Sai Oua

As tradition built it

Serves 4 to 6. About 45 minutes, plus grilling.

Ingredients

An outline, not yet a recipe: the tradition's method with its ingredients named but not weighed. Quantities are being added from sources inside the tradition, lead dishes first.

• 5 dried large chillies (15g)
• 30g lemongrass, sliced
• 25g garlic, sliced
• 40g shallot, sliced
• 5g kaffir lime zest, finely chopped
• 2g salt
• 5g shrimp paste
• ground pork
• as available sausage casing

Method

1. Pound the dried chilli, lemongrass, garlic, shallot, kaffir lime zest, salt and shrimp paste together into a paste.
2. Mix the paste through the ground pork, keeping the mixture loose rather than compacted, since the dish's texture depends on it staying loose enough to burst rather than holding together like a European sausage.
3. Stuff loosely into casing.
4. Grill over charcoal, traditionally with coconut husk added to the fire.

What a modern chef changes

The coconut-husk smoke treated as a real, testable variable, and the loose pack respected rather than corrected

Rung 5

Method

1. Add dried coconut husk, or coconut-shell charcoal if husk cannot be sourced, to a base of good lump charcoal on the Big Green Egg. This produces a genuinely drier, sweeter smoke than lump charcoal alone, worth doing side by side against a plain-charcoal batch to taste the difference directly.
2. Resist the instinct to compact the filling as if stuffing a European sausage. A loosely packed sai oua bursts with aromatic fat and paste on the first bite; a tightly packed one just chews.
3. Grill low and slow rather than hard and fast, turning regularly, so the coconut-husk smoke has time to actually penetrate the loose filling rather than only flavouring the casing's surface.