Cured Sausage: 205 Advanced Thermal Processing
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Jonathon
Wow. So long ago. Not given it much thought until the recent posts regarding the jerky stuff. Still think about once in awhile. Wisconsin winter’s make you do weird stuff. Humidity is the key! Limited to what us home processers can do. Work in progress.PapaSop I would head down to Chippewa Falls to the Leinenkugels brewery and check for free samples, maybe tip a few at their sampling taps. Hopefully they are open during this C-19 season.
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YooperDog Leinekugel made a beer at one point tha was an amazing summer drink, something orange but light and refreshing…can’t remember the name of it!
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YooperDog Leinekugel made a beer at one point tha was an amazing summer drink, something orange but light and refreshing…can’t remember the name of it!
Jonathon they make a Summer Shandy and an Orange Shandy. Not sure if they are seasonal
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Cured Sausage: 205 Advanced Thermal Processing
Attend this Intermediate level class from Meatgistics University by watching the video, reading the article and post any questions you have!
Getting Started at Low Temperatures
The first thing that we want to make sure we are doing is starting the smoker at low temperatures. To avoid putting too much stress on the proteins we want to stay around 20 degrees from the animals living temperature. A hogs temperature is a little warmer than humans, right around 101° Fahrenheit so we want to start our smoking process around 120°. The other thing we want to do at the start is to dry the outside of the product. For most home smokers this will simply mean opening the top and bottom dampers to allow air to travel through the chamber and dry the surface of the product. This drying stage should usually last around an hour, if you skip this step you will have problems with smoke adhesion and you might end up with a streaky appearance on the surface of your sausage. If you are planning on using a water pan in your smoker I recommend that you NOT add it during this first hour to get the full benefit from the drying phase.
Then, once we are past the drying stage we want to close the dampers down and begin the cooking process by stepping up the temperature gradually. If you try to go directly from 120° to 170° you run the risk of cooking the outside of the sausage too quickly, this is called case hardening and this is how you end up with a product that is overcooked on the outside and under-cooked on the inside. Slowly increasing the temperature will allow the outside of the meat to transfer heat to the interior of the meat easier.
Relative Humidity
A very important factor when you are smoking any piece of meat is the relative humidity. You’ve heard us talk about the water holding capacity of meat a lot in the past, well Relative Humidity is the water holding capacity of the air and being able to increase that can speed up your cooking process and give you a juicier finished product. Most people at home do not have a way to control the relative humidity in their smokers and just put a pan of water in there, which is better than nothing but it is a shot in the dark. A psychrometer is something that a commercial smokehouse would have that will have both a Dry Bulb and a Wet Bulb and by getting those two reading it can give you the relative humidity.
So, placing a pan of water took our relative humidity from about 10% up to 15%, which as I said, is better than nothing but it isn’t going to make a ton of difference. So I started thinking of ways to increase that. There are a bunch of chemicals you can add to water to make it evaporate quicker but they are not ones that you want around food, you could disturb the waters surface with a constantly moving paddle, you circulate air through it or you can increase the surface area of the water.
The surface area of the water seemed the most doable to me so I have been doing some experimenting with ways to do this. In my pk 100 I took 3 large auto cleaning sponges, soaked them and then placed them so they were mostly out of the water, the sponges will continue to suck up water through them and will offer a better surface for evaporation. When I did this I was able to top out at 50% relative humidity with an average of 47%. I’d call that a pretty significant improvement from the 15% I was getting from a water pan alone.
Next, I bought a dry wick towel and laid it out on a rack above the water pan and draped part of it over and into the water to try to keep it moist. My thought was that this type of towel, much like the sponge would stay moist as it could draw water up from the pan. With this set up I topped out at 54.1% and had an average of 50.1%. I also tried a mop head and a regular towel but these were not as effective.
Finishing In Water
The last one I want to bring up is pulling your meat out of the smoker and finishing it up in water. I have been doing some testing here on this method and I think it has a lot of promise. So far I have found that the best results are when you smoke it to 130-140° and then move it to water that is a steady 170°. Usually, the 130-160° range takes 3 or more hours, depending on your relative humidity, from 140° your sausage should be up to temp in one hour. Surprisingly putting it in a vacuum bag does not seem to make a noticeable difference in the quality of the meat or the amount of smoke flavor. I am still going to recommend you vacuum bag it for an extra level of safety but plenty of people are doing it without them. One note, if you DO use a vacuum bag and you want to see what the temperature is, make a small cut in the up near the seal, insert your thermometer and then you don’t need a new vac bag if it needs to be cooked longer.
Special Thanks
Parksider and gadahl deserve a ton of the credit for the above section (Finishing In Water) as it was gadahl’s great post titled “Summer Sausage Nightmare” that brought up the idea to us and Parksider that recommended it. Since then I have used this technique 4 times and it has never failed!
Shop waltonsinc.com for PK 100 Pro Smoker Smokehouse
Jonathon Sorry to get off of the beer topic since it is a great topic as well. I have a full size steam pan that I use for finishing in hot water. I place it across 2 burners on my stove. The problem is that I have to constantly monitor water temp to keep it around 160. Would the Sous Vide heater clamp to a 6" deep steam pan?
