As someone who had previously only flirted with the idea of making sausages, I surprised myself when I came home at the start of February with a three-pound slab of pork belly and a $20 sausage stuffer. Perhaps it was a particularly celebratory Lunar New Year that enticed me to make my own fragrant and fatty slices of lap cheong to wok-toss into my favorite rice dishes. Or maybe it was my inner desire to see how the sausage really gets made.
Certainly, my curiosity was piqued after watching Mei Liao’s “How to not make Chinese sausages” TikTok tutorial. As she does in many of her videos, Liao, a recipe developer specializing in Chinese American recipes, drew me in with a twist. “This is not a tutorial on making sausages,” she intoned. “Spoiler alert: I ended up tossing it all.” Humidity is the enemy of Chinese cured sausages, she explained, and after an unexpectedly rainy day in the San Francisco Bay Area, her sausages went bad. Despite this disclaimer, I eagerly followed along — Liao has a knack for explaining the complicated sausage process in digestible steps, so that eager home cooks like me can ask ourselves, “Is making homemade sausage really worth it?”
So far, after making one batch of sausages, my answer is a firm yes. Throughout my own first attempt, I was struck by the ease of sausage-making, even if it ended up requiring two days of prep. On the first day, I candied my pork fat and marinated the meat in a bath of spices, which took less than 15 minutes. On the second day, I recruited a friend to help me fill the casings; drawn in by the novelty of the process, he was more than happy to lend a hand to crank the stuffer. Surprisingly, we finished in less than half an hour, no longer than most baking projects (though larger batches will certainly take more time). Finally, I hung my sausages on a banister with ample airflow, where I left them to dry for one month.
Countless countries, from Italy to Argentina, boast their own charcuterie culture, and China is no different. Chinese sausages have been around for hundreds of years, used primarily to preserve unwanted cuts of meat through the harsh winter months. There’s my favorite — hard lap cheong that’s dried like salami, but is both intensely savory and sweet on the palate. Then there are spicier, intensely smoked varieties from Sichuan and Hunan, and others made from duck liver, horse meat, or glutinous rice, to name just a few.
The formula for Chinese sausages (of the pork variety) isn’t all that complicated: You need pork with a 70/30 lean-to-fat ratio, curing salt, sausage casings, Chinese spices and seasonings, plus a swig of distilled liquor (rose wine, baijiu, or vodka) to aid with preservation. I easily found all those ingredients at my Chinese grocery store. As I learned quickly on the sausage community forums, families closely guard and pass down their recipes like treasures to each new generation. The sausages themselves have become a festive and familiar presence in Chinese communities, with some makers dangling batches on fire escapes, laundry lines, and even basketball hoops.
For ten years running, Liao’s own family has assembled a hybrid Sichuanese-Cantonese sausage to ring in the Lunar New Year, and at this point Liao knows the process intimately. She’s spent hours filling sausage casings with a plastic plunger, hanging them from drying racks, and waiting patiently for the batch to cure in a cool, brisk garage for at least two weeks. Until this year, she relied on her intuition while preparing sausages — in her family, she says on TikTok, “food safety has always been more of a vibe check than a science.” Although many Chinese families are similarly loose with their protocol, Liao’s experience with spoiled sausages led her to conclude that now she has to “trust refrigeration more than AccuWeather.”
To make way for my own sausages, which numbered eight in total, there was a bit of preparation, including negotiating fridge real estate with my two roommates and finding a chilly, airy space in my basement. I even contemplated purchasing a fan to stimulate the ample air circulation needed for the sausages to dry. With temperatures in Brooklyn creeping past the recommended curing temperature of 55 degrees Fahrenheit, I needed the fridge to firm up the sausages — especially in the case of rain, since I wound up moving the sausages to my roof for part of the month.
While store-bought Chinese sausages may be more accessible, I learned that it doesn’t take a sausage expert to taste the difference between them and their homemade counterparts. Brandon Jew, the executive chef and owner of Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco’s Chinatown, has sworn by homemade lap cheong since making his first batch in 2011 at Bar Agricole. According to Jew, the very best homemade sausages use hand-diced pork belly as opposed to ground pork, which creates deliciously fatty, melt-in-your-mouth sausage slivers. Not only are his hand-chopped, hand-assembled links more texturally interesting than store-bought, their flavor is far superior, too.
To make sausages year-round in Mister Jiu’s kitchen, the chefs hang rows of links underneath their range hood, which provides ample ventilation and ambient temperatures. Not far from the restaurant, the famed Mow Lee Shing Kee & Company, which has been making sausage in San Francisco’s Chinatown for over 160 years, works with a similar setup. Curing sausages indoors in San Francisco is particularly fitting, says Jew, since the Bay Area’s cold temperatures and relatively dry conditions eliminate the need to splurge on pricey curing chambers.
In Jew’s eyes, curing sausages isn’t for the faint of heart. Instead, it should be viewed as a rewarding and fun task that can challenge the most passionate of home cooks. “Raw meat is not a beginner thing,” he says. “But I do think there is a lot of merit to making something yourself, enjoying it, and understanding how you want to tweak it.” As someone new to the sausage making world, and without the pressures of a paying customer, I find comfort in Jew’s words.
Charlene Luo, the founder of the Baodega, a Brooklyn-based Sichuanese supper club, plans her whole year around sausage making. Along with her signature mapo tofu, it’s the only dish that’s always served at her gatherings. Sichuanese sausage making has always been a family affair for Luo — she has memories of bringing her grandma’s homemade sausages on a plane from Sichuan and helping her mom assemble them in the Minnesota frost with the help of a makeshift hollowed-out pill bottle. Once she moved to New York, she wasn’t able to find homemade versions anywhere, so she decided to take matters into her own hands. Now in her fifth year making these spicy, savory links, she’s nailed down a near-foolproof method: curing the sausages on her rooftop in the winter.
Much like Liao, Luo has made plenty of sacrifices to salvage her 40-pound batch of cured sausages, sometimes leaving social obligations quite suddenly when the weather threatens her efforts. “There were times when I was at dinner with friends and I had to leave early just to get home before it drizzled,” she tells me. Arriving home to an emergency situation of sorts, she’d frantically carry her sausages indoors, empty her fridge, and let the sausages dry in there until the weather cleared. Though this sort of unpredictability may deter some potential sausage makers, Luo believes it’s well worth the reward of continuing a traditional practice that very few attempt.
Smoking your sausages isn’t a requirement, and I chose not to, but this added step adds a heavy, pungent, and bacon-like smoke that defines a deeply flavorful link. Last year, Luo obtained a kettle grill with applewood pellets to cold-smoke her sausages before letting them cure for an additional day. If you don’t own a smoker, don’t fret. Liao tells me that you can line a pan with foil, toss in some wood chips and peanut shells, and throw a rack on the top.
If purchasing a $10,000 curing chamber isn’t in your future, Luo has a few more tips for achieving perfect curing conditions, even in the warmest of places. “I’ve seen people on YouTube empty their fridge, put a tension rod inside, and hang their sausages in there, with a little fan going,” she says.
As for my own sausages, they’re coming along nicely. Already, in their second week of drying, the links are beginning to firm up and transform slowly into the lap cheong of my dreams. As I anticipate taking a celebratory bite of my finished sausages in a few weeks, I have an inkling that the wait will make them all the more worthwhile.
Jess Eng is a food and culture writer based in New York City. Her work appears in the Washington Post, the New York Times, TASTE, and more.
Lily Fossett is a freelance illustrator based in Bath, UK. She has a passion for portraying narrative in her illustrations and uses digital media to explore color and texture.
