If Chinese sausage has turned up in a recipe or caught your eye at the store, here's what you need to use it with confidence and how to choose it, cook it, store it, what to substitute, and 7 recipes to try it in.

What is Chinese sausage?

Chinese sausage, called lap cheong, is a dried, cured pork sausage that tastes sweet and savory at once, with a faintly boozy edge. The links are thin and hard, a deep ruby red, sold in pairs tied at the ends and flecked with visible white fat.

Unlike fresh sausage, it is cured and dried rather than sold raw, so it keeps for ages and needs no defrosting. It is seasoned with sugar and soy sauce plus a splash of rose-scented rice wine, which is where that sweet edge comes from.

It is firm and waxy straight from the package and must be cooked before eating. Heat softens the fat and blooms the aroma across a whole pot of rice.

Cooking With Lap Cheong

The simplest move is the one most cooks reach for first. Slice it thin on the bias and lay it over rice in the last ten minutes of steaming, so the fat melts down into the grains the way it does in claypot rice and Canton Chicken & Chinese Sausages.

In a stir-fry, render it first. Start the cold slices in a dry or barely-oiled wok over medium heat to draw out the sweet fat, then build the dish in that flavored oil. Char Kway Teow (Stir-Fried Rice Noodles) leans on exactly this rendered base.

A little goes a long way. The flavor is concentrated, so two links can season a whole pan of fried rice or a tray of Chinese Pizza without overwhelming it.

Slice it on a sharp diagonal. The links are hard, and thin angled coins both cook faster and spread the richness further than thick chunks.

Pairing and Common Mistakes

Lap cheong belongs with rice and egg, alongside green vegetables like gai lan and bok choy. The sweetness plays against soy, ginger, and garlic, which is why it turns up in everything from sticky rice dumplings to noodle salads.

The common mistake is treating it like fresh sausage and frying it hard over high heat. The sugar in the cure burns fast and turns bitter, so keep the heat moderate and let it render slowly.

The other slip is skipping the rinse. A quick rinse and pat-dry knocks off surface dust from drying, and steaming the links briefly before slicing makes the hard fat easier to cut.

Substitutes

There is no exact match, but for the sweet-savory role you can use a small amount of sweetened cured pork or even a good Spanish chorizo, accepting that chorizo brings smoky paprika rather than sweetness.

Cantonese roast pork (char siu), diced small, gives you a similar sweet-salty pork hit in fried rice, though it lacks the rendered-fat richness. In a pinch, a firm smoked sausage with a pinch of sugar and a few drops of soy approximates the direction.

For the duck-liver version (yun cheong), a richer cured sausage is the only real stand-in, since plain pork lap cheong tastes leaner by comparison.

Buying and Storing

Look for it in the refrigerated or dry-goods aisle of a Chinese grocer, vacuum-packed in pairs. Good links feel firm and dry, with clean white fat, not yellowed or sticky.

Sealed and refrigerated, lap cheong keeps for months, and it freezes for up to a year with little change. Because it is cured, it tolerates a cool pantry for a few weeks too, though the fridge is safer in a warm kitchen.

Once opened, wrap it tight and refrigerate. If the fat smells rancid or the surface goes slimy, throw it out.

Quick facts

In Chinese

香肠，中国

British (UK) term

Sausage, chinese

en français

saucisses, chinois

en español

salchichas, chino

Recipes using Chinese sausage

There are 7 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 7 Chinese sausage recipes