Making Chiang Mai Sausage

I must admit, i've been a slow starter at getting into Masterchef Australia. But after seeing all the posts that friends had on facebook about it, and after my sister got back from Australia and talked about it, i had to find out what it was all about. I've only managed to see some of the finals series, but what i have seen has inspired me (and most of Australia i'm sure) to get into cooking. After seeing an episode on making sausages, i was suddenly inspired to want to learn how to make sausages. A friend and i thought we'd give it a go. After looking up lots of various recipes on the net, we figured we could get the stuffing sorted, but what to do about the intestine casing and how to stuff it. We didn't have any of those fancy machines that they had on masterchef! And there's no point buying something like that for an experiment that'd most likely taste terrible :)

So thank God for Mac and her aunty and Uncle. Mac is a good friend of my friend. Her aunty and uncle run a shop that makes and sells Sai Oowa (the thai name for the Chiang Mai sausage). So a couple saturday's ago, we went over to their restaurant, and i got the low down on how to make sausages. One of the best things i learnt - you DON'T need the fancy machinery that i saw on the TV to make sausages. An old cut up water bottle works just fine. Ok, so you'll need to really get your hands into it a lot more, but hey, it makes it more fun too.

here are a few pics of my cooking lesson.


trying to work get the intestine back onto the end of the bottle after i accidentally lost concentration and let it go


it really was fun making it


getting a bit of help from Mac's uncle in how to tie it up


the sausage all stretched out


and the final product!

Verdict: it was YUM!!! i was given a long length of sausage that i was going to take around to my sister's place to share with the family. But it never actually got there as i ended up eating it all myself :) hehe