Thai Sausages (Sai Grog)

Most tourists visiting Thailand remain entirely unaware of just how good Thai Sausages can be. The reason for this is that they seldom find their way onto a restaurant menu. Instead, they are usually purchased from a food market, or from a street vendor, to be eaten as a snack. This is truly a shame, as a good quality Thai Sausage can be very tasty.

Usually the sausage will be served cut into thin slices, and eaten with a small amount of greens such as cabbage leaves, whole garlic cloves, whole chilli and cucumber. Sometimes the Thai Sausage will also be dipped into a sweet chilli sauce.

Most Thai Sausages are made from pork, but they can also be made from beef, chicken, or even fish. Depending upon the region in which they were made, they tend to exhibit a slightly different taste. In Bangkok and Central Thailand they will be quite meaty tasting, with a lot of garlic present, in the North East (Isan), more chilli is added, and the quality of the meat, and quantity added, tends to be less, making for a more fatty sausage. In the South of Thailand, they tend to be much more sweat in taste, with sugar added to the recipe.

What really separates a Thai Sausage from its western counterparts is the sheer variety of herbs and spices added to the sausage mix. Typically a Thai Sausage will contain galangal, lemon grass, garlic, coriander, chilli, kaffir lime leaves, white pepper and fish sauce. As we can see, this is quite a mixture of flavours, making the Thai Sausage something quite special.

The major difference between a Thai Sausage and Western Sausage is in the form of the filler content, which is mixed with the meat. In the West we tend to add things like bran, corn, or similar crops, whereas a Thai Sausage uses sticky rice instead. This makes for a very heavy, filling sausage, one of the reasons it is so popular as a snack food, as a couple of them can fill you up nicely.

Thai Sausages can be fried, but they tend to taste so much better when they have been barbequed over charcoal. They need to be cooked very slowly, to allow the flavours of the herbs and spices to mix with the meat fat as it cooks, spreading flavours into the whole sausage.