Recipe Homemade Chinese Sausage Lap Cheong or Dry Cured Pork Sausage

Homemade Lap Cheong or Waxed Chinese Sausage

Homemade Lap Cheong or Lap Chong Dried Chinese Sausage Recipe. Chinese sausage referring to many different types of dried and cured sausages originally in China.In Cantonese chinese sausage called Lap Cheong or Lap Chong, while in Mandarin it’s called  Là Cháng. In Indonesia, we used to called chinese sausage as sosis cina, lap chong, or sosis merah (red sausage). Chinese sausage  commonly made of fatty pork, either the fat is chuncky or well blended. Chinese sausage usually smoked, sweetened, and seasoned with chinese five spice powder ot ngo hiang seasoning, , rice wine and soy sauce. Premium quality chinese sausage got it’s distinct umami smells, just like a good old ham.

Homemade Lap Cheong or La Chang or Lap Chong or Sosis Cina or Sosis Merah

Chinese sausage is usually added to enhanced the umami flavour into a dish. Chinese sausage can be used for soup, stir fried and almost all rice dishes. Chinese sausage usually stir fried until charred and then added to Chinese style nasi goreng/fried rice and Lo Mai Gai or Steamed Sticky Rice with chicken, Abalone, Salted Egg Yolk and Mushrooms Stuffing in Lotus Leaves Wrap(/nuòmǐ jī), trust me that addition of chinese sausage made simple fried noodle or vermicelli into the next level of deliciousness. Well, actually i useed to replace any chorizo recipe with my homemade chinese sausage, infact i added chinese sausage as topping for Broccoli Crust Pizza Recipe, stuffing for my Nasi Bakar (Grilled Banana Leaf Wrapped Spiced Rice), Peanut Crusted Roasted and Stuffed Whole Beef Tenderloin, Steamed Glutinous/ Sticky Rice Roll and Claypot of Chicken, Tofu, Sea Cucumber and Mushrooms Recipe

Homemade Lap Cheong or Dried Chinese Sausage

Chinese sausage or lap cheong or la chang usually traditionally hung unpackaged in the  street market or wet markets in China town market anywhere nearby your place. Chinese sausage available in many forms of fat content, color and prices. Chinese sausage usually looks like a hard and waxy in the surface, although no wax added into it. I like chinese sausage with chuncky fat so it’s fat will renderred right after stir fried in a smoking hot wok pan and release it’s goodness and flavoured your entire rice or noodle cooked within it. Real thinsg isn’t cheap, that’s for damn sure, so i insist you to choose the expensive chinese sausage ones when you visit your chinese groceries.

Dried Waxed Chinese Sausage

Nice and Fatty Lap Cheong or Chinese Sausage

Before you considering to made your homemade chinese sausage or any other air dry cured meat, you should know about the savety about curing  first. Improper dry curing sausage can be derived to botulism, a serious, potentially fatal and lethaly disease. Botulism is an intoxication usually caused by ingestion of potent neurotoxins in contaminated foods. You should know first that the neurotoxin excrete by Clostridium botulinum bacteria. The  neurotoxin  destroyed by heating  more than 85 °C (185 °F) for more than 5 minutes, but the bacteria spores that are heat-resistant. The bacteria usually in a spores (inactive form) and usually germinate, grow and then excrete toxins in the low or absence of oxygen. So in my opinion the additional of nitrate (pink salt, salpetre etc) is absolutely  important because it’s an effective agent agains Clostridium botulinum.  Maybe you heard that nitrate are toxic, infact nitrosamines did. Nitrosamine formed when nitrate transform into nitrite then react with amino acids or very high heat. Nitrosamines are known to be powerful DNA damaging chemicals and resulting cell mutation and cancer. But don’t really bother about it, infact a single portion of spinach or celery contain more nitrosamines than you can imagine.How to made sausage without fancy  sausage maker is another question, eversince i din’t really want to investing pretty much $$$ for it, which mean i have to do is manually. Using my chopper or food processor is not a good option, because it’s too powerfull and can easily overdo the sausage stuffing grinding, beside the heat possibly melt the fat even i freeze it out priorly. So then i using my old school meat mincer knive and properly clean wood cutting board to diced the pork meat and a regular knive to diced the back fat.

