Brianzipperdog123 asked about these in the Roll Call thread. I posted the recipe there, but that’s a great place for it to get buried. Plus, I’ve done a couple of batches since and made a couple of changes. I dropped the egg wash and am much happier with the crust on the top of the roll. I also made them larger (8 to a batch instead of 10) to better accommodate fillings and baked a little longer to make up for that. A batch of 10 was closer to a large dinner roll. In fact, I bet dividing the batch into 12 rolls would be about a perfect dinner roll size (and baking more like 12-13 minutes, total).

HARD ROLLS FOR WURST
YIELD: 10 buns or rolls

INGREDIENTS

 500 g flour (unbleached all purpose 4 cups) (or sub 100g whole wheat)
 313 g water (11 ounces)
 10g salt (1 2/3 teaspoons table salt)
 3g instant yeast (1 teaspoon)
 5g sugar (1 teaspoon)
 10g butter (2 teaspoons)
 (optional, but not recommended) 1 egg (beaten with 1 teaspoon water for wash

DIRECTIONS

 Mix all dry ingredients except salt well and add water until all of the flour is wetted and there are no
lumps.
 Let the dough sit covered for 20 minutes, then knead with bread hook for 3 minutes.
 Rest for 15 minutes, sprinkle the salt over the dough, and knead for additional 3 minutes until the
dough is uniform and somewhat smooth. Cover and let rest 10 minutes.
 Stretch and fold the dough letter-style (top to bottom and side to side) and let sit for 30 more min,
covered.
 Stretch and fold and place dough in fridge overnight, covered.
 Next morning, If the dough didn’t double in volume, let it sit out until it does.
 Divide into 8 pieces weighing 85 to 88 g each and shape as desired.
 Preheat oven to 450 F with a pan for steaming at the bottom of the oven.
 Cover dough with oiled plastic and let proof until it’s 1.5 to twice it’s volume (about 90 minutes)
 Just before baking, slash each roll lengthwise across the center. If desired (but not recommended), brush with the egg wash (BEFORE slashing).
 Add 1 cup of hot water to the steam pan and bake for 8 minutes. Turn the
pan and bake for 8 more minutes or until 205-210F internally. Remove baked rolls to a cooling rack for at least an hour to properly cool (although dinner rolls can be served warm from the oven).

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!

“Low and slow” does not mean “as low and as slow as possible.” The idea of “low and slow” is to “cook” the collagen (the primary protein in connective tissue and what makes meat tough) to get gelatin. That both tenderizes the meat and retains moisture. Gelatin is what makes something “lip smackin’”! That reaction requires moisture, and one of the best cooking methods to make it happen is braising.

The idea behind wrapping is to achieve something of a braise. It also slows down evaporation. That keeps the meat from drying out on the pit, and it gets you through the plateau. In “Modernist Cuisine,” the authors finally showed us that the plateau is pretty much due to evaporative cooling. In other words, you aren’t so doing much cooking during the plateau. Instead, you are spending a bunch of time and fuel to dry out your final product. Or, you can wrap the brisket and get through that point (and get a better product).

Just like ribs, brisket’s high ratio of surface area to volume makes it particularly vulnerable to evaporative cooling. That’s why we wrap 'em both.

As for pink butcher paper v. foil? I’ve used them both and do agree that butcher paper sets the bark better than foil. It seems to allow enough evaporation to set the bark but not so much to stall the cooking. However, I get the same result just by opening up the foil when my brisket gets close to finishing (not on the bottom, mind you, but that’s the point, and I’m not as concerned about the bark on it). Since I’m only cooking 1 or 2 briskets at a time (instead of the 100 or so that Franklin’s cooks in a day), I don’t mind the extra trouble. Of course, it’s not like wrapping with butcher paper is much trouble.

So, I’m quite happy using either. Whatever is in front of me will do. If Aaron Franklin says that pink butcher paper is better, then I believe him. The man cooks more briskets in a few days than I’m likely to cook in my lifetime, so I’m going to listen to him. However, in my situation, it doesn’t really make much difference.

I did back when I started this sort of cooking, but I left the stress behind a long time ago. Some of that is due to experience with what might happen during a cook, but most of it is having made peace with the fact that things will happen. Just take it as it comes and move along. If you have any idea what you are doing, you’re going to make something far beyond what just about anyone normally gets.

Time is the greatest luxury, so give yourself plenty of it. Anything smoked holds well. Anything smoked also reheats well, so make it in advance and reheat, if you can get away with that. On that, you can reheat on site and make it look like you are “cooking.”

As for large events, choose your audience wisely (i.e., know you’re dealing with someone who won’t ride your butt about everything). Be confident in your knowledge and ability. Be humble, and accept comments graciously (no matter how they may be intended). In all likelihood, the negative comments sound louder than the positive, but that’s just because folks with negative comments tend to make much greater efforts to get them across. A lot of folks that like what you did may never say so to your face. If you know you delivered what you promised, then, you delivered what you promised.

Know that you never, ever can please everyone with everything you do, so never be disappointed when you don’t. Learn any lessons that are there to be learned, and then drive on.

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.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be a member of a number of online communities, and this one rapidly has become an important one. It really does make a difference when a business is interested in getting to know its customers. Y’all want interaction beyond just orders, and you like to see your customers interact with each other. Not only do you want to teach your customers, you also want to learn from them, and you want them to learn from each other. It’s a wonderful thing, and it takes a genuine effort.

I echo Chef’s words that y’all are doing something right. This community is another example of how Walton’s wants to provide for its customers, how y’all want us to have the best experience we can, and how y’all know that works to everyone’s benefit on every level. Bravo!

