Yun cheong (膶腸) is the dark sibling of Cantonese lap cheong: the same sweet, wine-scented, air-dried sausage, but with liver — duck liver for the best ones, pork liver for everyday — worked into the pork and fat. Where lap cheong is glossy ruby with clear fat, yun cheong is brown, and it tastes deeper, more mineral and a little less sweet. In Hong Kong and Guangdong the two hang side by side in the same shop windows in winter, and a clay-pot rice usually carries a slice of each. The diagnostic detail is the colour and the liver taste; the method is otherwise lap cheong’s: coarse pork, cubed fat, sugar, salt, soy and rose-scented baijiu (mei kuei lu chiew), stuffed into thin casing and dried without smoke. The liver has to be salted and drained first or it bleeds water and colour into the mix. The name is usually explained as a Cantonese dodge: the plain word for liver, gon, sounds like ‘dry’, so cooks say yun, ‘moist, rich’ — a plausible story with no scholarly source behind it. I have not made this one yet; the formula is built from Cantonese home and trade practice for lap cheong and liver sausage and is untested.
Ingredients
MEAT BLOCK (2,270 g / 5 lb), % of meat weight
- 1,135 g (2½ lb) lean pork shoulder or leg — 50%
- 680 g (1½ lb) duck livers (or pork liver), trimmed — 30%
- 455 g (1 lb) firm pork back fat — 20%
CURE (% of meat weight)
- 50 g fine salt (2.2%), of which 15 g is used to salt the liver
- 5.7 g Cure #1 (0.25%) — 2.5 g/kg = 156 ppm nitrite
SEASONING (% of meat weight)
- 136 g white sugar (6%), or crushed rock sugar dissolved in the wine
- 45 g light soy sauce (2%)
- 11 g dark soy sauce (0.5%), for colour
- 68 g mei kuei lu chiew (rose-infused baijiu) (3%)
- 2.3 g white pepper (0.1%)
- 22–24 mm sheep casing or 26–28 mm hog casing, about 8 m (26 ft)
- Cotton string
Directions
Key ingredients
Black Pepper · Rock Sugar · Soy Sauce
- In the collection: Soy Sauce for salt and colour, Rock Sugar if you want the old-fashioned sweetener. The pink sibling is Lap Cheong (Chinese Sausage).
- Salt the liver: trim the livers of sinew and green spots, toss with 15 g of the salt and leave in a colander in the fridge for 2 hours. Cantonese cooks call this drawing out the water; it firms the liver and stops it bleeding into the mix. Pat dry and cut into 6 mm (¼ in) dice.
- Cut the pork and fat: cut the lean into 6–8 mm dice or grind through a 10 mm plate. Dice the fat 6 mm, rinse it in warm water, then toss it with half the sugar and 20 g of the wine and leave 30 minutes; the sugar turns the fat glassy when it dries.
- Mix: combine lean, liver, fat, the rest of the salt, Cure #1, sugar, both soys, wine and pepper. Mix 2–3 minutes until sticky. Rest 1 hour in the fridge so the sugar dissolves.
- Taste — the decision point: fry a spoonful. It should be sweet and salty in balance with a clean liver note and the rose perfume on top. Bitter means a gall-stained liver slipped in; that cannot be fixed.
- Stuff and tie: stuff firmly, tie into 15 cm pairs with string, and prick every link all over with a needle so trapped air and water can escape.
- Rinse and dry: dip the links in warm water to clean the casing, then hang in moving air at 12–15 °C / 54–59 °F and 70–75% relative humidity for 7–10 days, until they have lost 25–30% of their weight and feel firm. A fan helps; the Cantonese name for the method is wind-drying. If a sticky film or soft spot appears, the air is too still or too wet.
- Store: wrap and refrigerate up to 1 month, or freeze. Yun cheong is always cooked.
- Cook: steam whole links for 15–20 minutes on top of rice, or slice and stir-fry. Steamed links reach 71 °C / 160 °F well before they are tender. Sliced on the bias with rice and a little soy, or one slice to every two of lap cheong in clay-pot rice.
- Sibling recipe: make a batch of Lap Cheong (Chinese Sausage) from the same pork order and dry them together; the liver is the only variable.
Notes
Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. No authoritative published formula for yun cheong was found; it is built on Cantonese lap cheong practice (pork and fat, sugar, salt, light soy, rose wine, wind-dried) with liver added. Home recipes vary from about a quarter to half liver; one Chinese home formula uses equal weights of pork shoulder and liver, salted first ‘to kill the water’, with onion, garlic, sugar, soy and Fen jiu. Deviations: (1) liver at 30% of the meat block, a middle value; (2) Cure #1 at 156 ppm for a 7–10 day dry, which is short and followed by cooking; (3) a controlled drying room instead of winter weather; (4) a little dark soy for colour. Untested.
Where yun cheong came from. It is part of the Cantonese laap mei (preserved-meat) tradition — lap cheong, lap yuk (cured belly), lap ngaap (pressed duck) — made in the dry cold of the twelfth lunar month. Duck liver is the prized version, tied to the region’s duck-preserving trade; pork liver is cheaper and more common. Sweet Cantonese lap cheong itself is younger than its reputation: it is commonly credited to a Canton congee-shop owner around 1894. No separate dated origin for the liver version has been found.
The name. 膶 (yun) is the Cantonese character for liver in food names — 豬膶 for pig’s liver, 鴨膶 for duck liver. The usual explanation is avoidance: the standard character 肝 (gon) sounds like 乾 (gon, ‘dry’), an unlucky word for a merchant, so the ‘moist’ sound is used instead. Cantonese does do this with other words (tongue, 舌, sounds like ‘lose money’ and is renamed 脷, which sounds like ‘profit’), so the story fits the habit; the specific etymology is not settled.
Variations. Duck-liver (鴨膶腸) and pork-liver (豬膶腸) versions; mixed strings of yun cheong and lap cheong; some makers add a little five-spice or orange peel.
Sourcing and gear. Duck livers are sold frozen by Asian groceries and duck farms. Mei kuei lu chiew is a rose-infused sorghum spirit sold in Chinese groceries; it is not rose water, and rose water must not be substituted. A 0.1 g scale for the cure and a fan in the drying room are the useful gear.
Still open. No commercial Hong Kong maker’s proportions have been found; the share of liver in shop yun cheong is not documented.
The photo. The photograph shows Chinese dried sausages hanging in Hong Kong; liver sausages are the darker links, and the frame is not only yun cheong.
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