Cured Sausage: 205 Advanced Thermal Processing

[Jonathon]

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.

[mrobisr]

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.

[RJ Adventures]

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!

[Screamin]

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?

[Midwest_kc]

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.

1. 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

2. 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.

[Jamieson22]

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.

[Screamin]

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.

[mrobisr]

The drying phase also helps to keep the adhered smoke from being bitter.

[Jonathon]

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.

[Screamin]

OK, that’s good enough for me. Thanks for your insight and, once again, saving ma a lot of problems.