Sai Ua — Northern Thai Herb Sausage

Name: Sai Ua — Northern Thai Herb Sausage
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: 6
Cuisine: Thai (Northern / Lanna)
Ingredients: 800 g Pork shoulder with fat, hand-chopped; 1.5 m Hog casings; 4 stalks Lemongrass, sliced as thin as paper; 10 Kaffir lime leaves, shredded to threads; 25 g Galangal, finely chopped; 15 g Fresh turmeric, finely chopped; 5 Shallots; 8 cloves Garlic; 8 Dried red chillies, soaked; 1 tsp Shrimp paste (kapi); 2 tsp Salt; 1 tbsp Fish sauce; 1 handful Coriander leaves and stems, chopped; 3 Spring onions, sliced

A coarse pork sausage packed with so much lemongrass, galangal and kaffir lime leaf that it is more herb than meat. Unfermented, coiled into a spiral and grilled slowly over coals — the smell alone is the whole of a Chiang Mai morning market.

来源

食谱提供 Lanna (northern Thai) kitchens · 🏺 传统 · The old Lanna kingdom around Chiang Mai — cooler, herb-heavy, barely sweet, in contact with Shan and Yunnanese trade

Northern Thai (Lanna) · regional dish — An ownerless regional dish, so no cook is credited. The cited article — Wikipedia's canonical title is 'Sai oua', to which 'Sai ua' redirects — records the sausage as originating in Luang Prabang, Laos, and as being particularly popular in northern Thailand (Lan Na) and northeastern Myanmar. It gives the etymology from Lao sai, 'intestine', and oua, 'stuffed', and confirms the filling of coarsely chopped fatty pork with lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, shallots, coriander, chillies, garlic, salt, sticky rice and fish sauce. It also confirms that the sausage is grilled or roasted rather than eaten fermented, and lists sai krok Isan separately as a fermented sausage from the northeast. Quantities and method here are this book's own.

Background on Wikipedia ↗

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⏱ 90 分钟🍽 6 人份🔥 430 大卡🇹🇭 泰国🌶️🌶️

无乳制品无坚果

步骤

Pound the soaked chillies, shallots, garlic, galangal, turmeric, shrimp paste and salt into a coarse paste — one ingredient at a time, each one broken down before the next.
Mix the paste into the chopped pork with your hands, then work in the lemongrass, lime leaf threads, fish sauce, coriander and spring onion. Knead for a full 3 minutes until the mixture feels tacky and holds together in a lump.
💡 Fry a teaspoon of the mixture in a pan and taste it before you stuff anything. Once it is inside the casing you cannot adjust the salt.
Slide a casing onto a sausage funnel and fill it loosely, easing the meat along with your fingers. Leave it slack — you want it filled to about 80 percent.
💡 Overstuffed sausages burst on the grill as the fat expands. Slack ones survive. This is the single most common failure with sai ua.
Coil the filled casing into a flat spiral and pin it through with two bamboo skewers crossed at right angles so it holds its shape.
Prick the sausage all over with a needle, then grill over low coals for 30–40 minutes, turning every 5 minutes, until it is browned on both sides and firm to the touch.
💡 Low heat and patience. High heat splits the casing and burns the lemongrass to bitterness long before the middle is cooked.
Rest for 5 minutes, then cut into thick diagonal slices and serve with sticky rice, raw cabbage and a chilli dip.

💡 小贴士

No casings, no problem: roll the mixture into flat patties and grill or pan-fry them for 4 minutes a side. Every flavour survives; only the shape and the name change.
Sai ua is fresh and grilled, not fermented. Do not confuse it with sai krok Isan, the round sour sausage from the northeast, which is fermented with cooked rice and tastes completely different.
Pork is not swappable here. A northern Thai pork sausage made with chicken is a different food, and this book would rather say so than tag it halal.
It freezes raw beautifully. Coil, freeze flat on a tray, then bag — and grill from frozen over very low heat, adding 15 minutes.