A bad head virus knocked me down this week, wiping out a 4 day deer and duck hunting plan, so I decided to plunge in with my first dried sausage; I picked the Marianski dried Polish recipe. Used elk and pork, plus hand cut fat back bits. My last batch of Polish semi dried came out a little dry, so I forced myself to add more fat; came out about 2 pounds of elk, 2 pounds of fatty butt, and 12 ounces of fat back. It seems like a lot of fat but I like the commercial fatty dried sausages so went with it. Here's the mix, which includes a big handful of chopped hot pepper cheese in the 4.4 pound batch.
I used big hog casings and here they are after almost 3 days of hanging in a cold basement room in the 40's, window open, with humidifier running wide open, getting me to about 70% humidity. Keep in mind this is the first time I've done this.
At this point I'm thinking that to dry these down to a typical hard sausage is going to take some time. So far, at 40 some degrees and high humidity they haven't shrunk much. And, unlike other dried sausage recipes using cure#2, the initial hanging stage, rather than being at higher temps where "fermenting" seems like it would occur fine, this recipe calls for very low initial temperatures. Well, at least I'm following the recipe. Next stage is a day and a half of cold smoking, which is a chip shot with my MES and AMNPs setup, like the mailbox smoker talked about here before.
I hope I'm doing everything right at this point; after the cold smoke these go into a 50 degree humidified drying environment until down to 87%. You can dry further, it says, and I'll have to see at that point. I'll update after the first cut. I chose this recipe because it looked pretty easy, and I thought I could best replicate the temp and humidity requirements for my first dried sausage. Stayed with a fairly small batch on this first run.
I used big hog casings and here they are after almost 3 days of hanging in a cold basement room in the 40's, window open, with humidifier running wide open, getting me to about 70% humidity. Keep in mind this is the first time I've done this.
At this point I'm thinking that to dry these down to a typical hard sausage is going to take some time. So far, at 40 some degrees and high humidity they haven't shrunk much. And, unlike other dried sausage recipes using cure#2, the initial hanging stage, rather than being at higher temps where "fermenting" seems like it would occur fine, this recipe calls for very low initial temperatures. Well, at least I'm following the recipe. Next stage is a day and a half of cold smoking, which is a chip shot with my MES and AMNPs setup, like the mailbox smoker talked about here before.
I hope I'm doing everything right at this point; after the cold smoke these go into a 50 degree humidified drying environment until down to 87%. You can dry further, it says, and I'll have to see at that point. I'll update after the first cut. I chose this recipe because it looked pretty easy, and I thought I could best replicate the temp and humidity requirements for my first dried sausage. Stayed with a fairly small batch on this first run.
