Made-in-Hong Kong Chinese Sausages

One of our family rituals in winter is to make a trip to Sai Ying Pun to buy made-in-Hong Kong Chinese sausages and grown-in-Japan Chinese mushrooms. 

The family-run workshop that make those Chinese sausages is in one of the industrial buildings that looks out towards the Victoria Harbour.   Each year, they start making sausages at the beginning of winter and stop just before Lunar New Year.  

The sausages are stuffed with pork, extra-lean pork, spicy pork, pork with dried tangerine, pork liver, duck liver, goose liver, …

When they are not so busy, one can watch them mix the grounded meat with wine, stuff the meat into the skin like an extra-long eel, tie them up to the familiar shape, cut them into pairs, and then hang them up on long poles to dry.  When they are sufficiently dry, they are trimmed and hung up in bunches to be sold.  The whole process is done in a relatively small workshop.  

I estimated there may be 100 sausages on one pole.  There may be as many as a hundred such poles hanging in the workshop.  I heard that it takes up to 7 days for a Chinese sausage to dry naturally.  If heat is applied, the time can probably be shorter.  How many sausages are they making each season?  A quarter of a million, perhaps?  It boggles the mind.  

My favourites are the regular pork and the goose liver.