Curing Chicken Sausage

[lcruzen]

This weekend I'm finally going to be at home and going to do up some chicken, feta, and spinach sausage. This recipe is for fresh sausage but I want to try curing and cool smoking some of it. Looking at the recipe a 5lb batch calls for 2 teaspoons of salt. Omitting the salt and plugging in Tenderquick in its place doesn't appear to be enough cure. The recipes on the Morton site call for 1.5 teaspoons per lb of meat. So my thinking is omit the salt and add the Tenderquick per Mortons formula. I'm a little concerned about it being to salty. Any thoughts out there?

 

[richtee]

Omit salt when using TQ. Hmmm 1.5 tablespoons? That's 50% more than normal...you sure on that?

Also whole mustard seed is AWESOME with poultry sausage!

On edit...DOH TEAspoons... so it's a bit less. I would like to see the link to that if ya can...

 

[lcruzen]

Here it is. http://www.mortonsalt.com/recipes/Re...ory.aspx?CID=6

I was going by the amount of TQ they listed in the sausage recipes. They were all 1.5 teaspoon per lb. So I'm assuming that is the formula.

 

[mesquitecountry]

Not sure on what the percentage of nitrite is in tender quick but you can follow the exact same salt and cure levels you would in any of your smoked sausages.

Put the feta in at about 6% and chopped frozen spinach that you press all of the water of at about 1/2 a percent. That would be rather nice.

You also have to remember that the feta is going to add some saltiness to the game as well.

You have to be careful to make sure you are getting enough salt in chicken sausages or basically any other sausage where you add a high % of condiments.

You need the salt to bind up the sausage. I'll spare you the actin and myosin and yadda yadda molecular reaction boredom.

If you have roughly 1.8% salt in any of your recipes you will be fine.

I'm making a olive and feta greek style and a spinach feta this week at work in the R&D lab. Hopefully I'll pick up a few new items.