Sausage

[EllieMae]

How many people make their own sausage? I know that a lot of people spend a lot of money having sausage made for them. I finally gave it a try myself this year, and discovered that it is actually quite easy. I got on the web and found Eldon's Sausage and Jerky Supply in Kooskia, ID, and bought a book and some supplies like curing salt, dextrose and casings. For anyone who's interested, here's basically how it goes. You grind up trimmed elk/venison/whatever with some beef fat (to 10%) that you asked the local butcher to save for you. You do this through a coarse grinding plate. Then you add a bunch of different spices, depending on the style of sausage you are making, along with dry milk, curing salt (nitrates) and a little water. Then you grind it again through a finer plate and straight through the stuffer funnel into casings. You can get those big 2.5" fibrous casings for summer sausage or just use the normal 32mm hog gut for everything else. You twist/tie up your links and put them in the fridge overnight to "cure." The nitrate kills any clostridium spores so that they don't activate when you smoke it. The next day, you hang the sausage in your smoker at a relatively cool temperature, like 150-170 deg F. Eldon's book has a more elaborate scheme of starting cool and gradually increasing temperature, but I found that 4-5 hours at something around 170 or so was just fine. The important thing is to keep it relatively cool, at least for the first couple hours, so the sausage dries and the fat doesn't render and get greasy. You aren't cooking it at this point, just smoking it. The final step is to make sure it's cooked thoroughly. You can do this in the smoker, turning up the heat a bit and using a probe thermometer to make sure internal temp reaches 155, or easier yet, you just bring the sausage in the house and put them in a 170deg F pot of water until the internal temp reaches 155. Then you shower your sausage thoroughly with cold water to cool it quickly so they don't shrink and get wrinkly looking and hang them up for a while to dry and finish cooling and get that nice color ("blooming", they call it). It's that easy, and the results were excellent. Try it. These smoked sausages are not preserved or fully cured, so they should be eaten in a week or frozen. I also made some brats and polish sausage, which is just ground without the curing salt and stuffed but not smoked and then frozen to be cooked/grilled later. -al