Venison snack sticks

[tntnardo]

Have a question on venison snack sticks .. I have been doing these for almost 10 yrs. Its 50/50 venison/pork. I have had an issue the last 2 yrs. Best way a I can describe it is that the meat in the casing "will slide out" when you bite into the stick. its like the casing and meat are seperate. If you were to cut the end of the casing you can easily squeeze the mixture out. The taste is good.I Use 17mm collagen casing. Here is my smoking:
130* 1.5 hrs.
135*-145* 3 hrs. smoke
150*-165* 5.5 hrs. no smoke
165*-180* 1 hour until internal temp.
reaches 154*
Just wondering if anyone has encountered this problem or would know what could be causing this. I have done some research and it seems that some suggest that the heat is not high enough (they claim 180) to "cook" the casing. I do live where it is cold and the last 2 yrs I did these after deer season and I did have some problems with the temperature as the weather was around 20 to 0 degrees outside temperature. I do the smoking in my outside non heated garage.

 

[Winterrider]

I made some beef snack sticks recently that the casings would slide off of. I kinda liked that actually. Not sure why these did and hasn't happened before.

 

[JBPilot]

I was having the same issue with my venison sticks. Although mine are about 90/10 venison/bacon. The only things that I’ve done to fix it is add NFDM (1/2 cup to 5 lbs) to the mix and stuff using a dedicated stuffer. That gave me my first batch where the casings didn’t just peel or slide off. As for heat I generally do the first hour around 100* then slowly bump up the smoker temp to about 170-180* and shut it off when the sticks reach an IT of 155*. The outside temperature shouldn’t matter, actually it being cold helps with not having to do an ice water bath to stop the cooking. I just turn the heat off to the smoker and open the door. That cools them off really fast. The problem that I was having was that the sticks were drawing up too much and pulling away from the casings. Hope that helps you some.

 

[tntnardo]

Thanks for the quick response. I do think the problem has to do to the heat, but the flavor was great. It was really no big deal but I was just wondering if I was doing something wrong. Got a batch in smoker now .. again thanks for the information