I use one of those smoke tubes with pellets for cold smoking cheese. I use apple pellets which gives the cheese a nice mild snore taste.

I’d have to lean towards Jonathon’s thought that there was something caused by the pellets.

Hi all - new to the group. I live in Broken Arrow, OK. My wife and I started doing KCBS competition BBQ back in 2008 after a buddy helped me build a large gravity-fed insulated smoker. I’m a little on the tech side, so I added a controller system that would monitor the pit and meat temps and would control the fan that was blowing into a ball valve to control the temp in the smoker. I then connected the controller to a wireless router that I could pick up with my laptop and run a piece of software that would graph out the temperatures and show when the fan was running. During competitions, this made it very easy for me to put our large cuts of meat in the smoker around midnight and then get a good night sleep in our trailer. I’d wake up occasionally and look at the laptop to make sure my pit was still running within 2 degrees of my target temp. We competed for about 5 years and then had to stop due to job related issues. A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to get into making sausage. I watched all sorts of videos. We had a KitchenAid mixer but the reviews for the grinder attachment didn’t sound good. So the plan was just to get a grinder and then also use it for stuffing. When I went to look at the grinder, they had it on clearance so I was able to get the #12 grinder and a 5lb stuffer for a great deal. I’ve mainly made some basic brats or our favorite has been chicken, spinach and feta.

I found Walton’s when I was searching for some supplies for some venison summer sausage I wanted to try to make for the first time. So my first order from Walton’s was seasoning, meat binder, casings (both summer sausage and 21mm snack stick) and high heat cheeses to make a 25lb batch of venison summer sausage. More info about that in another section.

Looking forward to learning more from everyone here.

Steve

Decided to try my first attempt at making some venison summer sausage after a relative gave me 18lbs of frozen venison (most of it had already been ground once). So I added 7lbs of pork butt with Walton’s Summer Sausage H seasoning. I used meat binder and sure gel, but not eca. My plan was to do about half the meat in 2.4" x 12" fib casings and the other half in 21mm snack stick. I also knew my hands could not mix the meat well enough, so I also ordered a 44# meat mixer (that is a life saver). So this past weekend, I used my #12 grinder and ground all the meat twice (different plates) and then used the meat mixer to combine the season, sure gel, meat binder and water. At the end, I added both high heat cheddar and hot pepper cheeses.

I only have a 5lb stuffer, so we had to reload it several times. The summer sausage casings were a piece of cake. But my smallest stuffing tube was still a bit too large for the 21mm casings – I could load the casings on, but I had to stretch it out and not leave it bunched up. This meant I could only put a couple of feet of casing on at a time – really time consuming. So we ended up stuffing 21 of the summer sausage casings and then about 16’ of meat stick.

The end result was awesome in my opinion – and for my first time, I was quite impressed. I will be making more of this in the future. Summer Sausage is a great snack we take with us when we got out on the boat in the summer and hang out at the sandbars with friends.

Jonathon yes, I still have that smoker, just don’t use it as often unless I’m doing a cook of a lot of meat. I also have those Masterbuilt smokers (the 40 size), that I used most of the time. The next time I get the big smoker fired up, I’ll get some pics and post them here.