Sai ua
A fresh sausage carrying its aromatics in the mince, grilled slowly in a coil.
Pork. Not vegetarian — contains a sausage whose meat the source does not name, curry paste, which usually contains shrimp paste, fish sauce, pork.
Ingredients
- 1 kg pork shoulder, coarsely minced
- 200 g pork back fat, finely diced
- 4 lemongrass stalks, very finely sliced
- 10 kaffir lime leaves, very finely shredded
- 4 tablespoons red curry paste
- 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
- 8 garlic cloves, chopped
- 4 shallots, chopped
- 2 tablespoons fish sauce
- 1 bunch coriander, chopped
- 2 metres sausage casing, rinsed
Method
- THE AROMATICS ARE IN THE MINCE, NOT IN A MARINADE. Lemongrass and lime leaf sliced as finely as you can manage and worked right through the meat, so every bite has them. A marinade would only ever reach the surface, and this is a sausage.
- SLICE THE LEMONGRASS ACROSS, paper thin, and the lime leaves into threads. Anything thicker is woody and catches in the teeth, and that one failure is what people remember about a bad one.
- Use the tender lower third of each lemongrass stalk only, and strip the outer two layers away.
- Keep the meat and fat COLD. Mix the pork, diced fat, paste, turmeric, garlic, shallots, fish sauce and all the aromatics, then beat it against the bowl for 2 minutes until tacky.
- Fry a teaspoon of the mixture and taste it. This is the only chance to season it, and raw pork cannot be tasted.
- Rest the mixture, covered, in the fridge for 2 hours.
- Fill the casing loosely -- too tight and it bursts as the fat renders. Coil it into a flat spiral and pin it with two skewers crossed through, so it can be turned in one piece.
- GRILL IT SLOWLY, over a medium-low heat, 20 to 25 minutes, turning every 5. Fast and hot, the casing splits and the fat you carefully diced runs into the fire.
- Prick it two or three times in the first five minutes, and not after -- late pricking just lets the juice out.
- Rest 5 minutes, then cut across the coil into thick slices.
Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.
Filed under Thailand · All recipes