Brat Bologna?

[mark60]

I recently made some Buffalo chicken wing brats and added hi temp blue cheese, it was great. I’m thinking of using the brat mix with beef and making it like a bologna to slice for lunches and also doing the same with chicken thighs following Jonathon’s instructions for juicy chicken brats but stuffing in a bologna casing.
I was wondering if anyone has tried this or has any thoughts on it.
I’m also planning on cooking them in a sous vide bath figuring 4-5 hours to cook. I did a 5# beef bologna chub last weekend and did 2 hours in the smoker followed by sous vide and it cooked for about 5 hours.
If I go right to the sous vide after stuffing do we think I’d need cure or would I get out of the danger zone in time?

[chippewa]

mark60
This sounds great!! Got me thinking of making a trail bologna out of it. Wife is gonna kill me when I place another order.

[Jonathon]

mark60 Interesting idea you have there with going straight to the water, it’s got me wondering if you will run into the same issue I had while doing snack sticks this way. I determined that without the initial drying phase the texture was terrible and while that could be helped by putting them into a dehydrator afterwards it wasn’t worth it as it took like 5 or so hours in the dehydrator.

However, with a bologna you might not care, in fact it might even be more desirable to keep it at that texture. If you do it I would recommend removing the casing from the entire log of bologna after and vacuum sealing it. As for adding cure you wouldn’t really need to as you will reach a lethality relatively quickly.

Check out pages 33 and 34 https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/bf3f01a1-a0b7-4902-a2df-a87c73d1b633/Salmonella-Compliance-Guideline-SVSP-RTE-Appendix-A.pdf?MOD=AJPERES for some information on cooking chicken. Using page 34 you will have to know your fat content but with chicken that really isn’t very hard to accurately figure.

[mark60]

Thanks for the replies, this will be interesting. We made 5# of bologna 2 weekends ago with Waltons seasoning and gave too much away but everyone that got some loved it. I did an hour and a half in the smoker than vacuum sealed the chub and finished it in the sous vide, it came out great. We’re making more bologna this weekend and also doing the chicken brat bologna thing. I’ll get sliced pics and let you know how it comes out, probably Monday night before it gets sliced and sampled.

[mark60]

Alrighty, it’s done. First, the reason why. In an effort to stay fir and healthy my wife and I eat a lot of chicken, chicken breast to be exact. I do love making and of course, eating sausage though I’ starting to experiment with chicken sausage. We did beef bologna a couple weeks ago for the first time and make the chicken wing brats the same weekend, again the first time for that seasoning mix. I decided to make a bologna thing with chicken thighs and the brat seasoning. I went to pick up thighs and had a choice of bone in with shin or boneless skinless and trimmed. Not wanting to play with deboning and trying to keep things healthy I bought the boneless skinless. Ran them through a 10mm plate then an 1/8th inch plate then mixed the seasonings in, ran everything through a champion juicer before folding in the hi temp cheese. I stuffed it all into a bologna casing and put it into the sous vide set at 175. Cooked it to 165 internal, dropped it into an ice bath till it dropped to 110 then hung it for a couple hours. Overnight in the fridge and sliced the next day. I’m calling it a success, it tastes pretty good. The texture is softer than normal bologna but I imagine that’s because it’s chicken, definitely pretty tasty though. Next up will be beef with the reuben seasoning, I’m betting that will be pretty tasty too.

[Jonathon]

mark60 Good job, those look pretty good for chicken, did you use a binder? My suggestion would be to either use Carrot Fiber which is nice and inexpensive and holds 26 times its weight in water or Sure Gel which is more expensive but it adds some proteins to make the extraction easier and does a better job actually binding everything together, it would probably help fill the tiny voids you had.

The champion juicer is something that has been brought up on meatgistics before, I am curious, did you find about using that here, somewhere else or did you come up with it on your own?

Rueben is awesome, you will love that! Even better with some sauerkraut

[mark60]

I used 4 1/2# of thighs with enough seasoning for 5# and added 2 oz of carrot fiber. I was going to add closer to 3 oz but when I was weighing it out and saw how much 2 oz of it was I figured I’d stop there.

I think I first saw the juicer on a youtube vid. It oes a pretty good job and cleans up easily. More easily than an 1/8th inch grinder plate lol.
I used a 6qt Kitchenaid to mix everything because in Jonathon’s chicken brat instructions he said we wanted extraction and I figured I might not get enough by hand. It came out of the KA as sticky as molasses, it did a fine job.

[Jonathon]

mark60 Awesome, thanks for letting us know. If you do it again could you try to get a pic of it coming out of the Champion Juicer? Im just curious about it, thanks!