A learning experience for me.

[Smokemifyougotem]

So me and a friend recently upgraded our equipment, along with that we invested in a spice grinder, definitely the cheapest of all our upgrades. The learning came when we spiced up our tried and true sausage recipe. Previously we had been using ground pepper and using a hand chopper to chop and mix the spices prior to mixing. We decided that we would use peppercorns and grind for consistency ourselves and then we also used the electric grinder on the other spices. the electric grinder ground up the spiced much finer, of course, the result was some spices were much stronger in this batch and the pepper content was high enough in its fresh ground state to make the sausage much spicier than intended. Just thought I would share the learning.

 

[bregent]

Yeah, lots of ground spices lose their potency rather quickly. But black pepper is one of the worst - there is just no comparison to fresh ground. We were up at a vacation house last week and forgot to bring our pepper mill. They had a container of ground pepper that looked like it had not been open very long. I poured a sample in my hand and it tasted like dirt. Threw it away and bought a disposable black pepper mill for them.

 

[indaswamp]

Are you measuring your spices by weight in grams of volume in tsps.??

 

[Smokemifyougotem]

We were using volume measurements.

 

[HalfSmoked]

Always a learning curve in what we do.

Warren

 

[indaswamp]

We were using volume measurements.

Yep. That's where the issue is, finer ground spices fill up volume with a higher weight of spice. Much better to weigh out your spices for accuracy. Salt too.....different grinds on salt will affect the weight when measuring by volume. And crazy as it may sound, not all tsp. and T. spoons are the same volume.

 

[HalfSmoked]

Thanks for the like indaswamp it is appreciatted.

Warren

 

[Smokemifyougotem]

All spices were measured pre-grind. The extra grinding on the rosemary and Tyme really brought out their flavour. I had estimated for some increase in pepper flavour by measuring the peppercorns with the same volume measure as the pre-ground pepper in the previous batches but I will need to decrease it more.

 

[Smokemifyougotem]

Btw I agree with you, Indaswamp, on the mass vs volume measurements. While mixing the sausage we took the step of measuring our volume so we can transition the recipe to all wt measurement. Much easier and precise.