Taiwan’s 大腸包小腸, or Small Sausage in Large Sausage

The night markets of Taiwan are a foodie’s Playland, an eternal source of delicious and inventive street foods. We have covered a few in our time: we wrote about gua bao, a steamed bun stuffed with braised pork belly and accompanying garnishes, back in 2016, and we tackled the infamous Nutritious Sandwich, a combination of ham, soy sauce egg, tomato, and cucumber stuffed into a panko-coated donut, just last year. Today’s sandwich is one that I have been wanting to try since I first read about it years ago, though I only added it to our List earlier in 2022.

大腸包小腸 is pronounced something like daichan bao xiaochan, which translates directly as “large sausage wrapping small sausage,” but is usually rendered more appetizingly into English as “small sausage in large sausage.” It consists of just that, a smaller, thinner sausage and a larger, fatter one, with the larger sausage slit open to make a kind of bun. Lest you think this meal is keto-friendly, the larger sausage consists mainly of long grain glutinous rice, seasoned and stuffed into hog casings. The smaller sausage is a Chinese-style pork sausage, slightly sweet, made with lean pork and dried overnight. The two are combined to look something like this:

First though came the quest for supplies. I gathered these from a variety of sources–Park To Shop in Chicago’s Chinatown, Tai Nam grocery in the Little Vietnam neighborhood, HP Oriental Mart, a little Filipino market down the street from me in Oak Forest. I even mail ordered the long-grain sticky rice I used. The dried shrimp, crispy fried onions, and soy paste, a sweet thickened soy sauce that is fairly unique to Taiwanese cuisine, would all be used to flavor the sticky rice sausages. The chilies and pickled mustard greens would become garnishes.

I don’t have good photos of the process of making the sticky rice sausages, in part because the process itself is difficult and frustrating. I’ll post a TikTok video at the end of this page that shows some of it. I mainly consulted this Youtube video to learn how to make them, though I gained additional insight from a website called TaiwanDuck.com. I rinsed the sticky rice 5 or 6 times until the water ran off clean, then soaked it in water for around 45 minutes, during which time I also rehydrated some of the dried shrimp. Then I steamed the rice until it was cooked, and mixed some soy paste, rice wine, 5 spice powder, rehydrated dried shrimp, and crispy fried onions into the rice thoroughly.

So far, so good. But then I tried stuffing the rice into my hog casings. As the rice cools off, it stiffens, becoming more difficult to force through a tube into the casing. When it is hot, it is more fluid, but also incredibly sticky and difficult to work with. Once I did manage to get the sticky rice into the casing, the instructions said to poke holes into the sausages to keep the casing from bursting and then steam them to cook the casing. Every one of my casings burst when it was steamed. I stuffed them a second time and burst all the casings again. The third time, I decided I would just pan-fry them instead. These sausages are sometimes grilled, but I didn’t want to risk having the sticky rice sausages I’d worked so hard to make burst again, spilling their contents through the grate onto the charcoal.

Here is what the sticky rice sausages looked like while frying in the pan. I left the strings on the ends well into the cooking process because as soon as I remove it, the rice begins escaping the casing.

The pork sausages were much easier by comparison. Between this page and this one, I developed a recipe that seemed true to the style but with a few tweaks of my own. The sausages were made mainly from the lean parts of a pork butt, flavored with ginger juice, rice wine, dried garlic, salt, sugar, 5 spice powder, and honey. The changes I made were to add some curing salts, since these would be hanging overnight to dry and that not only seemed safer, but would give them the nice pinkish color I wanted them to have. Secondly, since my previous experience with lamb casings taught me that they are a pain to work with and smell really bad, I used artificial casings instead.

After the sausages had hung in my utility closet overnight, losing a good portion of their mass and developing a nice color, I held them in 180°F water for 20 minutes or so, to cook the sausages gently without rendering too much of their sparsely-held fat.

A Digression: How Did I Do?

Earlier in the month, while I was still simply researching the sandwich and looking all over for a restaurant in the Chicago area that might serve it, I could not identify any vendors in Chicago who served the sticky rice sausage. However, Taipei Cafe on South Halsted offered the pork sausage, so Mindy and I stopped by one Saturday afternoon to try it.

