Ingredients
Scale
- Preserved pork (Chinese bacon):
- 7 thick slices of pork belly, skin-on
- 100g red Sichuan peppercorns
- 10g Rhizoma kaempferiae (sand ginger)
- 10g Fennel seeds
- 10g whole black Peppercorns
- 200g Kosher salt
- Chopped fresh chilies to taste
- ***
- Sausage:
- 10kg Pork belly, skin off
- 100g Sichuan Chili powder
- 150g Kosher Salt
- 5g freshly-ground Cumin powder
- 10g freshly-ground black pepper
- 20g Sugar
- 20g freshly-ground Sichuan peppercorn powder
- 50g Kaoliang spirits (if unavailable, use high-proof vodka)
- ***
- Hog casings
- Cypress branches
- Fresh tangerine peels
- Fresh grapefruit peels
Instructions
- For the Ham:
- Grind the sand ginger, fennel and pepper to a fairly coarse powder, them put them with the Sichuan peppercorns into a hot wok and stir-fry them. Add the salt and continue stirring for a while (when you can smell the strong aroma of the spices and the salt is dry enough, remove it from the wok).
- Stab a hole through the top of each piece of pork belly so that a string can pass through it.
- Pour the salt with spices on the pork belly and rub them, add a goodly amount of fresh tangerine peel (it can be replaced by orange peel) and minced fresh chile peppers to taste.
- Tile the seasoned pork in a basin and wait for 7 days. During this period, turn over the pork once. After 7 days, wash them and put a butchers twine loop through the hole. Then dry them in the sun for 3 days, bring them inside at night but keep them in strong light if possible. Ideal temperature during this period inside and out is 10 degrees centigrade.
- For the sausages:
- Mix all the sausage ingredients together by hand, then grind fairly coarse in a meat grinder and inject the mixture into a casing. Stab tiny holes in the sausages to let the air out.
- Cut some cypress twigs, add a goodly amount of tangerine and grapefruit peels. Burn them under the pork/sausage (keep the meat high above the fire, this is a cold smoking process in an ideal world) for 1 hour to give the preserved meat a smoked flavor. These should be cold-smoked by either building the fire on a very cold day outdoors or by using a cold smoker or cold smoking attachment for your grill.
- Then hang the preserved pork and sausages in a dry place for more than 20 days and up to 2 months.
- The best temperature for making and hanging these preserved meats is around 10° C.
- When ready to eat, boil the ham and sausage until the skin of the ham is translucent to make them tender before slicing thinly and serving.
