Jalapeño Summer Sausage

[John Belvedere]

Made some Jalapeño Summer Sausage for Christmas gifts and personal use this week. I used Excalibur’s Jalapeño summer sausage mix along with Walton’s Sure Gel, cheddar cheese and cure #1. Unfortunately I didn’t check my stock and I was out of ECA. I used 8 lbs. chuck trimmed off all hard fat, 4 lbs. pork butt and I added and additional 1 lb. of pork fat back. 1st grind through a 10mm plate followed by an additional grind through a 3mm plate. Once ground I used my 20lb. mixer to get protein extraction. Then they were stuffed into 2 1/2 x 12 fibrous casings and then put them into the refrigerator overnight for the cure to work. The next day they went into my PID modified electric smoker with a mailbox mod for my AMPS pellet tray. They were smoked at 120 no smoke for an hour then I bumped the temp up to 130 with Apple/hickory smoke. Remaining smoke schedule was 140 for and hr., 150 for an hr., then 160 until the internal temp hit 130. At the 130 mark they were removed from the smoker and placed in a 150 sous vide bath until the internal temp reached 150 Since I used pork in the mix I held the sausage in the sous vide bath for an addition hour to make sure the meat was pasteurize. After their sous vide bath they went for an ice bath plunge and were then hung up at room temp for 2 hrs. to bloom. I was very happy with the result but all recipients loved them.
Thanks to Walton’s for all their excellent products, tutorials and Livestreams.

[tarp]

Looks good .Just did the same thing only used my PK100 to cook with but looks just like um.mmmmm

[Scooby1]

Looks good. I am a newbie so please bare with me…I am looking at the sous vide set-up cause my smoker takes forever to get past the meat temp stall. My questions are…

1. Why is water temp set at 150? I thought internal temp is supposed to be 160?
2. Approximately how long does it take when you put sausage in bath @ 130 internal temp til it reaches desired temp and you pull it out?
3. Do you vacuum seal sausage before putting it in sous vide?
4. do you check temp with meat thermometer and when meat is poked does it allow water in?
   Any help is appreciated and thanks for your time…

[PapaSop]

John Belvedere
Nice job. Looks great. Even more amazed you got all those pics to load in one post. Awesome.

[John Belvedere]

PapaSop said in Jalapeño Summer Sausage:

John Belvedere
Nice job. Looks great. Even more amazed you got all those pics to load in one post. Awesome.
I added all the pics then choose the small option which drastically reduced the resolution but allowed me to stay under the file size limit.

[John Belvedere]

Scooby1 said in Jalapeño Summer Sausage:

Looks good. I am a newbie so please bare with me…I am looking at the sous vide set-up cause my smoker takes forever to get past the meat temp stall. My questions are…

1. Why is water temp set at 150? I thought internal temp is supposed to be 160?
2. Approximately how long does it take when you put sausage in bath @ 130 internal temp til it reaches desired temp and you pull it out?
3. Do you vacuum seal sausage before putting it in sous vide?
4. do you check temp with meat thermometer and when meat is poked does it allow water in?
   Any help is appreciated and thanks for your time…
   Scooby1 I hope these will answer your questions. If not please feel free to ask for additional info.

1. I set the water temp at 150 as I like the texture that I get from that temp. You can go higher it’s just a matter of preference. I also kept the meat at the 150 temp to insure the meat was pasteurized. If you are not familiar
   with sous vide and pasteurization google “ A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking”.
2. once the meat reached 130 and I put them into the sous vide it took about 1 hr. to reach 150 internal temp.
3. I do vacuum seal them but some say you don’t need to. I have done it both ways and I just prefer to vacseal. It is a little more time consuming and costly but it’s what I’m comfortable with.
4. before I vacsealed the summer sausage I inserted a MEATER+ into the sausage and used that to monitor the internal temp of the meat. If you are not familiar with the MEATER+ do a search on the Walton’s product pages. I find the MEATER+ a very handy tool for sous vide and for rotisserie cooking. I have other dedicated thermometers I use when smoking and grilling that are also Blutooth and WiFi.

[Scooby1]

Would it be safe to say when putting multiple sausages in a sous vide cooker that when the one with the thermometer hits desired temp that the rest should be at desired temp also? It seems like the sous vide cooks evenly through… Is there a disadvantage to the sous vide? It seems like i could cut my cooking time in half with the sous vide… Thanks again…

[John Belvedere]

Scooby1 said in Jalapeño Summer Sausage:

Would it be safe to say when putting multiple sausages in a sous vide cooker that when the one with the thermometer hits desired temp that the rest should be at desired temp also? It seems like the sous vide cooks evenly through… Is there a disadvantage to the sous vide? It seems like i could cut my cooking time in half with the sous vide… Thanks again…

As long as whatever meat you have is surrounded and under the water you will be safe. The summer sausage log I put the probe in was placed dead center of the bunch. I have a mesh stainless plate that goes on the bottom so water flows under everything and I put stainless mesh plates on top to keep the meat from floating up. As far as cooking time remember that your internal temps of the meat can not go higher then what you set the sous vide controller at. So even if the outside sausage log hits the desired temp before the inner log when finished they will both be at the desired temp.

Sous vide cooking has many uses. I finished a homemade pastrami in my sous vide after curing it for 10 days and then smoking it for 4 hrs. I had it in my sous vide for 30 hrs. at 150.

You can make great steaks or roasts. I recently did a eye round in my sous vide. Meat was held at 130 for 24 hrs. and then seared in my Big Green Egg. The eye round was fork tender.