bpschuebel Thanks. I have a batch of goose sticks in the smoker right now. I’ll make sure I don’t run out of water. I made sure I had plenty of fat in this batch and cut back on the mixing time to 6 minutes total. I just fried up the waste mix and it was very good, not rubbery at all. So, that is a good sign. The problem batches were noticeably firm when I fried up the waste from them. Still not sure which variable or variables caused the problem batches but I’m going to be more diligent about controlling all of them in the future.

The cold water hack is real. The first time I tried it was after mixing a batch of sausage made with ghost pepper, I was complaining to a friend about the pain involved (lungs, eyes, nose, etc) during clean up and she suggested rinsing everything in cold water during clean up so the pepper fumes didn’t get released in to the air to breath. I tried it on the next batch and it worked perfectly, both with the pepper fumes, and as a pleasant surprise, with general clean up of all the equipment. The left over sausage and fat just slides right off the equipment with cold water. I’ve been doing that ever since, whether or not I use hot peppers.