Taipei Cafe serves their Taiwanese sauges appetizer simply sliced on the bias, with slivers of raw garlic as a garnish. It is a little thicker than the sausages I made, and sweeter. The overnight drying process had given mine a slight appealing sourness. It was also not quite as garlic-forward as the sausages I made, though that was more than corrected by eating each slice along with a sliver of garlic.

While we were there, we also tried their pickled cucumbers. These cukes were cut into short spears and quick-pickled in a sweet brine redolent of garlic and sesame oil. We really enjoyed them and I decided to make my own version as a condiment or garnish for the sandwich. I also ordered their gua bao, which was very much like how I remember the version I made years ago tasting. Good for me! Mindy requested their signature egg waffle with Spam, which turned out to be a slightly sweet, oddly shaped, and eggy waffle served upright in a cone, festooned inside the batter with little cubes of Spam. Unexpected, but tasty!

The biggest surprise though was the radish omelet I requested. It didn’t look like much, just a thick oily disk of egg, fried brown, but it contained some alchemy or space-age science, some combination of hot fresh egg and sugar and salted dried daikon radish that Voltroned into something bigger when put together.

We’ll be back to try that radish omelet again, and again probably, at least until I can recreate that alchemy reliably on my own. And some tables near us had ordered popcorn chicken that looked and smelled great, so there’s more of the menu for us to explore. But that is more than enough digression for now.

Small Sausage in Large Sausage

There are a variety of condiments or garnishes that can adorn 大腸包小腸. Some of them are familiar to those who remember the gua bao article–pickled mustard greens, crushed peanuts, cilantro. Sweet chili sauce and raw sliced garlic are also common. One of the Youtube videos I linked above described a sauce combining sweet chili sauce, soy paste, and minced garlic, and I made some of that to use. Pickled cucumbers were, as I mentioned, on my agenda. The recipe I used was a little like this one, and a little like this one, but with the cucumbers sliced a little more thinly, and with fresh Thai chilies instead of chili crisp.

Since I had already been pan-frying the rice sausage, I added some pork sausages to the pan as well.

Even after cooking the sausages, I still had the twine binding the ends of those rice sausages just in case they wanted to fall apart while cutting them open. And they don’t hold their shape particularly well when heated, as the sticky rice behaves more like a fluid. But browning the casing does help set it into a shape, and they are relatively stable once cooked.

To construct this Taiwanese hot dog variant, I started with the pickled mustard greens, roughly chopped

Then I added some of the sweet and hot Taiwanese pickles I’d made.

The homemade pork sausage went atop those.

And I tucked some thin slivers of garlic in underneath that pork sausage.

I sprinkled crushed peanuts on top

and drizzled the sweet chili garlic sauce over all.

Then, finally, I finished with a sprig or two of cilantro.

And of course, before eating, I removed the strings holding that rice sausage together. This is my version of 大腸包小腸, and while I don’t anticipate it would stand up to what you’d get in a Taiwanese night market–and boy how I would love to experience those one day!–I can’t imagine that I’m too far off the mark, because this is stunningly delicious. It is a treat for someone who likes big flavors and doesn’t mind using lots of napkins. The rice sausage tends to deform a bit under the teeth, though mostly the casing tears off cleanly enough, but there’s enough sag that the contents can quickly end up in your hand or your lap–I was glad to have a plate, though I can see a wax paper wrapper being effective as well.

As for the flavors, this thing leads with garlic, first and foremost. There’s dried garlic in the sausage, and minced garlic in the sweet chili sauce, in the cucumber brine, and sliced raw garlic added directly to the sandwich. My breath must have been radioactive. But these big flavors help liven up the relative mildness of the large sausage, which is mainly rice, and the small sausage, which is a little sweet and a little sour but doesn’t have the big hit of fat that makes the flavor of many pork sausages so explosive. That sweet/sour flavor is picked up and amplified by the pickled cucumber, the sauce, the pickled mustard greens, and accentuated by the toasty flavor of the peanuts and the bright cilantro.

This is maybe my favorite thing I have eaten recently. But it makes me sad that I will have to travel to Taiwan to eat it again. Making that rice sausage is just too much work.

@sandwichidiot Taiwanese street food 大腸包小腸, or small sausage in large sausage! #smallsausageinlargesausage #大腸包小腸 #porksausages #stickyrice #taiwanesefood ♬ original sound – Jim Behymer