Chinese sausage

Lore & Background

Chinese sausages include several named varieties. Lap cheong is a dried, hard sausage usually made from pork and pork fat, normally smoked, sweetened, and seasoned with rose water, rice wine and soy sauce. Yun chang is made using duck liver. Xiang chang is a fresh and plump sausage consisting of coarsely chopped pieces of pork and un-rendered pork fat, rather sweet in taste. Nuomi chang is a white-colored sausage consisting of glutinous rice and flavoring stuffed into a casing and then steamed or boiled; some versions have blood as a binding agent. Xue chang has blood as the primary ingredient. Bairouxue chang, popular in northeast China, includes chopped meat in the blood mixture. Guan chang is a long, red sausage made of fresh meat.

Reader's Guide

Chinese sausage is used as an ingredient in a number of dishes in southern Chinese provinces such as Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Sichuan, and Hunan, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. In Guangdong and Hong Kong, it is a key ingredient in lap mei fan (claypot rice with preserved meats), where whole sausages are placed on top of uncooked rice and steamed together, infusing the rice with rich, flavorful oils. It is also used in Chinese sausage buns, stir-fried glutinous rice, lo mai gai, and turnip cake. In other countries, Chinese sausage has been incorporated into local cuisines: in Vietnam it is called lạp xưởng and used in dumplings, pillow cakes, wontons, spring rolls, mooncakes, and sticky rice dumplings; in Myanmar it is used in fried rice and with fried vegetables; in the Philippines it is an ingredient in some Chinese-Filipino dishes like siopao bola-bola; and Taiwan produces a similar form of sausage, though rarely dried in the manner of Cantonese sausages. Health concerns have been raised because Chinese sausage is a processed food, and past incidents have involved the use of pigs of unknown cause of death, inedible dyes such as rhodamine B, and excessive preservatives.

Did You Know?

• Lap cheong is also known as Chinese sausage and is most strongly associated with Cantonese cuisine, particularly in Guangdong and Hong Kong, while Sichuan has its own distinct sausage not typically called lap cheong.
• Harbin-style sausage, a popular regional specialty in northeast China, was first manufactured in March 1909 by Lithuanian staff in a Russian-capitalized factory named Churin Sausage Factory.
• In 2013, a business in Zhejiang Province was exposed for using pigs of unknown cause of death to produce Chinese sausage, with 7,500 kilograms of 'toxic sausage' distributed to various provinces.
• In Vietnam, the Cham people produce a similar sausage called tung lò mò, made from pork, with Sóc Trăng province being the largest producer.