Night market
- Taichung
- Daily 16:00–02:00
Known forTaiwanese Sausage in Glutinous Rice (“Small Sausage in Large Sausage”) · Egg Crepe (Danbing) · Stinky Tofu
In the kitchen
How it’s prepared
Rice sausage is made by stuffing soaked, seasoned glutinous rice (in the Taiwanese style often with peanuts or lima beans) into pork large intestine and steaming it. According to Chinese Wikipedia, cooks in northern Taiwan tend to use pre-cooked rice and in the south raw rice, which gives slightly different textures. At the stall it is grilled over charcoal until the casing blisters, alongside Taiwanese pork sausage that the vendor turns constantly.
To assemble, the grilled rice sausage is slit lengthwise without cutting through, and a sausage is nestled inside like a hot dog in its bun. Pickled cucumber, sliced raw garlic and cilantro are stuffed in, then it is brushed or drizzled with sweet chili sauce or thick soy paste; some people add pickled mustard greens, hot pepper or wasabi. Most stalls make it to order, and it tastes best eaten hot.
Origins
History and origins
Rice sausage and pork sausage were both familiar charcoal-grilled snacks at Taiwanese night markets and roadside stalls long before anyone combined them. The pairing is generally described as a late-20th-century invention, and Chinese Wikipedia says it became a night-market staple in the 1990s. Who made the first one, and where, is not reliably recorded; one unsourced account on Chinese Wikipedia credits Hakka people in Hualien, who are said to have eaten it as a snack on the way to work. In the name, “big intestine” (大腸) is how Taiwanese Hokkien speakers refer to the rice sausage, and “small intestine” (小腸) is the pork sausage tucked inside.
Taichung's Fengjia Night Market saw a publicized dispute over who was the original shop: in 2008 two stalls facing each other across a lane each claimed to be the founder, and the quarrel made the local news. A 2013 Public Television report on Fengjia also places the originating shop there and says the snack became a copied favorite at night markets around 2008, which does not match Chinese Wikipedia's 1990s. With no solid documentation, such claims are best read as each stall's own account. The snack has since spread island-wide, picking up local twists such as the popiah-wrapped version made by a stall in Jiaoxi, Yilan.
