Last weekend my family got together and we had a sausage making Saturday! We put enough venison and pork together to make 100lbs of summer sausage. We ultimately want to reproduce a summer sausage that my grandparents used get when they had venison processed.
We decided to start with Len Poli's venison summer sausage recipe so we could adjust the flavor. I mixed 15lb batches and added 1 TBS of powered garlic, 1 TBS cracked pepper and 2 TBS mustard seeds to the recipe. Deleted red wine. We used Bactoferm F-LC for the starter culture.
We purchased a case of pork butts from Sam's Club so we made the rest into ham sticks.
Here are a few pictures from sausage Saturday.
Had 2 mixers and stuffers working most of the time.
My brother brought his stuffer and his SS table.
Stuffing ham sticks.
Drying sticks before smoking.
Finished sticks. Ran out of sheep casings and finished with larger collagen casings.
Summer sausage with clear casing.
With mahogany casing.
The Bactoferm F-LC is a fast acting culture so I smoked 1 stick at 24 hours just to see. The tang was there but not very pronounced. The next batch was at 36 hours then 48. The last 2 batches tasted the same with good tang.
I smoked the summer sausage with red oak until it reached 152 then ice bathed it. Both sausages turned out very good. I will try another extra TBS of garlic powder next year.
From time to time I share some of the SMF threads on my Facebook page. My sister brought a friend who has a large smoker does a lot of smoking but has never made any sausage. Jim saw a thread I shared of Todd Johnson's about smoking mixed nuts from Fleet Farm. Jim made the nuts from his thread and brought them along (which was kind of cool).
I would like to try making this an annual event to get everyone together. It will make better sausage makers out of all of us.
Thanks for looking!
We decided to start with Len Poli's venison summer sausage recipe so we could adjust the flavor. I mixed 15lb batches and added 1 TBS of powered garlic, 1 TBS cracked pepper and 2 TBS mustard seeds to the recipe. Deleted red wine. We used Bactoferm F-LC for the starter culture.
We purchased a case of pork butts from Sam's Club so we made the rest into ham sticks.
Here are a few pictures from sausage Saturday.
Had 2 mixers and stuffers working most of the time.
My brother brought his stuffer and his SS table.
Stuffing ham sticks.
Drying sticks before smoking.
Finished sticks. Ran out of sheep casings and finished with larger collagen casings.
Summer sausage with clear casing.
With mahogany casing.
The Bactoferm F-LC is a fast acting culture so I smoked 1 stick at 24 hours just to see. The tang was there but not very pronounced. The next batch was at 36 hours then 48. The last 2 batches tasted the same with good tang.
I smoked the summer sausage with red oak until it reached 152 then ice bathed it. Both sausages turned out very good. I will try another extra TBS of garlic powder next year.
From time to time I share some of the SMF threads on my Facebook page. My sister brought a friend who has a large smoker does a lot of smoking but has never made any sausage. Jim saw a thread I shared of Todd Johnson's about smoking mixed nuts from Fleet Farm. Jim made the nuts from his thread and brought them along (which was kind of cool).
I would like to try making this an annual event to get everyone together. It will make better sausage makers out of all of us.
Thanks for looking!
