Hey Smokey I live over in Garden City and was reading your post you sent back referring to the Smoky cheese can’t wait to get started going on it I’ll have to look you up sometime
Great to see other Idaho folks getting on the meat and food wagon on this sight
Bruce. Bshaffley@yahoo.com

Mike would you be so kind on letting me know what is a good temp to smoke your selection of cheeses and type of wood used. I have been a lover of smoked cheese forever and would like to try and make my own
Bruce

Austin
I have question on the pork fat. What is the best amount of time fresh pork fat can be stored when purchased fresh from my local slaughter house. Recently I bought some early in November right after elk season but didn’t get around to using the last of it , around 4 lbs and tasted it just last week before Christmas for some sticks I had in the works and it tasted a little weird so I didn’t use it and ended up tossing it out to be on the safe side due to a bad experience from fat I added to elk and ruined some awesome looking sticks, till I tasted the half finished product. The fat was not vacuumed packed just stored in a box wrapped in blue plastic wrapping
So any advice on storage time and how it will be stored will be awesome
Thanks Bruce

John Belvedere
That’s so awesome you folks are celebrating your 46 th year as my bride and I are celebrating our 45th this year and I wish you the best and congratulations for staying the course

Would you mind listing how you did your bacon on the forum here so that I could copy that it looked awfully good to me and I’d like to try it for the first time I have never done bacon

johnsbrewhouse said in ECA with jalapeño sticks?:

Bruce 0 Sounds like the fat was your problem. The elk is usually so lean and also a bit gamey you won’t notice much on freezer burn. You can tell that on the meat as well, it will look pale like th blood is gone away and starting to dry. Racid meat and fats are hard to recover from and cover up. I bought a chamber sealer to cure some of my freezer burn and rancid problem when freezing.

Thanks so much for your great input and I could not agree more I do have a great vacuum packer that in the future I will have to put two more use in order to have a better quality product

johnsbrewhouse
Bruce here again, The meat smelled OK when I took it out of the freezer in fact it was elk meat double wrapped in plastic and when I started to do it with the fat that was in the freezer that was not double wrapped that was just single wrapped in a bag plastic it smelled like rancid fat and tasted like it as well

I did hold it overnight in the fridge but the fat I used smelled rancid after starting to smoke

I recently made jalapeño
Snack sticks and they had a smell .eIt was bad ,The meat was,in my freezer for a year .Is it possible that the fat was bad and the meat. I’m frustrated and don’t know what to think, please help if you can
Bruce in Idaho
Bruce

I recently made jalapeño
Snack sticks and they had a smell .eIt was bad ,The meat was,in my freezer for a year .Is it possible that the fat was bad and the meat. I’m frustrated and don’t know what to think, please help if you can
Bruce in Idaho
Bruce

Jonathon

twilliams

I’m really new to this snack stick deal so I was glad that at least they were good tasting but being used to the way I thought that they should be according to the way commercial people get it done. Ice water bath but I didn’t refrig over night and I probably should have Thank for ANY advice given. Bruce

I used all ingredients from Walton’s and with no additional species. I used collagen cases from Walton’s and a 15 lb. sausage stuffer from Weston. The links looked good till I tried snacking on them and the cases were easier to remove than to snap them off in a bite
I hope this additional info will help. Followed temp directions to the letter as well

Recently I made some venison snack stick with collagen cases and I used the recommendation of uncle willies recipe and the favor was awesome. I had one concern though, the casing on the stick after vacuum packing to freeze them seemed to be loose on the meat . Could anyone explain what I did wrong or what step I messed up on? They were venison and mighty tasty for sure. Thanks.