Sichuan la chang (四川麻辣香肠) is the cured sausage of Sichuan and its neighbours: coarse pork and fat seasoned with ground chilli, toasted Sichuan pepper, a little sugar, baijiu and a short list of warm spices, stuffed into casing, dried in the winter air for weeks and often smoked. It is the middle case between China’s two sausage poles. It is wind-dried like Cantonese lap cheong, but it leads with heat and the tingling numbness of Sichuan pepper (ma-la) rather than sugar and rose wine, and it often takes the smoke the Cantonese sausage never sees. The diagnostic detail is that numbing pepper: a la chang without it is just a hot sausage. The chilli itself is a post-Columbian arrival in China, which puts this sausage’s flavour at a few centuries old at most. Before eating it is always steamed or boiled and then sliced, often into a stir-fry with garlic shoots. I have not made this one yet; the formula is built from a Chinese trade formula for Sichuan spicy sausage and home practice and is untested.
Ingredients
MEAT BLOCK (2,270 g / 5 lb), % of meat weight
- 1,590 g (3 lb 8 oz) lean pork leg or shoulder — 70%
- 680 g (1 lb 8 oz) firm pork back fat or skin-off belly fat — 30%
CURE (% of meat weight)
- 57 g fine salt (2.5%)
- 5.7 g Cure #2 (0.25%) — 2.5 g/kg, for a dry of several weeks
SEASONING (% of meat weight)
- 45 g white sugar (2%)
- 23 g baijiu (1%)
- 23 g light soy sauce (1%)
- 45 g ground Sichuan chilli (erjingtiao), or half cayenne and half sweet paprika (2%)
- 14 g Sichuan peppercorns, toasted and ground (0.6%)
- 7 g spice mix: star anise, cassia, black cardamom and dried tangerine peel, toasted and ground (0.3%)
- 28–32 mm natural hog casing, about 5 m (16 ft)
- Cypress or pine sprigs and dried orange peel for smoking (optional)
Directions
Key ingredients
- In the collection: Soy Sauce and Rock Sugar (or white sugar) balance the chilli; the sweet sibling is Lap Cheong (Chinese Sausage).
- Toast the spices: toast Sichuan peppercorns in a dry pan until fragrant and just smoking, cool, and grind; discard the black seeds and stems first. Toast the spice mix the same way. Untoasted Sichuan pepper tastes soapy.
- Cut cold: chill lean and fat to 0 °C / 32 °F. Cut the lean into 1 cm (⅜ in) dice or grind through a 10 mm plate; cut the fat into 6 mm dice. Traditional la chang is hand-cut and coarse.
- Cure and season: mix lean and fat with salt and Cure #2, then sugar, baijiu, soy, chilli, Sichuan pepper and spice mix, and work 2–3 minutes until tacky and red all through. Rest overnight in the fridge (the trade practice is 6–8 hours) so the cure starts before stuffing.
- Taste: fry a spoonful. It should be salty, hot and numbing, with a little sweetness behind. Adjust the chilli and pepper now.
- Stuff and prick: stuff firmly, twist into 20 cm links and tie, and prick every link to let out air. Weigh the batch and write the weight on a tag.
- Smoke, if you want it: after 2 days of drying, cold-smoke at under 25 °C / 77 °F for 8–12 hours over smouldering cypress or pine sprigs and dried orange peel, the Sichuan household way. Hot smoke would cook the fat.
- Dry: hang at 12–15 °C / 54–59 °F and 75–80% relative humidity for 3–4 weeks, until the links have lost 30–35% of their weight and are firm right through. Trade practice is about 10 days in the open air and then about 25 days hanging indoors. Case-hardening (a hard dry rim over a soft wet centre) means the humidity is too low; slimy patches mean too high.
- Store: refrigerate wrapped up to 2 months, or freeze.
- Cook: steam or simmer whole links 20–25 minutes, cool a little and slice thinly on the bias. Eat as is with rice, or stir-fry with garlic shoots, leeks or celery.
- Sibling recipe: Lap Cheong (Chinese Sausage) — same family, opposite flavour: sweet and wine against hot and numbing.
Notes
Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. The backbone is a Chinese trade formula for Sichuan spicy sausage: 35 kg lean pork, 15 kg fat, 250 g red chilli powder, 125 g toasted Sichuan pepper, 50 g lightly toasted tangerine peel, 10 g each star anise, cassia and white cardamom, 150 g each fresh ginger and scallion, 1.5 kg soybean oil, 1–1.5 kg salt, 1 kg sugar, 250 g baijiu, 75 g MSG and 75 g of ‘nitre water’, cured 6–8 hours, aired about 10 days until the surface oils and firms, then hung indoors about 25 days. Deviations: (1) chilli raised to 2% and Sichuan pepper to 0.6%, which matches home Sichuan recipes better than the mild trade figure; (2) Cure #2 at 2.5 g/kg replaces the unmeasured ‘nitre water’, because the dry runs weeks; (3) the oil, ginger, scallion and MSG are left out — add 1% chilli oil if you want the trade’s glossy look; (4) black cardamom replaces white; (5) a controlled chamber replaces the open air. Untested.
Where Sichuan la chang came from. Curing pork in the twelfth lunar month (la yue) is old across China; the Qimin Yaoshu already records a stuffed sausage in the sixth century. What is new is the chilli. Capsicum reached China from the Americas by sea in the late sixteenth century and became central to Sichuan cooking only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so a ma-la sausage is a few centuries old at most. Households in Sichuan, Chongqing, Hunan and Guizhou still make la chang and la rou (cured pork belly) every winter, many hanging them over a smoky fire.
The name. La chang (腊肠) is the Mandarin reading of the same characters as Cantonese lap cheong; ma-la (麻辣) is ‘numbing-hot’. Sichuan people often just say xiangchang (香肠).
Variations. Non-smoked, air-dried only; Hunan versions smoked harder; Chongqing versions hotter; some households add a little five-spice or more sugar for children.
Sourcing and gear. Erjingtiao chilli flakes and good Sichuan pepper (da hong pao) are sold by Sichuan specialty importers; old, grey Sichuan pepper has lost its numbing. A drying chamber with humidity control and a scale for weight-loss tracking are the important gear.
Still open. No regional standard for the chilli and pepper levels exists; Sichuan home recipes vary widely. The smoking practice is described in general terms in the sources, without a wood-by-wood record.
Read more on the site. China