All I wanted to do was make sausage!

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

This isn’t sausage made from corned beef. Rather, it was the result of the scramble when it hit me that St. Patrick’s Day was right around the corner and that I had forgotten to start curing a corned beef. I couldn’t get a corned beef done in just a few days, but (maybe, just maybe) I could simulate one a bit by working up a cured sausage with corned beef spices. It worked out very well, and a little tweaking got me right where I wanted it.

The single, coarse grind is a bit unusual, but I also find it key. Again, I wanted something to make me think of corned beef, and that goes beyond mere flavor. But, hey, you do it as you like.

This makes great bulk sausage, but I prefer it stuffed in large hog casings. That said, it also works very well as a stuffing, mixed with potatoes for a hash, or even just as a patty sausage. The next thing I want to play with is making a Reuben burger with this patty sausage.

“Corned Beef” Sausage

Ingredients:
 5 lbs (2.25 kg) Beef chuck roast (weigh after grinding)
 1 tbsp salt
 1 tsp Sure Cure (Instacure #1; Prague Powder #1)
 4 tsp ground black pepper
 2 tsp onion powder
 2 tsp garlic powder
 1.5 tsp mustard seed (whole)
 ½ tsp cayenne pepper
 ½ tsp paprika
 ¾ tsp dried thyme
 ½ tsp ground allspice
 ½ tsp ground ginger
 34g Sure Gel
 ¼ tsp ground clove
 ½ tsp ground celery seed
 1 tbsp sugar
 ¼ tsp ascorbic acid (or appropriate amount of other cure accelerator) (optional)
 ½ tsp ground coriander
 ½ tsp ground dill seed
 ½ cup ice water
 4 tsp light corn syrup

Steps:

1. Grind the meat as you like (I like only 1 grand with an 8 mm (5/16”) plate because I want some chew to this).
2. Mix in all remaining ingredients.
3. If stuffing, stuff into casings of your choice (I like large (38-42mm) hog casings, again for the chew). In any case, refrigerate for 8-48 hours to cure (or you can go right to cooking if you use an accelerator).
4. Stuffed sausages can be poached, cooked by sous vide, grilled, smoked, or cooked by any combination. My current favorite if stuffed into casings is to give the sausages a very light smoking and then finish by sous vide to 155F. A heavier smoking is just fine, but that’s more “pastrami” sausage (mighty, mighty good but not corned beef).

Tex_77 Good gracious. The prelude to that review was something like “this car was the most amazing thing we’d ever driven . . . until the wheels came clean off.”

Shoot. Add a little S&P and garlic powder to that, and that could be a TexLaw treat!

I also have no problem closing the PK 100 door on a probe wire. The seal is very good.

If you were terribly concerned about it, you could run the probe wire through the smoke stack. It is short enough for a long probe wire. However, I just don’t see an issue.

For tongue, I like to smoke it on the pit for a couple hours or so and then finish it up by braising (or in the crock pot) with whatever sounds good until it’s tender. I usually add a little onion, cumin, and Mexican oregano, but I do keep it simple. I might even add nothing. It’s easy enough to add seasonings to smaller portions and cook a little longer to get rid of any raw spice flavor.

For liver, yeah, just sprinkle a little salt on it and fry it up and don’t overcook it (leave it at least a little pink). Grind some pepper over it when it’s done. You also can chicken fry it.

Personally, I haven’t done anything with kidneys, but I love a kidney pie. I also had some deviled kidneys and loved them.

Having a decent amount of Welsh blood in my veins, this could be a great way to get a spot in one of my many homelands.

Talk about a great party house!

I don’t think it matters all that much, either. Some say that seasoning before a grind can increase some wear on your plates and knives, but I have a hard time imagining much a difference to a home user.

You can do as you like, but always keep in mind that it’s still raw.

Personally, I would rather cook it just to have it all done, but I can see freezing them if you’re saving up for a large cook.

Man, that is terrible. We’re sending good vibes your way. May that snow come and help.

txoutdoorsman And I’m just south of that, between S. Rice and Chimney Rock. We might be able to throw a baseball towards each other and have them land in the same yard (or at Bubba’s)!

I don’t know about Chef, but I have the Cuisinart 14 cup. It’s a dream.

I’m fortunate in that, while I like wheated bourbons, they aren’t my favorites. Don’t get me wrong, now. I like them, and I’m not likely to turn any of them down, but I can live without them for long periods of time (and I surely am not going to pay what many of them are going for these days). When it comes to bourbon whiskey, I tend to prefer something with barley and rye and little (or no) wheat. That’s more my style. In fact, if I had to spend the rest of my life drinking only Four Roses (even just the yellow label) Jim Beam (even just the white label), or Evan Williams (especially the bottled-in-bond) as the only bourbons I could have for the rest of my life, I’d live a mighty fine life.

In fact, I tend to prefer rye whiskey over bourbon. While a handful of folks have gotten all worked up about a handful of rye whiskeys, prices and availability otherwise haven’t been terribly affected by hype. Regarding Sazerac, I’ve always liked it, but my mind boggles at why it suddenly became so expensive and hard to find. Bizarre.

In fact, I’ve preferred Scotch whisky over bourbon for several years, now. With limited exceptions that mostly are in the $200+ bottle family (that I want little or no part of), prices have been more affected by tariffs than hype. Yeah, I’ve lost a couple age statement favorites (like Laphroaig 18), and Highland Park isn’t what it used to be, but I’m quite happy with what’s around.