Summer Salami & Summer Sausage (Fermented Dry & Semi-Dry)
THE RECIPE:
-----------------------------
Pork Butt (65%) = 3900g
Pork Back Fat (10%) = 600g
Beef Chuck Roast (25%) = 1500g
Total = 6000g
-----
Fine Kosher Salt (2.5%) = 150g
Cure #2 (0.25%) = 15g
Dextrose (0.3%) = 18g (from the Homebrew store)
Brown Sugar (0.3%) = 18g
Yellow Mustard Seed (0.4%) = 24g (half course ground, half whole)
Fresh Cracked Black Pepper (0.3%) = 19g
Garlic Powder (0.15%) = 9g
Ground Ginger (0.15%) = 9g (homemade w/ dehydrator)
Smoked Paprika (0.15%) = 9g
Ground Nutmeg (0.07%) = 4g
Liquid Hickory Smoke Concentrate = 3tsp (from LEM)
Distilled Water = 3tsp
-----
Distilled Water (0.5%) = 30g/ml
B-LC-007 Starter Culture (0.06%) = 3g (from Butcher & Packer)
Beef Middle 60/65mm (~8ft strand)
THE PROCESS:
-----------------------------
This is my fourth batch of my tried and true dry cured "summer" salami, and more excitingly, my first time doing some of it as a regular smoked and cooked summer sausage, as I just got a Pit Boss Copperhead 3 - Dick's Sporting Goods had a really good sale on them over the Black Friday weekend. The only real difference from my normal recipe is I've switched to B-LC-007 (I typically us FL-C) and lowered the sugar levels to .3% each (I typically use .5% of each with the F-LC). Reasons for the switch up is A) it's much colder here in Michigan now, and the area where I keep my fermentation tub is now a very cool 65-68ºF, and B) the only other time I've used B-LC-007 (in some dry cured all-beef salami) it came out more acidic than I'd prefer at .5% dextrose and .5% brown sugar. My guess as to the higher acidity level in that batch was because B-LC-007 with its additional bacterial strains is able to gobble up more of the sucrose/brown sugar than F-LC can, or because it was all beef - not 100% sure there, guess we'll find out.
Anyway, onto the making of this stuff...
Washed everything up and sanitized all the grinder parts and the kitchen counters. Cleanliness first! Cubed up two pork shoulders, the chuck roast, and some back fat keeping them all in separate bags, threw them into the freezer to stiffen up. One plus to it being so cold out now, I can just place my grinder on the back deck to chill the entire machine in one fell swoop.
While everything chilled, I got my all my salts, sugars, and spice weighed out and ready. I also got the first bit of my mixing liquids ready (the 3tsp of Liquid Smoke and Water each).
Almost two hours later once everything was sufficiently crispy-cold, I ground the chuck roast, back fat, and half the pork shoulder through a 5mm plate, and the remaining half of the pork shoulder through a 10mm plate.
Grab the big mixing lug, add the salts/sugar/spices, the initial liquids, and mixed it thoroughly by hand - always a good upper body workout. I then cling-wrapped it and set it in the fridge to cure up overnight. In the past, I've continued right on to mixing in the starter culture, stuffing, and going into the fermentation tub with no issues at all - really it was just getting later than I wanted it to be to finish up everything else, so in the fridge overnight it sat. Before going to bed I grabbed a nice long beef middle, washed it off, and left it in a bowl with water in the fridge overnight as well.
Woke up the next morning, had my coffee then it was stuffing time! Prepared the distilled water and starter culture and let it bloom while I re-rinsed the beef middle, set up the stuffer, and prepared all the lengths of butcher's twine. Grabbed the meat from the fridge, threw it into the mixing lug, and then mixed in the starter culture slurry thoroughly by hand. Packed up the stuffer, slid on the beef middle, and away we went...
These bad boys look huge! I used a ruler set below the stuffer to try and keep all my lengths the same, and the ruler says I succeeded, but these still look way bigger than 12" each. The 6000g batch ended up making 7.5 chubs averaging 800g per full chub, with 430g lost to the stuffer that I threw in a baggy just slightly open to act as a tester batch. Anyway, optical sausage illusions aside, into the fermentation tub they go to ferment for a few days at 65-68ºF and 85-95% RH.
Three days later (76 hours total fermentation to be exact) I gave the fermentation tub the sniff test, rolled up a large meatball from part of the test batch in the baggy, and sous vided it. Tastes right to me; good acidity level. The Accurite monitor says temps stayed nice and steady at 65-68ºF and the RH readout was 88-97% RH - perfect. I netted the sausages that would be dry cured, weighed them all, and then everything went into the drying chamber for the evening before beginning my smokes the next morning.
