Why I Still Can't Find a Decent Basic Sausage in Hong Kong

Why I Still Can't Find a Decent Basic Sausage in Hong Kong

In Australia, there's a hardware store called Bunnings. Every Saturday, without fail, there's a sausage sizzle out the front, run by a local charity or school group raising funds. It's about as simple as food gets: a cheap sausage from the local supermarket, a slice of bread, butter, tomato sauce, and grilled onions. There's even a long-running, mostly good-natured argument about whether the onions go under the sausage or on top. I have opinions on that, but that's a story for another day.

That sausage isn't fancy. It's not trying to be. It's plain pork, grilled, and it does exactly one job well. And it's what a lot of my Australian customers ask me for when they first arrive in Hong Kong: something plain, something simple, something that tastes like pork and not much else.

I'd love to tell you I've found it. I haven't, not consistently, and here's why.

What's actually out there

Hong Kong has good sausages. That's not the problem. The problem is finding one that's genuinely basic, at a price that makes sense for what is, at its core, a simple food item.

The good quality options are priced like a specialty product. Which, in a way, they are, but a plain pork sausage shouldn't need to cost what a specialty item costs.

Most sausages here are built around flavour, not simplicity. Cheese, herbs, chilli, all sorts of additions. Some of it is genuinely well done, but it's not what a customer means when they ask for "just a plain sausage." Often, added flavour is also doing double duty, covering for lower quality meat rather than adding something to good meat.

Casings are frequently a letdown. Non-natural casings that end up chewy rather than snapping cleanly, which changes the entire eating experience regardless of what's inside.

Sometimes the meat itself is the issue, in an unexpected way. I tried one style I genuinely enjoyed, a cervelat, which traditionally uses a beef and pork base. This version used a different combination, with additives to boost the flavour rather than letting the meat carry it. It tasted good. But it wasn't the kind of ingredient list I want standing behind my name, so it was an easy pass, even though I liked eating it.

I tried making my own

Since I couldn't find exactly what I wanted, I tried making sausages myself. That taught me something I didn't fully appreciate going in: a sausage with none of the fat or filler people worry about isn't actually a better sausage. Mine came out too coarse, too dense, more like a tube of steak than a sausage. There's a reason a proper sausage needs some fat and some binder. The question was never "should there be any," it was always "what kind, and how much."

Where things stand

At the moment, I stock one sausage regularly: a straightforward English pork sausage that's become genuinely popular with customers. It's not the Bunnings sausage. But it's the one that's earned a permanent spot after years of trying other things, some of which I stocked for a while before demand dropped off, some of which never made it past a sample. It's also one of the easier freezer staples to always have on hand for exactly the kind of no-fuss meal it's built for. If you're planning ahead, our guide to safely thawing frozen meat applies here too.

I still don't have the full range I'd like. Some of that's price, some of it's ingredients, some of it's simply not being able to justify stocking a product that ten people might want but I'd need to order in bulk to get.

So if you've been asking me for something plain and simple and wondering why I haven't got more options, this is why. I'm not done looking. If something changes, you'll be the first to hear about it.