Sheep casing

[hooked on smoke]

What is the difference between natural sheep casings and home pack sheep casings?
Looked at a Web site that has thever but no description of what the difference is. Was thinking of making some hot dogs but know nothing about it yet.

 

[wild west]

Home pack is usually shorter lengths sometimes inconsistent diameter. Good for the home sausage maker because you don't have to buy a large quantity

 

[hooked on smoke]

Ah, thank you. Yes there was quite a price difference between the 2.

 

[hooked on smoke]

Again I know nothing about them but this is the site I was looking at.
The natural casings are pricy but for my use it think the home packs would do just fine.

Walton's Sausage Casings - waltonsinc.com‎
Adwww.waltonsinc.com/‎

 

[ab canuck]

I buy all my csg from a butcher supply shop, I do buy the "hanks" A pkg of full length csg good for 100-120 lbs. Csg will last for a long time as long as there are salted and kept in the fridge. If you do small batches home paks are good, We usually do 25lb batches and will do a few at a time so we go the Hank route. 

 

[SmokinAl]

The casings last forever, I have some that are 6 years old & just like new.

Here is a great tutorial on handling them.

http://www.smokingmeatforums.com/t/159729/how-to-handle-natural-casings

Al

 

[DanMcG]

I was going to say, Do yourself a favor and stay away from the home packs because of quality issues, until I noticed your link to Walton's.
Walton's sells great products and since these packs are a 1/4 of a hank, they might just be the same as there regular casings. It might be worth a phone call to verify.

 

[mickey jay]

The concensus over the years was that the 'home packs' were the leftover ends and bits that the casing companies were trying to avoid just throwing away.  It would be good to know if that's not the case in this example from Waltons.  One thing I will mention is that making sausages is already detail oriented enough to be adding the difficulty/time of dealing with odd lengths of casing.  It basically means you'll have to be managing possibly multiple transitions to a new length of casing during a single batch which adds time and complexity (and frustration; especially with sheeps!).  Since casings last so long, spending the extra to get extra plus less frustration isn't a terrible deal.