The biggest three un-netted chubs I put into the Pit Boss w/ Applewood pellets and smoked for 3 hours on the "Smoke" setting (130-140ºF), then 2 hours at 150º, then 2 hours at 175ºF, then ~2 hours at 200ºF, pulled them at an IT of 148ºF. It was a crisp 34ºF with light winds and snow here and there, so the smoker temps stayed on the low side of each setting which made stepping up the temperature slowly nice and easy. I ice-bathed them for 10 minutes, patted them dry, then put them in the drying chamber to bloom and dry out for 3 days before packaging them up.
The rest of the netted chubs for dry curing went into the cold smoker box with a full AMNPS tray of Pitmaster's Choice pellets which lasted for just over 10 hours, then back into the drying fridge. They'll catch another 10-12 hours of cold smoke somewhere down the road as well (we'll wait for a "warm" Michigan day I think). The drying will go until 30%+ weight loss is achieved (I like it a 30-35%, my dad likes it 40-45%), which with the drying chamber set at 55ºF and RH of 80% for three weeks then stepped down to 75%, usually takes 6-8 weeks.
Here's some pics of the summer sausage after all was said and done.
Here are some pics of a few slices from a previous batch of the dry cured ones of this recipe I made three months ago.
TASTING NOTES:
-----------------------------
• This recipe is too fatty to do as a regular summer sausage; much better suited to the dry cured salami with this high of a fat content. It leaves the summer sausage with a soft texture and almost butter-like fat flavor. Might be good if you’re one of those people who likes to pan-fry their summer sausage for sandwiches, but I am not one of them.
• The dry cured version is much better in my opinion, texture-wise, and flavor-wise - the fat really develops a beautifully rich “funk”, for lack of a better term. The only thing the summer sausage does better is pull up more smoke flavor.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
-----------------------------
• Next time I do real summer sausage in the smoker I'll do it as it's own batch with a leaner mix with a heavier beef ratio, and in fibrous casings; the beef middles while nice for the dry cured ones are far too difficult to remove on the cooked summer sausage. Lesson learned!
THE RECIPE:
-----------------------------
Pork Butt (65%) = 3900g
Pork Back Fat (10%) = 600g
Beef Chuck Roast (25%) = 1500g
Total = 6000g
-----
Fine Kosher Salt (2.5%) = 150g
Cure #2 (0.25%) = 15g
Dextrose (0.3%) = 18g (from the Homebrew store)
Brown Sugar (0.3%) = 18g
Yellow Mustard Seed (0.4%) = 24g (half course ground, half whole)
Fresh Cracked Black Pepper (0.3%) = 19g
Garlic Powder (0.15%) = 9g
Ground Ginger (0.15%) = 9g (homemade w/ dehydrator)
Smoked Paprika (0.15%) = 9g
Ground Nutmeg (0.07%) = 4g
Liquid Hickory Smoke Concentrate = 3tsp (from LEM)
Distilled Water = 3tsp
-----
Distilled Water (0.5%) = 30g/ml
B-LC-007 Starter Culture (0.06%) = 3g (from Butcher & Packer)
Beef Middle 60/65mm (~8ft strand)
THE PROCESS:
-----------------------------
This is my fourth batch of my tried and true dry cured "summer" salami, and more excitingly, my first time doing some of it as a regular smoked and cooked summer sausage, as I just got a Pit Boss Copperhead 3 - Dick's Sporting Goods had a really good sale on them over the Black Friday weekend. The only real difference from my normal recipe is I've switched to B-LC-007 (I typically us FL-C) and lowered the sugar levels to .3% each (I typically use .5% of each with the F-LC). Reasons for the switch up is A) it's much colder here in Michigan now, and the area where I keep my fermentation tub is now a very cool 65-68ºF, and B) the only other time I've used B-LC-007 (in some dry cured all-beef salami) it came out more acidic than I'd prefer at .5% dextrose and .5% brown sugar. My guess as to the higher acidity level in that batch was because B-LC-007 with its additional bacterial strains is able to gobble up more of the sucrose/brown sugar than F-LC can, or because it was all beef - not 100% sure there, guess we'll find out.
Anyway, onto the making of this stuff...
