Cured Sausage 108 - Basics For Making Smoked Sausage
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Cured Sausage 108 - Basics For Making Smoked Sausage
Attend this entry-level class from Meatgistics University by watching the video, reading the article and post any questions you have!
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 StufferProcess
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 160FCooling
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
Shop waltonsinc.com for Bratwurst Seasoning
Shop waltonsinc.com for Meat Grinders
Shop waltonsinc.com for High-Temp Cheese
Shop waltonsinc.com for Boning Knives
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Does everyone prefer 100% pork for the Roasted Garlic Seasoning or a pork / beef mix? I know with the German I prefer a pork / beef mix.
On the written part of this post it says 10 lbs pork butt, but the other amounts are for 25 lbs. so I was wondering if the beef portion maybe was left off? I believe the video says all pork though.
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Does everyone prefer 100% pork for the Roasted Garlic Seasoning or a pork / beef mix? I know with the German I prefer a pork / beef mix.
On the written part of this post it says 10 lbs pork butt, but the other amounts are for 25 lbs. so I was wondering if the beef portion maybe was left off? I believe the video says all pork though.
dawsjd Pretty sure he only made a 10 lb batch of sausage. I’ve made this sausage before and I used Pork shoulder to make it, I believe it was around 8-10 lbs so that’s about how much sausage I made. In my opinion this works great with Pork, but I’m going to make some of this after Deer season using Venison and straight Pork fat. I’ll post how it turns out once I make it.
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dawsjd Pretty sure he only made a 10 lb batch of sausage. I’ve made this sausage before and I used Pork shoulder to make it, I believe it was around 8-10 lbs so that’s about how much sausage I made. In my opinion this works great with Pork, but I’m going to make some of this after Deer season using Venison and straight Pork fat. I’ll post how it turns out once I make it.
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dawsjd Yeah…we started going through all the videos and adding footnotes for the conversions. Maybe we need to pick that back up so next to the “1 Bag of Roasted Garlic Smoked Sausage” would be a small #1 and if you click on it it brings you to the bottom where it shows how much. The other option would be to have a per lb breakdown right there.
Does anyone want to chime in on how they would like to see this set up?
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dawsjd Yeah…we started going through all the videos and adding footnotes for the conversions. Maybe we need to pick that back up so next to the “1 Bag of Roasted Garlic Smoked Sausage” would be a small #1 and if you click on it it brings you to the bottom where it shows how much. The other option would be to have a per lb breakdown right there.
Does anyone want to chime in on how they would like to see this set up?
Jonathon Thanks Jonathon, I have no problem doing the math conversions for batch sizes. My main question was is the Roasted Garlic Seasoning best with all pork or best with a pork / beef blend? When I make the Waltons German I like 7lbs pork butt and 3lbs beef in a 10lb batch. Just looking for opinions.
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dawsjd In my opinion that’s a personal preference thing. I tend to like 100% pork better for most cured sausage but a blend is also perfectly acceptable. I wouldn’t treat the Roasted Garlic any different than any other sausage, so if you normally go with a blend then blend it, if you normally go 100% one way or the other then I’d do that. Either way, you can’t go too far wrong!
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Has anyone had experience using Morton’s Tender Quick on summer sausage? I have always used LEM packaged seasoning and cure and have never had an issue. I thought I’d try the TQ along with garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper and mustard seed. First try I used venison with 10% pork fat added. After slow smoking to 158 deg. I did a cold water bath (tap water temp) then placed the sausages on a rack to rest for 2 hours, then into the fridge. The fibrous casings would not turn loose of the meat. Just curious if anyone else has had this issue?
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Buffalo77 The cold water bath is the real culprit there. We just did this Wednesday with some venison summer sausage (did batches of 20, 25 and 30% pork fat) and the ones that we did that were smaller in diameter were pulled first and then put in cold water with just a little ice. They wouldn’t peel away and all the others peeled fine. This is something we have shown quite a few times, so I wouldn’t blame the tender quick just yet. We have Excaliburs MRT and I really need to do something with it, we have carried it for 2 years or so and I still haven’t had time to try making anything with it.
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Cured Sausage 108 - Basics For Making Smoked Sausage
Attend this entry-level class from Meatgistics University by watching the video, reading the article and post any questions you have!
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 StufferProcess
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 160FCooling
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
Shop waltonsinc.com for Bratwurst Seasoning
Shop waltonsinc.com for Meat Grinders
Shop waltonsinc.com for High-Temp Cheese
Shop waltonsinc.com for Boning Knives
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Sylvia50 what recipe are you asking about?
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Sylvia50 just enough that when mixing the meat has a pretty shine, but add in small increments you don’t want too much.
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Joemy96 cure #1 and Sodium erythorbate
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Joemy96 cure #1 and Sodium erythorbate
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