Well, best practices at my place at least...
Smoking your sausages means that you’re almost ready to sample the result of all your hard work. Follow this guideline to help prevent fat out and to get a good smoke flavor.
- Make sure EVERYTHING is squeaky clean! ALL surfaces and ALL tools!
- Install the grinder blade in the correct direction. Cutting edge mates with the plate surface.
- Cube your meat BEFORE you have the grinder and all other items set up. By cubing the meat with all your tools and utensils on the same counter, you risk contamination.
- Grind your meat while it’s VERY cold. This assists in getting a good grind, less fat smear, and is a good practice of safe food handling.
- If grinding lots of meat or different types of meat, place ALL meat that is not in process back into the refrigerator. The meat needs to stay at or below 40° F as much as possible prior to adding cure.
- Buy a decent scale that measures in grams. All measuring spoons are not created equally. This small investment will help you in repeating your recipe time and again, this will also assure you that you are using the correct amounts of curing agents.
- When mixing your meats, spices, and cure together, mix it well and then mix it some more. You want the meat mixture to become VERY sticky. When the mixture is very sticky, you know that the myosin has been released from the meat. Myosin is a natural protein in the meat that will help your sausage have a good texture and bond.
- BEFORE you begin stuffing your sausage, test fry a patty of it to see if you have everything you need in it. This is also when you can find out that you failed to put in your cure! Meat that is gray inside when cooked means no cure… That’s a heartbreaker to find out after stuffing and smoking…
- If you’re using natural casings, rinse and start soaking them around 24 hours before use.
- If using collagen casings, don’t soak them, you’ll be very angry when they blow out. Not all casings require the same treatment. Read the manufacturer’s instructions, or ask on here if you aren’t sure how to handle them.
- Before starting to stuff your sausages, remove all the non-essential items from the work surface. A cluttered area will impede your ability to move and work with the links as they are coming out of the stuffer.
- When stuffing, don’t get in a hurry. Rushing or forcing the meat into the casing can lead to blow outs on the casing and possibly damage to your stuffer. Slow and easy will also provide you with uniform sizes in your sausages.
Smoking your sausages means that you’re almost ready to sample the result of all your hard work. Follow this guideline to help prevent fat out and to get a good smoke flavor.
- Preheat your smoker to 120° with no smoke
- Place the sausages into the preheated smoker and allow them to “dry out” for at least one hour at this temperature.
- Then, if the exterior of the sausage is fairly dry, add smoke and raise the temperature 10° to 130. Allow the sausages to smoke at this temperature for 30 minutes.
- After 30 minutes, raise the temperature 10° to 140°.
- Each 30 minutes, raise the temperature 10° until you hit 170°. Don’t go much higher than this or you risk the fat rendering out of your sausage. That’s a bad thing.
- Continue cooking until the internal temperature of the sausage is 152°.
- To stop the cooking action, place the sausages into an ice water bath or shower them with cold water.
- Now, it may take MANY hours for some sausages to reach an internal temperature of 152°. I’ve had summer sausage take 14 hours to get to the mark! You’ll be tempted to raise the pit temperature, but by doing so you risk fat out.
- After the water bath, allow the sausages to hang, or place them into paper sacks to rest a while before packaging up for the refrigerator or the freezer.
- Finally, if you’re still reading this, you cannot cook sausage to time! You must cook it to temperature. A good thermometer is one of your most valuable tools in this hobby.