Washed everything up and sanitized all the grinder parts and the kitchen counters. Cleanliness first! Cubed up two pork shoulders, the chuck roast, and some back fat keeping them all in separate bags, threw them into the freezer to stiffen up. One plus to it being so cold out now, I can just place my grinder on the back deck to chill the entire machine in one fell swoop.
While everything chilled, I got my all my salts, sugars, and spice weighed out and ready. I also got the first bit of my mixing liquids ready (the 3tsp of Liquid Smoke and Water each).
Almost two hours later once everything was sufficiently crispy-cold, I ground the chuck roast, back fat, and half the pork shoulder through a 5mm plate, and the remaining half of the pork shoulder through a 10mm plate.
Grab the big mixing lug, add the salts/sugar/spices, the initial liquids, and mixed it thoroughly by hand - always a good upper body workout. I then cling-wrapped it and set it in the fridge to cure up overnight. In the past, I've continued right on to mixing in the starter culture, stuffing, and going into the fermentation tub with no issues at all - really it was just getting later than I wanted it to be to finish up everything else, so in the fridge overnight it sat. Before going to bed I grabbed a nice long beef middle, washed it off, and left it in a bowl with water in the fridge overnight as well.
Woke up the next morning, had my coffee then it was stuffing time! Prepared the distilled water and starter culture and let it bloom while I re-rinsed the beef middle, set up the stuffer, and prepared all the lengths of butcher's twine. Grabbed the meat from the fridge, threw it into the mixing lug, and then mixed in the starter culture slurry thoroughly by hand. Packed up the stuffer, slid on the beef middle, and away we went...
These bad boys look huge! I used a ruler set below the stuffer to try and keep all my lengths the same, and the ruler says I succeeded, but these still look way bigger than 12" each. The 6000g batch ended up making 7.5 chubs averaging 800g per full chub, with 430g lost to the stuffer that I threw in a baggy just slightly open to act as a tester batch. Anyway, optical sausage illusions aside, into the fermentation tub they go to ferment for a few days at 65-68ºF and 85-95% RH.
Three days later (76 hours total fermentation to be exact) I gave the fermentation tub the sniff test, rolled up a large meatball from part of the test batch in the baggy, and sous vided it. Tastes right to me; good acidity level. The Accurite monitor says temps stayed nice and steady at 65-68ºF and the RH readout was 88-97% RH - perfect. I netted the sausages that would be dry cured, weighed them all, and then everything went into the drying chamber for the evening before beginning my smokes the next morning.
The biggest three un-netted chubs I put into the Pit Boss w/ Applewood pellets and smoked for 3 hours on the "Smoke" setting (130-140ºF), then 2 hours at 150º, then 2 hours at 175ºF, then ~2 hours at 200ºF, pulled them at an IT of 148ºF. It was a crisp 34ºF with light winds and snow here and there, so the smoker temps stayed on the low side of each setting which made stepping up the temperature slowly nice and easy. I ice-bathed them for 10 minutes, patted them dry, then put them in the drying chamber to bloom and dry out for 3 days before packaging them up.
The rest of the netted chubs for dry curing went into the cold smoker box with a full AMNPS tray of Pitmaster's Choice pellets which lasted for just over 10 hours, then back into the drying fridge. They'll catch another 10-12 hours of cold smoke somewhere down the road as well (we'll wait for a "warm" Michigan day I think). The drying will go until 30%+ weight loss is achieved (I like it a 30-35%, my dad likes it 40-45%), which with the drying chamber set at 55ºF and RH of 80% for three weeks then stepped down to 75%, usually takes 6-8 weeks.
Here's some pics of the summer sausage after all was said and done.
Here are some pics of a few slices from a previous batch of the dry cured ones of this recipe I made three months ago.
TASTING NOTES:
-----------------------------
• This recipe is too fatty to do as a regular summer sausage; much better suited to the dry cured salami with this high of a fat content. It leaves the summer sausage with a soft texture and almost butter-like fat flavor. Might be good if you’re one of those people who likes to pan-fry their summer sausage for sandwiches, but I am not one of them.
• The dry cured version is much better in my opinion, texture-wise, and flavor-wise - the fat really develops a beautifully rich “funk”, for lack of a better term. The only thing the summer sausage does better is pull up more smoke flavor.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
-----------------------------
• Next time I do real summer sausage in the smoker I'll do it as it's own batch with a leaner mix with a heavier beef ratio, and in fibrous casings; the beef middles while nice for the dry cured ones are far too difficult to remove on the cooked summer sausage. Lesson learned!
