers of sugar and pork fat. Cover, leave in the fridge overnight.
Mix the lean pork with the marinade ingredients of 7.5g salt, 30g sugar, 3g Prague powder #1, 20g light soy sauce, 15g Fenjiu wine or rose wine, and 75g water. Cover, refrigerate overnight.
Next day, soak ~6ft of casing in warm water for 20 minutes.
Rinse the sugar off the pork fat, drain for a minute or two. Combine the marinated lean pork with the fat, together with 75g of water. Stir very well, ~3-5 minutes.
Scrunch your casing up the bottom of a funnel, leaving ~2 inches of casing remaining at the end. Tie an overhand knot (see pic below) at the end of the casing.
Stuff the filling through the funnel with the wide end of a (Chinese-style) chopstick. Once you stuff it with ~2 inches remaining at the end, tie another overhand knot to close it up.
Using two toothpicks or needles, puncture the sausage every half inch or so down the whole casing. Turn 90 degrees, and repeat for all four sides.
Cut out four ~8 inch sections of baker's twine, tie a loop in the middle of each stuffed long sausage: separate each long sausage into two individual Lap Cheongs by laying the loop of twine under the sausage, looping it through the loop, and tightening.
Dry the sausages: Rinse under warm water quickly to get rid of surface grease, pat dry with paper towel and put in the oven at 50C for 24 hours. Then hang in a cool, dry, sunny place for ~3 days, Guangdong winter of about 15C-20C with about 60-70% humidity (Nov/Dec average temperature and relative humidity (%) in Guangzhou).
Note:
This recipe makes 8 sausages. Feel free to scale up for a bigger batch.
Astute observers will notice that Lap Cheong isn’t really cooked at any time during the whole process – Lap Cheong is cooked before you eat it. If you just want to give your homemade Lap Cheong a whirl, you can steam it on high for ~5 minutes. Alternatively, you can toss your Lap Cheong into your rice cooker along with your rice halfway through the cooking process.
For those that feel strongly about the quantity of cure #1 that we used - first, know that we already significantly cut the quantity of nitrite from some of the Chinese language recipes we were looking at (by anywhere between half to a quarter). We're aware that this is still higher than the consensus for Western sausages. If you would like to lean closer to that English language consensus, do follow Benjamin Chen's advice below and swap the 3g of Prague Powder #1 for 1.25g (or about 1/4 tsp), and optionally add in 0.25g ascorbic acid (vitamin C) if you like. Yet rest assured that the quantity we used would be entirely safe for human consumption... you'd have to eat something like 8-10 Lap Cheong in one sitting (something no one would ever do) for it to even start to become a question mark.
I know that the casings in the West seem to be a bit different than what’s used here – at the markets in Guangdong you’ll generally find dried casings, while in the West the go-to method of preserving the small intestine for sausage seems to be with some sort of brine? Presumably, any sort of hog casing should work great (within the 28-34mm range should be fine), but obviously prep the casing in accordance to how you’d prep it for Western sausage (IIRC flush it of salt and soak overnight?).
That said, maybe do check out if you can get the same sort of Chinese style casings that we have – you’ll have to go to your local Chinese supermarket for the wine, anyhow. The characters for sausage casings is “肠衣”. I believe that pretty much any casing would do the trick so long as its within that size range.
When making the candied pork fat, a good hunk of sugar did get wasted down the drain. If you want to save sugar, what you can do is brush 30g of the sugar off the fat for use in the lean marinade, and wash off the remainder. We didn’t go this route as it’d obviously take an extra day (i.e. a day to make the candied pork fat, another day to marinate the lean).
So, what did people in Guangdong (by extend, China) use in sausages before the use of nitrites for preservation? Well, a small number of people would die of botulism each year. Also there’s niter or nitre (the mineral form of potassium nitrate) that people would use. I know it’s fashionable to hate on Prague Powder these days – and hey, if you wanna roll the dice re botulism, go ahead and roll those bones, I guess.
Definitely don't mean to throw too much shade on producers of Lap Cheong in NA. And I mean... we haven't eaten around all those brands, so maybe there's a gem or two there. And also, we're never the sort of people to turn our noses up at stuff - it's just that less-than-ideal store bought versions of stuff provide a really good excuse to make it yourself sometime :)
A little language discussion: the meaning of the character "腊/lap" means "dried meat" or "drying meat" (as in 《晋书·谢安传》“布千匹，腊五百斤。”) However this "腊" is traditionally pronounced "xi" when referred to dry meat, nowadays 腊 and 臘 are mixed in pronounciation, meaning, and usage.) "Lap/腊" is not what we previously wrote "small pieces of meat" in the video. I was thinking about the English transliteration of "lap" and the "Laap" in Thailand, and currently I'm reading a book about Tai language elements in Cantonese, somehow all that got mixed up in my head. My bad.