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Hunan Preserved Meat

Hunan preserved meat is famous in China. Here I will talk about different types of preserved meat in Hunan local food market and my parents’ homemade preserved meat.

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Talking about famous Hunan food, the first one I would say is the stink tofu. Then the next one I would recommend to my foreign friends will be the Hunan preserved meat.

If you visit Hunan, you will definitely see the preserved meat in the food market, also various types of preserved meat dish in the local restaurants.

You can find plenty of choices of preserved meat available from Hunan local food market.

These are the preserved pork sausages. In Hunan, there is one flavour called “Yue Ji” (a name of a flower), without hot chilli, tastes with mixture of saltiness and sweetness. Another flavour has slightly spicy, both are popular choice for locals.

The preserved fish fillets, you need soak them before cooking as they are very dry. In Hunan these fishes are usually cooked with hot chillies and salted vegetables.

Well, here comes another type of meat you may hardly see in the West, the preserved pig intestine. @_@. (Well, have I told you that Chinese eat almost anything edible?) 

The most popular ones should be the preserved pork. In China you will notice that Chinese usually eat pork with skin and fat. This might seem unusual to the West where people are more sensitive about fat because concern of weight control. But in China, pig skin as food is normal. For preserved pork, the skin and fat parts are really tasty.

During Spring Festival time, my parents would make their own preserved meat.

Before preserving, they would marinate the meat with salt, sugar and Sichuan peppercorn. Then they would smoke the meat using some half-damp sawdust.

After smoking, the meat will be hung out there for a long time open-air drying, in their balcony!!! 

See these are the homemade preserved sausages and pork they made in this year Chinese Spring Festival.

And this year, they even made preserved duck!

How nice they look! Most of these will give to my brother and his family when they visit my parents during the Spring Festival. For me, I can only enjoy this in photo :).

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You may also like to see how we prepare and make a Hunan preserved meat dish at home. Click photo to read more.

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