cook oriental food and buy authentic Asian ingredients online Northern Thai Sausage, "Sai Oua"


This is an ImportFood.com online Thai recipe. Here you can conveniently purchase authentic, quality ingredients imported from Thailand. We hope you enjoy our website and it helps you enjoy cooking Thai food!

Northern Thai sausage is easy to make, and the mix of ingredients leads to a spectacular result. We would encourage you to make this with ground pork or, for any hunters reading, try this with local elk, deer, wild boar, or other natural meat that you might have. Also watch our online video below showing how it's made. You can't go wrong with this sausage. Please be sure to leave us a comment using the form below if you make it, and share how it turned out.

Ingredients:
3/4 cup ground pork
1 cup pork belly fat, cut into small dice
5 kaffir lime leaves, finely chopped
1/2 cup finely-chopped fresh lemongrass
2 tablespoons finely-chopped fresh galangal
2 tablespoons red curry paste
1 teaspoon turmeric powder
2 teaspoons sugar
3 tablespoons thin soy sauce
Sausage casing

Method
In a mortar and pestle, pound together lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, and galangal until fine.

In a large mixing bowl, add pork and the rest of the ingredients, mix well. Mix by hand a glove. Do not knead, make sure the pork fat stays in shape.

Tie one end of the pork casing with string then use a funnel (see pictures and video below) to force the mixture into the casing. Prevent air bubbles from forming, and do not over-stuff it. Tie the other end. Now your sausage is ready to cook.

For best results, use a bamboo skewer to poke holes in the casing. Poke it before and during the cooking process, this will make sure that the sausage doesn't break while cooking. Grill on low heat, keeping watch. Flip and poke until golden brown, dry and aromatic (about 25 to 30 minutes (depending on the size of the sausage).
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June 16th, 2009 5:14 AM

Anonymous said:

Can you used this to make sausage patties insteak of links?

June 16th, 2009 5:41 AM

cherry said:

How are you? I got up early working on my MKT again. :) Here is very yummy yummy.

June 17th, 2009 12:07 AM

John Buzolich said:

My wife and I were just in northern Thailand, in Chiang Mai, during April 2009. It was our first trip to Thailand and we loved eating food from the street vendors at the night market. Some of these northern style sausages were fantastic. They would often cook them in small balls, about the size of a golf ball, but all linked together in the same sausage casing. The vendor would have them all on the grill, and then clip off the number of pieces you wanted based on what you paid. They were fantastic! I can't wait to try this recipe

June 29th, 2009 7:40 AM

Ken Hill said:

I've made this sausage twice now and it's yummy! As with any unusual recipe it was far better the second time. Make sure you dice and mash the lime leaves and lemongrass mixture really well. I had to use salt pork instead of belly fat but thought it was fine (& not salty). Although I usually like to cook meats over charcoal, I've found sausage cooks better on the upper rack of a gas grill. There is so much fat released during cooking that flare ups become a problem over charcoal. Thanks for your awesome website and recipes!

July 16th, 2009 1:19 PM

Tom DeRisi said:

I made this for the first time on the 4th of July weekend. I used the sausage stuffer attachment on my KitchenAid stand mixer. I really worked well. I started with about 2.7 lbs of fresh ground pork and increased the other ingredients by guessing. I didn't want to make it too salty so I just added a little more of the thin soy, but I did add an extra tablespoon and a half of the red curry paste etc. I did take to heart Ken Hills comment about really dicing the lemongrass and galanga and leaves as finely as I could. (I have had Sai Oua in Thailand and it was like eating sausage with tan bark in it and I didn't want that) I then pounded the mixture in the mortar extremely well. I was very pleased that there were no hard chunks in the sausage. My local butcher only had pork back fat which was just fine. I am american and my wife is Thai and we have a great friend from Berlin who is a close to a sausage expert as we can find. He thought that the cubes of fat should have been ground into the meat more then they were but loved the flavor. My wife's aunt owns a few Thai restaurants in the SF Bay Area thought it could have had more lemongrass and kaffir leaf. I loved it. Give it a try and you will be very pleased with the results. It is also a great way to score points with your Thai in-laws. Those of you americans with Thai wives will know what I mean.

July 17th, 2009 9:41 AM

Dan said:

Interesting, would love to taste this one someday. I'm lucky though - a local (Ohio) Thai restaurant serves "E-San" sausage. Wonderful. The serve it with some strips of raw cabbage, couple slices of fresh ginger, and basil & cilantro, as well as some chili sauce on the side. I like to order it with a side of sticky rice. Makes a whole meal.

October 14th, 2009 5:00 PM

Moniek said:

I couldn't get any sausage casing, i put them on skewers like you would make kebabs end jused a grill pan. Turned out great.

January 31st, 2010 3:16 PM

Barbara Fernandes said:

How do you call that ingredient in the blue bowl for making Thai sausage

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