I have all this sausage around, but no proper rolls.

Fixed that!

Howdy, y’all!

I’m in Bellaire, Texas, a small municipality pretty surrounded by Houston. We like to say that Houston is our suburb.

Both my parents are avid and excellent cooks, so I’ve been cooking for as long as I could pull up a chair to the stove or grill. I’ve been into cooking and food science for a very long time, and I’m always looking to learn something new. More specific to here, I’ve been into low-and-slow smoking for about 20 years. Other than what happens with barbecue-style smoking, I’ve done only a bit of curing here and there (mostly corned beef or pastrami or something like that), and I only started making sausage about a month ago.

My current cookers are a Weber kettle, a Klose 20x36 offset, and a Camp Chef Lux pellet cooker. I’m strongly considering a PK 100 and probably will pull the trigger on that sooner than later.

My favorite meat snack probably is dried sausage of just about any sort, followed up very closely by jerky and cracklins.

I’m very happy to have come across Walton’s when looking for sausage-making gear, as well as Meatgistics for what I’ve already learned. I’m looking forward to more.

Cheers, y’all!

I here you, man. I always bake bread, but it’s much more on an occasional basis than it is right now. In the last month, I’ve done rye bread, ciabatta, semolina bread, biscotti, farinata, pita, and I don’t know what all else.

Yesterday’s lunch. I grilled up some of the latest batch of what’s becoming our “house” sausage.

IndianaJohn I just made a batch of Summer sausage without ECA, and I quite like it.

I almost added the ECA, but I balked on it at the last minute because I didn’t want to go straight to the smoker (I got a later start than I had intended and wasn’t up for a late night). I don’t know if I’m going to add any for another batch. If I do, I probably will add less than the 1 tsp/lb. I don’t want much more tang than what curing provides, and I’m not worried about shelf stability. All the sausage will live in the fridge or freezer.

On that, I recommend holding the Summer sausage in the fridge for a few days after smoking and before freezing, if you can get away with it. I’ve found that the flavor develops a great deal. I smoked this batch on Friday, and it was pretty good that evening. I took some to a family gathering on Saturday, and it was better than the night before. We had some more last night (had not been frozen), and holy cow! It was great!

Regarding binders, I really like the texture that Sure Gel provides.

I got off about how burning wood produces all that NO2, but then I got to thinking about how Parksider mentioned that he got a smoke ring when he used propane. It turns out that propane combustion produces around 3 times the nitrogen oxides as wood combustion. Now, I didn’t poke around enough to see how much of that may be NO2, but you pretty much have to figure that it’s got to be -some- of that.

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/nox-emission-combustion-fuels-d_1086.html

Go figure. You learn something new every day!

JayFatCity I recently got the 11# stuffer. So far, I’ve only run 5-6# batches through it, and it works wonderfully. The piston just pushes it all down and through, no matter how much is in there.

I got that larger size because I expect to do 10# batches after I get my recipes nailed down, and I do not regret it at all.

A fan sounds like a very good idea, but I would think you would want it slow enough to just stir the air a bit to even out the temperature, rather than give a significant convection effect.

Way to go, Joe Hell! I whipped myself into shape a while back after realizing I could still live well without digging myself an early grave. It does take work, and I still make my doctor roll his eyes a bit when I tell him about my diet and drinking, but things sure are a lot better.

Cheers!

capt jack A little bit of food grade lubricant definitely does help (mineral oil, silicone spray, etc.). Cold meat helps, as does changing the direction you are mixing. I’ve also found that the fuller you get the mixer, the more anything that sticks to the sides gets pulled back in. If nothing else, there’s scraping.

Unfortunately, the only real input I have is that a friend of mine and his father-in-law made some fantastic sausage from wild pigs shot on their family ranch. I forgot to ask details, but I might have to fix that (and get back to you).

I know that (like zerr ) that the carcasses are skinned right after they are shot, and that they usually hang the carcasses for a few days before processing. I’m sure they added some fat. They did both cured and fresh, and both were terrific (I preferred the cured, but I tend to do that).

capt jack A little bit of food grade lubricant definitely does help (mineral oil, silicone spray, etc.). Cold meat helps, as does changing the direction you are mixing. I’ve also found that the fuller you get the mixer, the more anything that sticks to the sides gets pulled back in. If nothing else, there’s scraping.

I miss the dial-up handshake a bit, if I’m honest. I started on-line with a 300 baud modem in the '80s, so I heard it for a long time.

Yes, 300 bps. We read faster than that (well, most of us do–can’t speak for Team Blue). Upgrading to 1200 baud was like going from a bicycle to a car, and getting to a “cable modem” at my workplace was like suddenly discovering I could fly like Superman. I’m sure I’m not the only one with such an experience.

I have a Weston Pro 2300 (non-chambered) that has served me well for close to 15 at this point, and is still going strong with a good deal of use. I recommend it to anyone looking for something like it. That said, there are many moments when I wish I had a chambered sealer. That Primavac 254 is on my wish list. My biggest issue with it is where to put it.

I left the Foodsaver brand a long time ago, and I probably wouldn’t take one today if you offered it for nothing. I had a “Pro” version that lasted about 3 years, not nearly long enough for what was a $300 machine at the time. The replacement barely made it a few months, and the warranty replacement for it was garbage right out of the box. That was enough for me. Some of my barbecue buddies and my homebrew shop used the Weston, so I went with that. It’s a workhorse.

Everything looks good from here on Chrome. Thanks for staying on top of this, Jonathon!

Don’t worry about puncturing the casing if you want to be absolutely sure. Once you get to the point where they may be done, the casing does little for you.

Or, you can do something like what I did. I used a “sacrificial” sausage that had a probe inserted in it, and I assumed the others would be close enough. The sacrificial one got eaten that day and never got packaged.

Jonathon Yeah, I’m still getting it, too. A refresh solves just about all the problems. The one thing I still can’t do (refresh or not) is reply in any way except via the quick reply box.

None of this is the end of the world, of course. Somehow, I bet we all survive until this is figured out.

Thank you for doing that, Jonathon.

Another thing is that I seem to be able to submit a reply only through the quick reply box.

Jonathon The entry button for the giveaway works fine for me, and I don’t see any other problems with Waltons.com.

On Meatgistics, there still are HTML problems, but refreshing the page fixes just about everything.