My Own Dried Chinese Sausage or Lap Cheong Made Out of My Very Own Kitchen

Making my own chinese sausage or lap cheong  in my very humble amateur kitchen is one of my obsession. Eversince i start making charcuterie or dry aging meat, i was curious about homemade air dry curing sausage. Store brought chinese sausage  may contain tons of preservatives, color dying agent, and msg (monosodium glutamat) or other flavour enhanced agents. I didn’t added any msg on my homemade lap chong, instead i’m using palm sugar to enhance umami balance flavour with the salt, simply magic as what happen to salted caramel.

Homemade Chinese Sausage Stuffing

Before making homemade chinese sausage, you should know that the ammount of all the ingredients for making air dry cured sausages is properly measured, especially the amount of the nitrate preservatives. The recommendation maximum ammout of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) for dry curing is 500 ppm or 500 mg per kg sausage mixture. The salt ammount for dry ured sausage is about 3 % of the weight, you really take a close attention on it. The meat and fat ration is commonly 80% meat to 20% fat. The spice and flavour enhancement is another optional too. Eversince i like a fattyand chunky  chinese sausage or lap cheong, i’m using 40% fat on it. The best fat for dry curing is solid back fat because the soft fat like in the soft tissues is really easily rancid and turn into off smells and flavour. I’m using 500 grams of pork loin and 200 grams of pork back fat for this recipe, 3% salt means  21 grams and the amout of salpetre is about 350 mg. I also added 21 grams of palm sugar and 2 tablespoons of  Here’s the fun part, my digital weight scale can only measure 1 gram, so i need to put the 1 gram of saltpetre in a piece of paper and divided it into three part equally with my atm card and it made me thinking of myself “heck what i’m doing, my mom ganna be going crazy and beat the hell of my head because i obviously seems like a crack addict ” lol

Homemade Chinese Sausage

Most chinese sausage wrapped in an edible artificial casings, such as collagen and cellulose, but i really want the original version with natural pig intestine casing. Is it possible to making a dry cured sausage using natural pig intestine ? luckily the answer is YES. The pig small intestine is needed to be cured before the sausage hung to dry cured. The pig intestine cleaned inside out, you can read about How To Clean and Preparing Pig Intestine, then  salted to enhanced the self life. Simply ask your butcher for pig small intestine, he or she probably give it for free for you.

How to Stuffed Homemade Sausage Using Plastic Funnel

I’m using plasting funnel to stuffed the chinese sausage stuffing into the pork intestine. For unnecessary photography, i’m using spoon to plug the stuffing. Clean hand fingers or even chopstick is much more effective and fungtional for plug the sausage stuffing, just made sure you’re wearing a sterile gloves and sterilized chopstick otherwise it’s gonna be a mess. The end of the the pig intestine tie out after you finished stuffing to let the air released, slightly different with commonly people did because my plasting funnel tube didn’t long enought to be slipped with the intestine.

Homemade Fresh Chinese Sausage with Lots of Air Bubbles

After you stuffed your homemade chinese sausage stuffing into your pork intestine, the stuffing a little bit slippery on the instenstine because so many air bubble on it. The stuffing can be plugged better with your hand too, just squeese the stuffing out with the intestine tube to the end, then divide the sausage link by twisting and then tiding  it to made individual homemade fresh sausage

Prick The Sausage Using Sterilized Metal Pin to Removed the Air Bubbles

After peeling the remaining fat on the pig intestine, the fresh sausage looks more translucent. The air bublles then removed by pricking it with sterilized metal pin. Remember that this process also enhanced the sausage drying process too. Pricking the fresh pig intestine sausage also iniciate free oxigen entering the sausage stuffing and prevent Clostridium botulinum to grow.

