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 Making Sausage 
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KeystoneCowboy wrote:
Great stuff at fair prices.


Yeah, that was my conclusion too. Let us know what you buy, I'm sure you're gonna get the pro-level shit!

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Fri Jul 23, 2021 6:38 pm
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Well, I had today off . . . so I started my day at Costco, picking up two 2-packs of pork butts. 30 pounds. Oh shit. My original plan was to convert all of it to sausage today, but somehow I got smart and only did half of it. Guess I'll tackle the rest of it tomorrow.

Anyhow, back to the first post of this thread, I still have the Bacon Mac & Cheese Bratwurst seasoning, which is the fat pack of seasoning in the lower left plus the bag of noodles in the upper left:

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That's enough for 25 pounds of sausage . . . and since I got my unexpectedly-large shipment of hi-temp pepperjack cheese recently, I figured now was the time to use it!

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Here's the spice mix, and yes it has little chunks of bacon in it!

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I cooked the pasta (but not TOO much) and added the cheese, and then set that aside:

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I ground up two of the butts using my 10mm die, and made three 5-pound batches, which is a comfortable amount to process. I used my KitchenAid mixer for sausage for the first time . . . here it is mixing up five pounds of pork plus spices:



It worked like a champ! After the spices were mixed in and the mixture was tacky, I dumped in the noodles and the cheese chunks, and here's the resulting mixture in the sausage stuffer:

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Before I started stuffing, I cooked up a little patty in a frying pan just to taste it:

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^ See that little white thing in the upper right? That's a piece of high-temp cheese, just sitting in the hot pan . . . yeah, it softened around the edges a little, but it didn't melt down or burn up like regular cheese would. WEIRD.

So then I started stuffing:

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And here's 15 pounds of sausage in the fridge to chill overnight . . . I'll smoke/cook it tomorrow:

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And I'll also be doing the remaining 10 pounds of the same sausage, plus 5 pounds of breakfast sausage which I'll just keep bulk.

This shit is exhausting. And it gets me pissed when I walk through the grocery store and see sausage on sale for $4/pound . . . .

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Fri Nov 05, 2021 7:39 pm
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box in a freezer garlic and mixed spice, other one is cheese. yes thats a sausage in middle. :bigsmile: Don't know what ratio you made but 5% is good enough with high temp cheese. you can do reg you just gotta cube em small. I kinda don't like the high temp cheese (chedder) it has a "waxy" taste


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Fri Nov 05, 2021 8:28 pm
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Nice collection, Chris!

I used 1/2 pound of cheese per 5 pounds of meat (so 10%), which is what the recipe called for. My recipe also had the noodles added, so thatt bulks it up a little too.

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Sat Nov 06, 2021 5:12 am
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MadPick wrote:
This shit is exhausting.


I was back at it today, but today was much more rewarding. thumbsup

Yesterday I made 15 pounds of the bacon mac and cheese bratwurst, and today I made 10 more pounds, and smoked (cooked) the 15 pounds that I made yesterday. Here's the final result:

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And it's really good. It's a commercial mix, so I'm not taking credit for the taste, but I definitely did a better job with the assembly than I have with past batches -- slowly climbing that learning curve.

It has a nice smoky taste. For dinner I made pasta alfredo with slices of sausage in it, and it was a good match.

Back to the high-temp cheese topic. I found that I was a little too hands-off with my sausage-tending in the smoker, so at one point I found those around the edges were at 170 degrees and those in the center were at 120. Rotate, rotate, rotate. :bigsmile: But, I could see a potential for leaking cheese if it couldn't handle those temps.

I took my last five pounds of pork and made breakfast sausage using this spice mixture. This is just bulk sausage, no links. We of course had to do a little testing, for science:

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And damn, that is really good too....

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Sat Nov 06, 2021 5:37 pm
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Today's final haul of the bacon mac and cheese . . . well, maybe about 1+ pounds shy of the total haul. :wink05:

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Sat Nov 06, 2021 6:32 pm
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I made one adjustment to my setup today. The sausage stuffer comes with holes in the bottom, so you can bolt it down to a tabletop, which of course I don't want to do. So, this has been my usual setup:

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^ It works. It sucks. Sometimes the clamps fall off and you need to set them up again, which inevitably happens when your hands are covered in raw meat.

I bought some suction cups from Amazon, added some 1/4" lock washers and fender washers, and now I have this:

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I think this is going to be a LOT better. The only downside is that the stuffer gets pushed a little away from the edge of the counter (so the suction cup doesn't hang over the edge), so the handle will hit the upper cabinets. No biggie, I'll move it to the peninsula where there are no cabinets, or to a table.

