What it is
Taiwanese sausage (香腸, xiangchang, "fragrant sausage") is a pork sausage made with more sugar than Cantonese styles and rarely dried hard, so it stays soft and juicy. Street stalls grill it over charcoal until the skin is glossy and lightly charred. A clove of raw garlic is the usual partner. Grill stalls often sell sticky-rice sausage (糯米腸).
Where it came from
Chinese cured sausage is centuries old. One of the best-known Taiwanese makers began in Tainan. In the 1950s Chen Wen-hui (陳文輝), who ran a meat business beside a Tainan canal, set out to improve the dry, salty sausages then on sale. He bought freshly killed pork each morning, diced the back fat instead of grinding it, marinated the meat for more than 12 hours and dried it slowly at low heat. The sausages sold fast in the city.
Chen founded the Hei Chiao (黑橋牌) brand in 1957, built a drying cabinet to cut sun-drying time, and later became an early adopter of automated lines and vacuum packs. The brand helped bring sausage into everyday home cooking, and by 2012 it held close to half of Taiwan's sausage market.
Sausage carts were long known for dice games in which customers bet for extra sausages. Taipei vendors interviewed by Vice traced the game to the Second World War, when it was used to sell sausages to soldiers.
How it is made
The base is minced pork with a generous share of fat, seasoned with sugar and spices. Recipes vary by maker: one Kaohsiung shop uses five-spice and kaoliang (sorghum liquor), while one Taipei cart worked in plenty of garlic. Stalls grill the links to order over charcoal, turning them often so the sugar colours without burning. At home, steaming first and pricking the casing with a bamboo skewer helps them cook through before the skin chars.
How to eat it
It is an afternoon and night-market snack, served on a stick or in a paper bag. Take a bite of raw garlic between mouthfuls of sausage. Many people order a sticky-rice sausage as well, or ask for the two combined as 大腸包小腸. Some long-running grill shops also serve soup, such as pork-bone soup.
Around Taiwan
- Tainan
- The Hei Chiao brand began in Tainan in 1957 and runs a sausage museum in the city's Anping industrial park, in South District.
- Kaohsiung
- Kaohsiung keeps several long-running charcoal grill stalls. San Lun De Dian (三輪的店) in Fengshan began on a tricycle in 1961, Hsin Ta Kang (新大港) is in its third generation, and Pai Ku Er Dai (排骨二代) on Cijin grills only over fading charcoal.
- North
- Taipei vendors who ran dice games for sausages told Vice they kept away from night markets, saying the smoke and smells there would spoil their product.
