The fragrance and cured taste of Tujia cured sausage are unimaginable before you taste it. Once you taste it, it will leave you with eternal memories and endless aftertaste. The mellow and greasy feeling extremely stimulates the taste buds. After tasting it, you can't help but be amazed. Among the Tujia cured meats, cured sausage should be the well-deserved “lady” of Tujia dishes.

After the Tujia people kill the New Year pig, almost every household will pickle sausages. During festivals and when guests arrive, sausages are the first choice. It is a special dish of Tujia people to entertain guests. The owner will dig out a few pickled, dark-brown sausages from the grain pile, clean them carefully, put them in boiling water or a steamer, cook them, take them out and let them cool slightly, then cut them into thin slices. Place on plate. It's round, thin, and retains alluring juice. Its light fragrance and palpable waxy flavor fill the whole room, making people salivate just looking at it.

Haha, I know that many people are already greedy. Are you afraid of being greedy? Then follow me and learn how to make Tujia sausage!

The making of sausage is more complicated than smoking bacon. To make bacon, you only need to cut the pork into strips, marinate it with salt, leave it for a few weeks, hang it on the kang and smoke it for more than half a month, and it will basically become bacon, but bacon has more to pay attention to.

Processed pork. After buying hind leg pork at the market, cut the lean and fat meat from the bones. Then use a sharp kitchen knife to cut the cut meat into thin slices about 1 cm wide, and put it into a large basin. This completes the first step of processing the pork.

Add condiments. According to personal preference, mix dried chili peppers, dried citrus peels, and dried Sichuan peppercorns in proportion into powder and sprinkle into the processed pork. At the same time, mix in salt according to household eating habits, and stir with your hands until every piece of processed pork has been cooked. Wrapping in seasonings completes the pork ingredient processing.

Stuff pig intestines. Pork alone is not enough. You also need to buy several pairs of fresh pig intestines based on the amount of processed pork. Generally speaking, 60 kilograms of pork requires at least four pairs of pig intestines. After purchasing the pig intestines, wash them and place them on a plate. Put the mouth of the prepared mineral water bottle (or wire ring) into one end of the pig's large intestine, and then pour the processed pork into the large intestine through it. While filling, gently move the pork down evenly to the length of the two sausages, about two feet. . After the sausage is filled to two feet, tie the two ends of the sausage tightly with thin twine, and then tie the twine in the middle of the sausage until it just becomes two connected sausages. In this way, two sausages are filled. To make 60 kilograms of pork into sausage, the filling time alone takes 4 hours for an average worker of 3 to 5 hours. Stuffing sausages takes a lot of time and is as meticulous as embroidery.

Hang to dry. The stuffed sausages cannot be smoked and grilled immediately. They must be hung in a cool place on the balcony to dry for a few days to allow part of the water vapor to evaporate. It seems that the outside of the sausage is fresh and clean, and it can be put into the kang. This time is suitable for two or three days. Smoking and roasting on the kang. Hang the dried sausage on the fire pit and smoke it with firewood for 24 hours until the sausage emits aroma and a slight amount of oil overflows, then it can be put on the kang and become a real Tujia cured sausage. From pork to bacon, the production time spans about a month, and is generally done in the cold winter to facilitate storage and smoking. It can also be made in other seasons, but the taste is never as pure as that made in winter.

It is said that cured sausage is the "lady" of Tujia cuisine, and it is worthy of its name. First, the cured sausage is a delicate type among Tujia bacon, embodying the culinary wisdom of the Tujia people. First of all, we are very particular about the choice of meat, and leg meat is the best. In addition, the sausages use pig intestines, which are a clever combination of pig intestines and bacon, with original inspiration from local materials. In the production process, fine linen threads and various spices are used, just like the embroidery work of Tujia girls. More importantly, the world only knows the deliciousness of sausages, but they may not know the sophistication and complexity of their production. The taste of cured sausages produced by different Tujia families is different, but the mainstream taste is the same: fragrant and poetic, greasy and rich, and graceful aftertaste. If you go to Yichang or a nearby Tujia village in winter, be sure to bring back a few skewers of cured sausages, otherwise the New Year’s Eve dinner will be missing the taste buds of Tujia dishes “ladies”.

Oops! You are so long-winded, can you please make it simpler? It really makes me faint!

In short, you need to prepare fresh and tender pork first, cut it into small pieces, find spices such as Chinese peppercorns and orange peels, mash them and mix them evenly into the meat. If you feel it is not enough, You can also add peanuts, sesame powder, melon seed powder, etc. to it to make the sausage more flavorful. Then find a bamboo tube and put the cleaned pig intestines on the bamboo tube. Then carefully stuff the seasoned pork into the tube bit by bit and pour it into the small intestine. It should be noted that during the process of stuffing the meat, the pork that has been stuffed must be continuously squeezed, so that the meat pieces, condiments, and spices can be well combined and will not fall apart after cooking. At the same time, tie the hemp rope into small sections according to your needs. After that, the prepared sausages are hung on the fire kang, smoked with cypress branches, orange peels and other fragrant materials, and dried to dry the moisture for storage. After twenty or thirty days, the sausages are ready for storage. Farmers usually bury them in grain piles to prevent them from being eaten by insects and mildew. This is how the Tujia people’s delicacies for the year are prepared.

Having said this, you must want to try our Tujia sausages.

If you are lucky enough to come to our Tujia village in Changyang, the hospitable Tujia people there will definitely treat you with sausages - friends from afar!