Sichuan sausage (四川香腸)
Sausage dried and smoked with Sichuan pepper and chilli, spicier and less sweet than the Cantonese lap cheong. Sichuan pepper produces the numbing (málà) characteristic of the province’s cooking.
| Lean pork (shoulder) | 700 g |
| Pork fat | 300 g |
| Fine salt | 22 g |
| Sugar | 15 g |
| Ground Sichuan pepper | 8 g |
| Dried red chilli flakes | 10 g |
| Shaoxing rice wine | 30 ml |
| Light soy sauce | 20 ml |
| Fresh ginger, grated | 10 g |
| Chinese five-spice | 2 g |
| Hog casing (Ø 28–32 mm) | — |
- Preparation: Cut the meats into 1 cm cubes. Chill, but do not mince too finely.
- Seasoning: Lightly toast the Sichuan pepper and the chilli flakes dry to release their aromas. Grind coarsely. Mix the salt, sugar, wine, soy sauce, ginger, and five-spice. Add to the meats.
- Resting: Refrigerate for 24 to 48 hours.
- Stuffing: Stuff into the casings. Form sausages of 20 to 25 cm. Tie.
- Smoking (traditional): Cold-smoke over cypress or pine wood for 3 to 5 days.
- Drying: Hang in a cool, well-ventilated place for 2 to 4 weeks.
- Use: Slice and steam, stir-fry with vegetables, or add to hot pots.
The Sichuan sausage (Sichuan xiang chang, 四川香腸) belongs to the family of la chang (Chinese dried sausages), whose earliest written attestations date to the Wei and Jin dynasties. But where the Cantonese lap cheong rests on a sweet mildness from rice wine, the Sichuan sausage pushes in the opposite direction: spiced intensity, cypress-wood smoking followed by a prolonged drying in the cold, dry air of the Sichuan winter.
Sichuan pepper (Zanthoxylum simulans) is not a pepper in the botanical sense. It is the dried fruit of a shrub of the Rutaceae family, a cousin of citrus. The hydroxy-α-sanshool it contains acts not on heat receptors, as capsaicin does, but on touch-sensitive neurons, thereby eliciting a sensation of vibration rather than burning, producing a numbness that the Chinese term má denotes, distinct from the heat (là) brought by the chilli. This sensation, the málà, has no equivalent in any other cuisine. In the sausage, this molecule partly persists through cooking and smoking.
The cypress (Cupressus funebris), ubiquitous in the landscapes of Sichuan, releases in combustion resinous terpenes that deposit on the casing a camphorous, resinous film absent from smoking over beech, for instance.
It is eaten exclusively cooked: stir-fried in the wok with leeks, steamed over glutinous rice, or sliced into fried noodles. In Sichuan families, its making marks the entry of winter: the sausages, prepared in November or December, are hung at the windows for several weeks. This seasonal gesture, shared with other sausages, is universal in the relation it establishes between winter, preservation and culinary identity.
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