Mixing time

[kyle]

Miller I find that bear meat has a lot of oil in it. When its cooked or smoked, its hard not to have a lot of oily grease in the pan. I have not made bear sausage, but have cooked a fair share and would think it would be hard to keep the fat together in a casing. Just my 2 cents

[rescuefoot]

Did you use any binder in your sausage mix? I made a batch of bratwurst using venison and pork. The first time I made it, I didn’t use a binder. The fat cooked out of the sausage and left empty pockets where the fat was. Then, I learned about adding a binder to the bratwursts. For Bratwursts, I was encouraged to use carrot fiber as the binder. This made a huge difference in the texture of the meat. There were no more empty pockets where the fat cooked out of the meat.

For summer sausages, they recommended using Sure Gel. That made a big difference in the summer sausage. Since you are making a premium sausage, they encourage you not to use any other brand than Sure Gel.

Hopefully this will help you out as much as it has helped me.

[Miller]

rescuefoot I did, I used sure gel.

[rescuefoot]

Miller How much Sure Gel did you use? If I remember correctly, the ratio is one box of Sure Gel per 5 pounds of meat.

[johnsbrewhouse]

rescuefoot 1.2 ounces per 5 lbs. of meat

[Miller]

I used 3.88oz of sure gel in 16.2lbs meat block
13.5 lbs bear, trimmed
2.7 lbs pork fat
0.95 lbs H summer
0.648 oz sure cure
3.88 oz sure gel
1.3 lb water
And like I said in the first post, smoke schedule was like that in the summer sausage video.

[Cabelas90]

Miller How long did you mix? You can over mix but it’s highly unlikely that a home processor would.
I have seen wild game take up to 21 min in a commercial mixer to get proper extraction.
Also Did you let this sit overnight or did you use a Cure accelerator? I don’t see Citric acid listed but if you did use ECA and let it sit that could be your culprit.

[twilliams]

Miller my personal opinion I would have added pork trim vs pork fat since the bear is already quite fatty. Then I would have ran a different smoke schedule vs the one listed on the video.

[Miller]

Cabelas90 mixed 8 mins in a mixer attached to my grinder. the product did sit in the ref over night and I did not use an accelerator.

[Miller]

twilliams the bear meat was trimmed well, I did the trimming myself. it was a younger bear so there was not a lot of marbling in the meat.

[Cabelas90]

Miller I would put money on lack of protein extraction. Especially with only 8 min of mix time. We were having tons of trouble on summer sausage @ a flat 10 min mix in a commercial mixer. Once I got it through to our crew that Protein extraction is what really matters we generally see 13-15min on average.
I assume with it fatting out the product is mushy and crumbles when you try to cut it?

[Miller]

Cabelas90 the product is still good, and it doesn’t crumble. it’s just drier than the last batch of elk that I did. I gave a log to a buddy and he even told me that it was drier than the last. I’ll try it again, I have another 12 lbs of the trimmed meat I was going to make snack sticks with, so I’ll for sure mix longer. I take all kinds of products to elk camp with me every year and the guys there love the stuff. I’m sure this bear summer sausage will be a hit, but i’ll know the product could be better.

Thanks for all the input.

[cdavis]

Miller good luck at elk camp.

[Cabelas90]

Miller You could try to up your Fat closer to 25% - 30 % assuming that the bear is close to 100% lean.
Good luck at Elk Camp! Everything taste better in camp!

[Jonathon]

Miller havig never used Bear take my advice with a grain of salt but 8 minutes with wild game very well might not be enough. Time mixing is good in general but tons of things go into how long it will take. Things like amount of water added, quality of meat, TEMP of meat (that’s the big one) Temp of the room it is being mixed in and style of mixer (obviously) all of those things could be a culprit. Since you think it fatted out I am going to guess it could have been under mixed as like Cabelas90 says it is highly unlikely that a home processor would overmix, or you may possibly have a problem with your smoker, though I find that less likely than protein extraction.