2kg pork belly
25g salt
20g crushed garlic
30g chopped fresh coriander
7g white pepper
130ml lime juice
15g lemon grass
20g fresh ginger
100g finely chopped shallot
20g shrimp paste
7g crushed or ground chilli
Hog casings
All flavourings except the coriander are ground in a mortar and pestle then all are mixed into the meat before stuffing.
I'm just back from a trip to Turkey and so I have a taste for spiced meat. Being a predominantly Islamic country, there's no pork sausge to be found in Turkey, just delicious spiced beef and lamb. I shall be making Adana kebabs soon. But for now, as a way to satisfy my desire for spicy meat, I decided to make some Thai sausages.
I found a Thai sausage recipe here that seemed interesting but I lost my nerve a bit when I increased the quantities up for 2kg of meat. I wondered if some of the tablespoons and teaspoon quantities had been mixed up. 4 tablespoons of shrimp paste seems an awful lot of this really strong ingredient. I'm no kind of expert when it comes to Thai cooking, with Tom Yum soup the only dish I have ever made from fresh ingredients. But I am used to seeing recipes printed with typos so I thought I would be safe to adjust some of the quantities down.
The finished sausages are great, and I think I did well to reduce the amount of lime juice. This could have come down even more as the result was still a little wet. But the shrimp paste, lemon grass, ginger and chilli could all be ramped up to give even more zing.
I used hog casings for this as I have run out of sheep, but I think these would suit a thinner sausage.
