Sizzling sausages – the best bangers in Beijing !

Much as one may love eating Hong shao rou  红烧肉 and xīhóngshì chǎo jīdàn 西红柿炒鸡蛋, not to mention Běijīng kǎoyā 北京烤鸭, there are times when we expats long for a taste of home.  Good quality western-style bacon is not always easy to come by, and sausages are even more elusive. However – rejoice! rejoice! – I have recently discovered a chap, Andy Horowitz, who is making PROPER sausages here in Beijing.

His company is called Andy’s Craft Sausages which he started last year because he, too, was frustrated at not being able to get ‘proper’ western sausages easily here in China.  As with many companies here, this all began in a rather ad hoc fashion.

He started making sausages for himself, then when he had a surplus, gave them to friends and colleagues, they started asking him to make sausages for them and were prepared to pay  for them, and fairly quickly one thing led to another and it became a proper business. His website is: http://www.beijingsausages.com

When I read about the company in a local magazine I was really enthusiastic, and after perusing the website I phoned up to order some sausages.   I was slightly taken aback to hear Andy’s American accent – after all he was producing great British classic sausages such as Cumberland and Lincolnshire, would they be authentic I wondered?  He offered either full size sossies or chipolatas and  I went a little OTT* and ordered no less than 4 kilos of sausages (1kg Lincolnshire, 1kg Cumberland; 1kg Chorizo, 1kg Spicy Italian).  They were vacuum packed and frozen in 1/2 kilo packets (two per type), and were delivered promptly,  ready to go straight into my freezer.

They are wonderful sausages, very authentic in terms of flavour and spicing, and made of really high quality organic shoulder pork, with no nasty additives, and the filling is packed into natural sausage skins (not horrid artificial skins).

Andy has been meticulous in meeting all appropriate western food health standards, and complies with  HACCP – a rare thing in this neck of the woods, believe me.                         His sausages taste and smell fantastic, like the sausages you remember from your childhood, rather than the rather bland supermarket sausages we get in the west nowadays, and a zillion times better than anything you can get here in China.

Hooray! Bangers and Mash, Toad-in-the-Hole and the Full Monty Sunday Breakfast Fry-Up are back on our menu!!

*OTT = Over The Top