Fresh Homemade Chinese Sausage: Ready to Hung to Air Dry Cured

The fresh pig intestine chinese sausage or lap cheong the hung to dry in a cold, good-ventilated and dark place, then left until dry and loosen 30 percent of it’s original weight.Make sure you notes the weight of the fresh sausage before you hung it and calculate the 30 percent loss from the original weight.  In my case, the fresh lap cheong sausage weight is 736 grams and the 30% loss is 216 grams, which means my chinese sausage is ready to be eaten (cooked first) when it’s weighted 52o grams.  Unfortunately, my homemade lap chong or chinese sausage a little bit forgotten in the fridge and the drying  goes a little bit too far until the  weight reach 393 grams in 30 days (24 october-22 november 2014).

The Chinese Sausage Hung Dry In the Fridge Alongside my Homemade Lamb Pancetta

If you living in  a tropical country like indonesia, i guess it’s possible to left the fresh sausage hung to dry curing in room temperature because it’s too hot and too humid. You can use your refrigerator for dry it, just made sure you cleaned out your fridge. Simply left it hung undisturbed in the fridge doorin the ideal fridge temperature (about 1– 4°C or 33 – 39°F) and the fridge humidity in “dry mode”. Do not open the fridge door too often since the temperature will fluctuated and made the lap cheong taste funny.

The Finished Product of My Homemade Chinese Sausage or Lap Cheong

Homemade Lap Cheong or Waxed Chinese Sausage

This is my homemade lap cheong or chinese waxed  sausage lool a like after air dry cured in the fridge after 30 days. The sausage looked great dark plum in colour with chunky bits of fat meat showing inthe surface. Nice umami with distict anise smells comes out of it and the taste just perfect for my licking; fatty, savoury and sweet. Totally better than the store brought. The lean loin meat has shrunk a lot, but i guess the fat didn’t. Because i didn’t use any artificial filler, the weight losen out in a greatlyI think the fat meat is a little on the high side. Next time I will reduce it to around 28 – 30% : lean meat. To keep the homemade lap cheong in fridge or freezer. If you want to keep them for longer than 2 – 3 weeks, best in freezer. I don’t really know if it will go mouldy or turn racid if you leave it in the fridge for too long, but i guaranteed that i won’t be last than longer before ended out in my tummy.

Recipe Homemade Lap Cheong or Dried Chinese Sausage

Recipe Homemade Chinese Sausage or Lap Cheong:

Ingredients: (i’m using half of the recipe)

• 1 kg pork loin
• 400 grams pork back fat
• 2-3  pig intestine, cleaned (2-3 m sausage casing)
• 1 cup salt to salted the pig intestine
• 42 grams salt
• 42 grams palm sugar
• 700 milligrams saltpetre (0,7 grams)
• 4 tablespoons chinese five spice powder
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons chinese rice wine

How to Make Homemade Chinese Sausage or Lap Cheong:

• Measure the weight of each ingredients properly
• Clean out and sterilize all of the utensils
• Mix and rub the salt to the pig intestine, let is marinated about 24 hours in the fridge, washed it properly under running water and drain in properly, set aside
• Meanwhile, dice the meat and fat with a knife into half cm cubes.
• Combine all the seasoning in a large mixing bowl.
• Add the meat and fat and mix well and let soak overnight in the fridge.
• Stuffed the chinese sausage stuffing to the pig intestine using the plastic funnel and chopsticks or finger.
• Tie off one end of chinese sausage casing and then plugged out the stuffing to the tie
• Tie the casing into 15cm links.
• Prick the links and the sausage all over with a sterilized metal pin to allow the  air bubbles to escape from the sausage.
• Hang them to dry in a well ventilated place until dehyrated and losen it’s 30 percent of it’s original weight.

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