lap cheong

The famous Chinese sweet pork sausage, lap cheong, are made in similar dimensions to the well-known pepperoni (that is, long and thin). The Cantonese word lap cheong is a generic term for "sausage".

Pork meat and fat from the sow is roughly chopped and combined with salt, sugar, and anise. Every cook will have her own additional recipe for the spice mix. The mixture is stuffed into narrow casings, boiled, and hung.

It is said that the ruder the look of the sausage, the better it will taste!

Lap cheong is available fresh from asian grocers, and also sliced and canned in many supermarkets.

research sources include AsiaOne, The Cook's Thesaurus, and a multitude of hits from Google.

Long long ago, they didn't have the edible synthetic tubing to make these sausages - you had to clean out the small intestine of the pig to get your tube. Of course, it also tasted better then!

To cook them while cooking steamed rice: slice the lap cheong into thin slices - cutting them at an angle will maximise surface area - and place in a metallic plate with some light soya sauce. Place the place into the electric rice cooker when the steam is beginning to rise vertically from the cooker, or the equivalent if you have a clear-lid rice cooker, when most of the water has evaporated from the rice leaving "dimples" in it. Leave to cook. Serve when the rice cooker tells you the rice is cooked (or you might just want to wait a few minutes just to be very very sure).

This obviously assumes you have a rice cooker - well, Option B assumes you have a microwave oven.
Place the sliced lap cheong into a microwaveable plate with some light soya sauce. Power setting on HIGH for about 40 seconds will do it for you. Of course, it depends on how thinly you slice them.

Other ways to have lap cheong : in fried rice, as part of a stuffing with glutinous rice inside a duck or dumpling (loh mai fan).

During my entire stay in Thailand I made sure I had a supply of this amazingly tasty sausage around the house.

I sliced it up thinly and either fried it up with onions or pineapples or just microwaved it when I was too lazy, then tossed it on the Dominos pizza I ordered every two or three evenings. Another tasty dish is to saute it with mushrooms and scallions, mix in a bit of pineapple and pineapple juice, then toss it in white or fried rice. The flavor goes a long way, and you can fill up on this meal for less than $1.50US.

Suggestions for buying the sausage: Get it from a reputable grocery store, as it will be a better choice of meat and less likely to have nasty bowel-voiding bacterium on it. Keep it refrigerated when you get it home, and make sure you cook it before eating it unless you're completely acclimated to the local cuisine and microbiological friends.