Smoked meat on the table
The diverse flavors on the island come partly from military immigrants who came to Taiwan with the Nationalist government from 1949 onward. This is how the flavors produced by Xingshazhai Hunan Cured Meats of Shuishang Township in Chiayi County came about.
The old boss, Li Jialing, is a second-generation waishengren, the child of a father who served in the ROC Air Force in China and decamped to Taiwan in the mid-20th century with the Nationalist government. Cured meats were a side business for the family. Later, Li Jialing, after working in Taipei for years, returned home at the age of 40 to commercialize his father’s hometown cuisine.
At 8:30 in the morning, the staff haul sausages and partly cured meat out from the refrigerated shipping containers to dry them in the sun. “A sausage needs at least six or seven sunnings,” says Li. It takes half an hour to rack up about 360 kilograms of sausages each day to sun-dry them. When production enters the busy season in the runup to the Lunar New Year,, hordes of photographers will rush to Xingshazhai to capture images of the blue sky, yellow sun, and red wall of sausages.
“Meat cured in dry, cold conditions turns out better, but Taiwan’s more a damp cold, so it’s not that well suited to it,” says Li. So instead, they use air-conditioning, putting the meats in refrigerated containers to have 4°C cold air blown over them at night, then hauling them back out to “sunbathe” during the day. “This business is really dependent on the weather.”
“Some people think the good taste of my family’s meats is because of the unique recipe, but what’s more important is the process. Knowing how to control it so that we complete curing in six days takes experience.”
Next, Li Jialing leads us into the work area. Two teams of people work on processing the pork that is delivered fresh from the market early each morning, the first handling the hind legs. They first check them over and remove the silverskin (the outer layer of connective tissue), and then cut the meat into thin strips, ready for the grinder. This is the raw material of sausage, which is then seasoned with just salt, sugar, MSG, chili powder, Sichuan pepper, and kaoliang liquor.
On the other side, Li Jialing’s wife, Chen Shouzhen, cuts the pork belly into long pieces five centimeters wide. After stringing them with a loop of cotton thread, each piece is coated with salt. After this “spa treatment,” they’re left to cure at a low temperature for five days, and then they spend four or five days in the sun before being smoked over rice husks.
Behind the factory, Li Jialing has built two rectangular curing stoves, each about two meters deep. Iron rods, each hung with eight pieces of salted raw pork belly, are neatly arranged crosswise in the top of the stove. Charcoal is burned at the bottom, covered with a layer of rice husks. Throughout the process, they have to carefully observe the fire temperature, making sure the temperature inside the stove stays at 40°C.
The smoking takes five days, until the meat turns a beautiful reddish brown. After being taken out, the pieces are then washed down with boiling water to remove the dust and residual oils.
So is the curing done? Not yet! The smoky smell of the meat at this stage is still too strong, so it needs to be aired for a week or two before being packaged. The total processing time for a piece of cured meat is thus nearly a month, so you can see that nailing that perfect flavor really is no simple task.
Good cured meats can entice a diner to plough through several bowls of rice.