How to make Taiwanese Sausages, Shang Tang 香腸

In this recipe we have made a traditional favourite Taiwanese Food – Taiwanese Sausages, Shang Tang 香腸. It’s quite satisfying and fun to make your own sausages and they look great when you’ve finished all the preparation! These Shang Tang 香腸 sausages are air dried and have a rich flavour of pork, garlic and rice wine. The air drying also adds a flavour which people like though it was originally simply a method of preservation of meat. In the UK we can find Chinese sausages but no where sells Taiwanese 香腸, so the only option was to make our own! We are not sure if you can buy Taiwanese sausages in the USA or not? Probably somewhere!

Taiwanese shang tangs

The ingredients (for 40 sausages, shang tangs) 食材;

Taiwanese shang tang ingredients

• 2Kg Pork (we used a shoulder of pork)
• half a rice bowl of dried garlic
• third of a bowl of sugar
• a full rice bowl of soy sauce
• half a rice bowl of red and half a rice bowl of white rice wine
• Spices: black pepper, salt, 5 spice, red pepper, + chili powder (if you like hot)
• also we used half a rice bowl of bread flour to bind the sausage ingredients
• about 3 metres of sausage skins
• We bought our 23mm collagen based sausage casings, 2 sticks of about 11 metres each, from Butchers Sundries for £4.50 including delivery. (and new customers can get £1 off the first order!) In the USA you can get sausage casings from Amazon, and probably other places too, but they seem a bit more expensive.

The method 作法;

1. Prepare the pork, we had to cut the skin from the pork shoulder, we left a thin layer of pork fat because sausages need a bit of fat in them.
2. The pork should be chopped into a coarse mince approximately 5mm square pieces
3. Mix all the ingredients together in a large mixing bowl
4. When thoroughly mixed you cover the bowl with a lid or cling film and put it in your fridge overnight to marinade
5. The next day we have to get the sausage mixture into the casings, about 1m (3ft) at a time, we used a simple funnel , one person held the sausage skin on the funnel and another pushed the filling into the sausage casings with the back of a wooden spoon!
6. Before filling we tied one end of the casing and put some boiled water in the casing to wash/lubricate it
7. We made the sausages about as long as your hand is wide and tied them with string between links
8. Any air bubbles must be removed so when the sausages dry they will not get mouldy, use a pin or a needle to prick any air bubbles in the sausages. All together we got 41 sausages from the 2Kg of pork.
9. Hang the sausage links in a cool dry airy place (not in sunlight) for about 2 days before you treat them as a normal Taiwanese Shang Tang 香腸!

Taiwanese shang tangs

Joanne has recorded a how to make Taiwanese Sausages, Shang Tang 香腸 cooking video so you can see and follow the timings, chopping sizes, and method step by step, as she prepares this delicious Taiwanese special food. Hope you like it, we did, and we have enough sausages for a few weeks now, totally confident with the quality of the ingredients too!

How to make Taiwanese Sausages, Shang Tang 香腸, cooking video

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