Recent content by hog warden

And 2.2% salt, plus cure, is a bit salty. I'm thinking of dropping that to 1.75%, plus 0.25% pink salt (cure) to get to 2.0% salt total. Do that, use coarse ground pepper and his 14 grams mix per pound of ground meat might work.

BTW, one of the things about Pop's recipe that rang a bell with me was something an old German relative once told us. Breakfast sausage is made with salt, pepper and sage. Nothing else. (The pepper got modified to include hot pepper flakes for those that wanted to add some zip). The majority of...

Pleasantly surprised to see I'm not the only one using Pop's not so secret sausage spice mix. However, as I look at it again thru a different lens, there are some questions that are begging for answers. When I did the math, the 8/2/1 comes to Salt....2.2%, Pepper 0.6% and Sage 0.3%. What begs...

Recipe for smoked breakfast? Same (or some) level of salt, pepper and sage as OP used, PLUS, 0.25% by weight of pink curing salt (1 teaspoon per 5 pounds of sausage dissolved in 1 cup ice water per 5 pounds), and I now include dry powdered milk in all my smoked sausage. By volume, it's 1 cup dry...

Refresh my memory......what is reason for smoking sausage until internal temp reaches 150F? It is fully cooked by then, but does it need to be? Could one treat it like bacon and smoke it for a couple hours until you get good color and flavor, and stop then? Say internal temp of only 120F or...

Also, to make this into a smoked breakfast sausage, all it would take is to ad the cure, some water and maybe binder, then stuff it and smoke it. This is the main reason I started making my own sausage years ago. It was to duplicate what a local butcher shop made and sold that we got as a...

When working with bulk fresh sausage, one thing I've noticed is the tendency for the cooked patty to have a rubbery texture. Anyone know what causes that and how to prevent it?

I am coming around to appreciate the brilliance of using percentages to establish the spice profile in sausages. The one I have been using is said to have originated in a meat market in Ft. Worth where fresh breakfast sausage was sold by the ton. Yet it differs a lot from others published in...

May or may not relate, but was in Sam's on monday and noticed they had uncured pork belly in the case next to the pork butts. Not the big long slabs, but more like thick 1 foot squares. Would make a good source of fat if you had a lot of lean pork.......venison, etc.

Between electric and wood, any difference you noticed in outcome? One preferred over the other? (Other than ease of use).

To anyone who might know, is there any difference in quality of sausage smoked on an electric or propane smoker using sawdust, chips, etc vs. some other method that uses real wood? The latter being a lot more work. Is it worth it? I see a lot of guys smoking sausage on offsets........but is it...

I had similar question about using pin oak, as I have one in the backyard that I keep trimming limbs from. Dried some out and tried it. Smoke not pleasant. Pin Oak is a red oak. Related, guys planting oak trees for the acorns to attract wildlife prefer white oaks. Acorns are sweet. Red oak...

Along lines of the "are all oaks" thread, what about hickory? I have access to at least Shagbark, Pignut and Pecan........and maybe the Shellback. If you buy smoking woods in the store, hickory and pecan will be different, but hickory is generic. They don't say which species it is. So what about...

Yes, does look pretty good. What I eventually realized was when trying out new recipes, 5 pounds makes for a good size for a test run. A lot of recipes show spices for 10 pounds, so is easy to cut that into half. And if using pork, almost any pork butt will yield at least 5 pounds when trimmed...

I remember back in the day when most taverns would have a big jar of pickled eggs or the Penrose pickled sausage on the shelf. Also pickled beets. Have traditional recipes for the eggs, but not the sausages. If forced to try it, would probably follow the recipe given by Rytek for the beer...