What Is Cured Sausage?

Smoked sausage is sausage that has been ground, seasoned and cured and then smoked at lower temperatures instead of grilled or fired. It varies from fresh sausage in taste and consistency and is often stuffed into different casings than fresh sausage. Smoked, or cured sausage covers a wide variety of types of sausage including hot dogs, polish, ring bologna and Kielbasa.

Meat Block

10 lb of Untrimmed Pork Butts
1 Bag of Roasted Garlic Smoked Sausage
1 Bag Smoked Meat Stabilizer
1 oz of Sure Cure (Included with purchase)

Equipment

Walton’s #8 Meat Grinder
Walton’s 20 lb Meat Mixer
Walton’s 11 lb Sausage Stuffer

Process

The first thing you need to do is to grind your meat. Before you begin make sure your plates and knives are well oiled to prevent friction. You will want to grind the meat twice, the first grind should be with a 3/8 plate and then with a 1/8 plate. Remember to keep your meat cold through this process.

Meat Mixing

Next, you need to mix the seasoning and cure into your meat. To do this you can either use a meat mixer or do it by hand. Because this is a product that we are going to cure and smoke we need to achieve a high level of protein extraction so doing this with your hands is difficult but can be done. When using a mixer add the meat to the mixer, then the seasoning and cure and finally the water, you will want to mix in both directions until all seasoning and cure has been mixed in and you have good protein extraction. You will know that protein extraction has been achieved when the meat is sticky and tacky if you can pull a handful of it apart and it stretches that is a good sign.

Sausage Stuffing

Choose the largest stuffing tube your casing will fit on, collagen casings require no preparation so just put it on the stuffing tube and begin stuffing. Stuff until the casing is mostly full but remember we will want to twist these into links so leave it slightly understuffed.

Note

When you are done stuffing the product has to be held in the refrigerator overnight to allow the cure time to work. If you added Encapsulated Citric Acid or other cure accelerators you skip this step.

Thermal Processing & Smoking

Set up your smoker and hang your sausage on smoke sticks or lay on racks and smoke at
125F for 1 hour
140F for 1 hour
155F for 2 hours
175F until internal meat temp of 160F

Cooling

Let them sit out for an hour before vacuum packing them to make sure we don’t get any unwanted moisture in our bags.

Wrap up

Now, whenever we want to eat them we simply defrost them and either eat them at room temperature or heat them up as they are already fully cooked!

Additional Tips

• After your twist your sausage you can freeze your sausage for half an hour and then when you cut where you twisted them into links it will stay closed a little more.

Watch WaltonsTV: Basics For Making Smoked Sausage

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