Summer sausage

[jbkitzy1]

Ok so i have never had luck making summer sausage but ive watched yout videos and bought all the things i needed to make another attempt i bought the habenero bbq seasonings the carrot binder and citric acid and 12" mahogany casings i do not have a smoker so the oven was my only option i beleive i used all the correct ingredients and followed all the steps i used abot 70/30 venison to pork butt and i stuffed them tight. I cooked at the lowest the oven would do at 170 with door open for 2 hours then closed it for 2 hours then raised to 180 and pulled out at 156 internal casings were shriveled already at halfway through this process i put in ice bath and the product texture was kinda dry and crumbly the flavor is excellent but the texture is way off and the casings are separated from the meat and i definitely made a huge mess out of the wifes oven with all the juices that leaked from the casings never used casings before that were perforated so im not sure what the problem is or what im doing wrong just a little bummed thought i would get these right for once this time but yet another failure. Any tips please

[jbkitzy1]

I have another round of the h seasoning already stuffed ready the oven so i wanna see if there’s any changes i should do to the cooking process or if my problem is in steps prior to this point i used a mixer and waited till last to add cheese and encapsulated citric acid. I did not have time to cook last night so this round had to sit in fridge until this afternoon to cook is it fine that it sat with the citric acid this long or does it have to be cooked immediately after processing

[sweet betsy]

Mr jbkitzy To address some of your problems with your Summer Sausage, First I suggest you did not mix your sausage near long enough. You have to extract enough
protein (meat glue) to hold all this together. You need to add a little water to help make it easier to mix. It has to stick against a wall if you throw it. I definitely would
not use carrot fiber in summer sausage. Summer is a
semi-dry sausage, carrot fiber will bind all the moisture
together and not let it dehydrate of the sausage.
Second, I know you don’t have a smokehouse, but cooking
it in a oven is not good. It is too hot, too quik. YOu need to
take your sausage after it is stuffed to a commercial processor with a smokehouse, maybe he will cook it for you. Also, letting your sausage set overnite is okay, but
cook it as soon as you can after that.

[Jonathon]

jbkitzy1 First, I would recommend using Sure Gel, it is a better binder for cured meat than Carrot Fiber which is really better used in fresh sausage. It can be used in cured sausage but sure gel is the better option. Second, 70% venison and 30% pork is going to leave you too lean, you need more fat than that. Go 50/50 with venison and nice fatty untrimmed pork butts, even that will be on the low end of what you want but it will work. You were most likely somewhere in the 10-15% fat range when you want to be in the 20-30% range. The fact that they dried up on you and the meat was crumbly are indicators that it was too lean. Also, remember to mix until you have really good protein extraction, the crumbly texture could have something to do with that, or if you added ECA and mixed too long that could have done it as well. The encapsulated Ctiric acid needs to be added during the last 60 seconds of mixing, this is because we don’t want to rputure the coating on the citric acid or the acid will interact with the meat too soon in the process.

If you do want to try making a lower fat summer sausage you can take some of the principles from this video and apply them, notably using cold phosphate to increase the water holding capacity of the meat. Just know that adding that will cancel out any citric acid you are adding or any other pH dropping ingredients.
https://meatgistics.waltonsinc.com/topic/235/how-to-make-juicer-meat-products?_=1603748529130