Weekend plans.

[tallbm]

I wish I could have. I have not been able to find fat back of any kind. It's not horribly dry. But it could have been better with more fat in it to be sure. The flavor is very good.

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Live and learn I guess. It still looks fairly good.

I run my sausage at 80% meat and 20% fat and have no issues with dryness. It also makes the math very easy to figure out how much meat/fat too have when doing in increments of 5 pounds (4lbs meat, 1 pound fat = 5 pound sausage, increase from there).

Also dryness may be caused by Fat-Out. Fat-Out is where the sausage gets too hot or heats up too fast and the fat turns to liquid and basically runs out from the meat and pools up in the casing or leaves the sausage all together.
This might have been what happened as well.

Did you walk the smoker temp up from 100F to about 170F in increments over time?
What was the final smoker temp? (I get away with 180F for my wild hog pork sausage since it must go to 165F IT)
Finally, what was the IT of the sausage when you pulled it?

I'm asking all of these questions simply to get some info to see if we can find where the dryness came from :)

 

[Steve H]

Here is my thread about this. I don't believe it was caused by fat-out. But simply not enough fat.

https://www.smokingmeatforums.com/threads/summer-sausage-question.278686/

 

[tallbm]

Here is my thread about this. I don't believe it was caused by fat-out. But simply not enough fat.

https://www.smokingmeatforums.com/threads/summer-sausage-question.278686/

Ah I got ya.

Yeah I'm a huge proponent of doing 80/20 meat to fat. I'm fortunate and can get trimmed pork back fat from a butcher not too far from me. When I do my venison sausage it is really needed since the venison is basically 99% lean it seems.

My sausage making with venison becomes real simple with the pork fat from the butcher.
I also save my Beef fat that I trim from my Briskets and I can do more beefier type sausages or cuts like my Venison Pastrami Loaf for sandwich meat. I use the Venison and Beef fat and it comes out tasting amazingly like pastrami!!!

Keep at it and you will get it down! :)

 

[Steve H]

Ah I got ya.

Yeah I'm a huge proponent of doing 80/20 meat to fat. I'm fortunate and can get trimmed pork back fat from a butcher not too far from me. When I do my venison sausage it is really needed since the venison is basically 99% lean it seems.

My sausage making with venison becomes real simple with the pork fat from the butcher.
I also save my Beef fat that I trim from my Briskets and I can do more beefier type sausages or cuts like my Venison Pastrami Loaf for sandwich meat. I use the Venison and Beef fat and it comes out tasting amazingly like pastrami!!!

Keep at it and you will get it down! :)

Thanks, I don't quit that easy! I'm going to take another shot at it this weekend.