Market Snack · Sour Fermented Sausage

Sai Krok Isan (Fermented Pork Sausage)

Photo: Vee Satayamas / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0

The tang doesn't come from vinegar — vendors pack the sausage with cooked sticky rice and let it sit for a few days so its own lactic-acid bacteria sour the meat naturally, the same basic chemistry behind yogurt.

Fatty ground pork is mixed with garlic, salt and cooked glutinous rice, stuffed into casings, and left to ferment for a few days until pleasantly sour, then grilled over charcoal. Vendors slice it into bite-sized rounds and hand it over with raw cabbage leaves, fresh ginger and bird's eye chilies for wrapping.

Why it's made this way: Long before refrigeration, fermenting meat in rice was Isaan's way of stretching a slaughtered pig further, and the technique stuck around as a favorite festival and market food.