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Fri Nov 26, 2021 3:17 pm
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Sausage master....or Master of his Sausage. :bigsmile: :thumbsup2:

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Mr. Q wrote: so basically, if you have to smoke some asshole, make sure they become fertilizer and then Bounce? got it.

Guntrader wrote: Huh, maybe I was an asshole.

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Fri Nov 26, 2021 4:30 pm
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usrifle wrote:
Sausage master....or Master of his Sausage. :bigsmile: :thumbsup2:



:thumbsup2:


what do you think of the cheese taste steve?

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Fri Nov 26, 2021 4:55 pm
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cmica wrote:
what do you think of the cheese taste steve?


I opened a piece of the cheddar after two weeks . . . and it's GREAT! I'm really enjoying it. The smoke taste is definitely there, but it's not overwhelming, and it actually seems to mellow the sharpness of the cheddar a bit.

I haven't cracked open a gouda yet.

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Fri Nov 26, 2021 5:21 pm
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MadPick wrote:
cmica wrote:
what do you think of the cheese taste steve?


I opened a piece of the cheddar after two weeks . . . and it's GREAT! I'm really enjoying it. The smoke taste is definitely there, but it's not overwhelming, and it actually seems to mellow the sharpness of the cheddar a bit.

I haven't cracked open a gouda yet.



ment the one in sausage to me its waxy..

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Fri Nov 26, 2021 5:39 pm
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cmica wrote:
ment the one in sausage to me its waxy..


Oh yeah. Wrong thread for the other cheese. :ROFLMAO:

I actually really like the high-temp cheese. I don't think it's necessarily the best cheese ever, but the fact that it doesn't melt away has been really nice. I've sliced up this sausage and cooked it in soup, fried up slices of it, and the cheese has stayed intact in the sausage. I have to think that regular sausage would have just melted away in those situations.

So yes, it gets a thumbs-up from me. thumbsup

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Fri Nov 26, 2021 5:54 pm
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Thought I'd drop this in here since I found it interesting...


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Plan B is actually repeating Plan A.... it just involves much more alcohol.

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Tue Jul 19, 2022 1:19 pm
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Figured I'd post this up --- interesting that such a simple recipe would turn out so good.... but I guess in reality, its just pulled pork in a tube.


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Plan B is actually repeating Plan A.... it just involves much more alcohol.

Of the ten voices I hear in my head, only three keep telling me NOT to shoot....
Do I go with the majority or common sense?


Sun Apr 09, 2023 8:15 am
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I cracked this thread open today and read through my posts from three years ago. It's funny to read about the challenges I had; I've "cracked the code" on most of them in the time since then, but one thing hasn't changed: Making sausage is a shit-ton of work!

The sausages posted earlier in this thread, bratwurst-sized links, all use hog casings that are roughly 32mm in diameter. I recently decided to make a different sausage (more on that later) that requires smaller casings, so I bought some 20-22m sheep casings. And since I had some left over from that project, I thought I'd try making linked breakfast sausage. I've made breakfast sausage before, but I've always made it as bulk or patties, since I figured it wasn't worth the hassle of making all those little tiny links.

And in hindsight, I was right . . . lmao.

I went to Chef'Store yesterday, and was thankfully :bow: able to buy a single pork butt, boneless, for $1.79/lb. Good deal. I ground it up, used this maple seasoning, and then after considerable effort I got them all cased up and into the fridge to dry a bit:

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Side note #1: That maple seasoning is good, I've used it before. I won't buy any more of it since it has more sugar than I want in my current diet, but it does taste good.
Side note #2: In my first post in this thread, I talked about struggling with getting the casings to slip over the stuffer horn. I had that same problem this time, in a big way, but finally (re)learned the lesson and got it straightened out. That lesson is, as taught by 2 Guys And A Cooler, add some baking soda (1 tsp per quart) to your casing soaking water. The baking soda makes the casings slippery, and then slide much more easily.

After getting all 10 pounds stuffed, linked and dried, I vacuum-sealed them into pouches with 10 each:

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And then cooked them all at 150 degrees in the sous vide:

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And then put them all in the freezer. My theory (as yet untested) is that I'll be able to pull a package from the freezer, and put the frozen links into the air fryer for maybe five minutes, just enough to heat them through and brown them a little.

I'm sure these will be good . . . but I worked on this all damned day. It's rewarding at the end, but it's a lot of effort!

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Sun Mar 24, 2024 11:43 am
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