Hunan-style Chinese Sausage * from the beginning

One of the treats I looked forward to every Chinese New Year was Hunan sausage. There was a place near where we lived in Taipei that made it every year. It was a neighborhood populated by many retired servicemen who longed for the traditional dishes of their home provinces in China. They would take over the sidewalk and any empty space available for their efforts. My favorite was the sausage or dry-smoked pork side meat. This type of meat is usually only available during the winter after pig slaughtering. I still have a craving for this sausage so we decided to try to make some ourselves.

First a brief Chinese culture lesson, related to the major ingredient in the sausage:

Part of many Chinese celebrations is a contest to see who can raise the largest pig. These are then put on display for everyone to enjoy.

The heaviest pig is awarded with a gold medal and a cash prize. The heaviest one in this ceremony we attended weighed 1157 pounds.

After the ceremony the pig was butchered and the meat taken home to eat.
In our local market, the pigs are slaughtered and then brought whole to the stand where they are butchered and sold.

Needless to say we don't have access to pork this fresh in Portland so we had to settle for fresh pork loin from the supermarket. It was chopped into 1/4-1/2" chunks along with additional pork fat for flavoring.

The necessary spicy-hot flavor was achieved by adding pepper powder, dried chili pepper, and Kaoliang liquor

To this was added salt that had been "dry-fried" with Szchuan peppercorns.

The spices were added to the meat and then it was allowed to marinate in the refrigerator overnight. The next step was to prepare the casings to receive the mixture. We were lucky and found some at the local Korean market that were already cleaned, but we still felt better after thoroughly washing them.

People who do this for a living have machines that force the meat into the casing - we don't. So we improvised by cutting the top off a Perrier bottle and using a wooden ram to force the meat mixture into the casing.
After the casing was filled we distributed the meat evenly and formed it into links.
The distinctive taste of this sausage comes from the smoking. I never determined what kind of wood they used so I made up my own mixture: sugar (they used sugar cane peel but I don't have any), rice, black tea leaves, and wood chips (cedar, apple, and oak). The sausage links were loaded into our smoker and smoked for about 5 hours.
When they came out it sure looked like I remembered it should.

The smoking also served to partially dry the meat. The low temperature didn't render any of the fat nor did it act to kill any bacteria that might be present so after cooling we store the sausage in the freezer. It must be cooked before eating, we tried some this morning with scrambled eggs and steamed bread - SUCCESS.

We are looking forward to the week after New Years when we will slaughter our pig and have some really fresh pork to make sausage and side meat. More on that later.