2nd question. Is there any consistency difference in the meat when only going to 130-140 and then straight to a hot water bath? I usually leave summer sausage in the smoker over night (just so I can get some sleep) and then put it in the HWB in the morning. It is usually still in the stall stage and probably has been for several hours. (142) I haven’t had any issues though.
If I can pull it out when the INT is 130-140 that would save hours. -
chrisndee2 no worries! I thought this was my favorite drink topic, so our posts don’t belong, yours does! So, as you can see the HBC (one on the left) has a minimum water level at about 4.25" and the Wesotn has its around 3". The Weston also has a moveable clamp and is significantly cheaper. The downside is that it does not heat as much water as the HBC but you could pretty much by 2 for the price of one of the HBC.
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Jonathon Sorry to get off of the beer topic since it is a great topic as well. I have a full size steam pan that I use for finishing in hot water. I place it across 2 burners on my stove. The problem is that I have to constantly monitor water temp to keep it around 160. Would the Sous Vide heater clamp to a 6" deep steam pan?
2nd question. Is there any consistency difference in the meat when only going to 130-140 and then straight to a hot water bath? I usually leave summer sausage in the smoker over night (just so I can get some sleep) and then put it in the HWB in the morning. It is usually still in the stall stage and probably has been for several hours. (142) I haven’t had any issues though.
If I can pull it out when the INT is 130-140 that would save hours.chrisndee2 I know this is and older post, but what about and induction cooktop. The one I have has a temperature setting, so to set it at say 176 for 3 hours would solve the temp problem. Just and idea that I haven’t seen posted.
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Tell ya what, I’ll never go back to cooking sticks all the way through with a smoker… love the finished product finishing in water! Even made some amazing dogs this way too and nice tender bite to the skinless dogs! Love it! Just need a bigger smoker now!
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J JohnG5 referenced this topic on
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The process of finishing with water has worked very well, but requires constant monitoring. I am about to get delivery of one of the sous vide heater devices to solve that, but what if I used the sous vide process for the whole cooking process? The step up of the heat at your suggested increments would be simplified and given that I have some summer sausage ready to go and the wind chill today is -24, the sous vide might help. I have combined some left over spices from previous cooks, so the taste is in the meat. My plan is to use the same increments and the same time at each heat level as suggested. Is there anything bad in this theory/process that is sneaking up on me and I don’t see coming?
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The process of finishing with water has worked very well, but requires constant monitoring. I am about to get delivery of one of the sous vide heater devices to solve that, but what if I used the sous vide process for the whole cooking process? The step up of the heat at your suggested increments would be simplified and given that I have some summer sausage ready to go and the wind chill today is -24, the sous vide might help. I have combined some left over spices from previous cooks, so the taste is in the meat. My plan is to use the same increments and the same time at each heat level as suggested. Is there anything bad in this theory/process that is sneaking up on me and I don’t see coming?
Screamin There are certainly posters here way more qualified than me to answer this, but I’m going to take a stab at this, and they can feel free to tell me I’m wrong and educate me as well, if they wish.
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obviously, there would be no smoke flavor with this method (though I suppose you could mix some liquid smoke in with the meat, but…gross
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I think the drying phase at the beginning is supposed to be pretty important as well. You could maybe start in the oven to achieve the drying and then move to the sous vide? Not sure how that would work.
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Screamin There are certainly posters here way more qualified than me to answer this, but I’m going to take a stab at this, and they can feel free to tell me I’m wrong and educate me as well, if they wish.
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obviously, there would be no smoke flavor with this method (though I suppose you could mix some liquid smoke in with the meat, but…gross
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I think the drying phase at the beginning is supposed to be pretty important as well. You could maybe start in the oven to achieve the drying and then move to the sous vide? Not sure how that would work.
Midwest_kc The drying phase is more to ensure good smoke adhesion. Honestly if I wanted to do 100% sous vide summer sausage I’d just drop it in water equal to my desired IT for a couple hours. Not sure why you’d want/need to do any ramping up.
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Thanks for your quick replies. I mentioned the step up of heat and I got that from Cured Sausage 107 - Basics for Making Sumer Sausage under the heading of “Thermal Processing and Smoking”. Somewhere in the posts I read that the graduated heating from 120 up to the 160 internal was to insure that the entire sausage was cooked evenly and not cook the outside first with high initial heat. I may have mis-read something, what am I missing? By the way, I was having problems with the casing wrinkling and someone else posted the question with Waltons suggesting mixing better and a really cold bath. Did both and problem totally solved.
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The drying phase also helps to keep the adhered smoke from being bitter.
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Screamin Yup, like mrobisr says, it nixes the drying phase and creates some problems with texture as well. This can be solved by putting them in a dehydrator after they are done with the sous vide but it actually ends up taking longer and I still don’t think it does as good a job as going from smoker to sous vide.
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