Here is some photos of the grinding, mixing and fermenting part of the show
Here is 26 pounds of breakfast sausage all finished and ready for consumption! It is the easy half of the project for a two main reasons; it's less time consuming and it's easy to tweak the results before you call it good. Just mix in the spices, fry some up, taste, and repeat if necessary.
Summer sausage is a whole other beast! I ended up with almost 60 pounds of sausage and the logistics of handling that quantity of meat is daunting. You have to get everything mixed up just so and then you have to find a place to keep it all cool for 3 days while it ferments. Then you stuff it in casings and try to figure out how to smoke it all. I had to do this year's batch in two smokes. Each smoke takes around 16 hours until I reach the magical internal temp of 155 degrees. Then I have to cool all the chubs in an ice bath to 100 degrees to stop the cooking process. Then they need to hang for a few hours to dry. All this takes place without me knowing for sure whether the finished product will be fit to eat or not.
I finally tested the first batch of summer sausage this morning - 7 days after starting. Since I am a perfectionist, I am never fully satisfied with the final product but this was pretty good. There was plenty of tang in the taste and it had a firm consistency.
It was definitely "Jake Approved"!
Half of the chubs are vacuum packed and ready for the freezer. 28 more are in the smoker as I type.
Here is Jake and me enjoying the fruits of my labor at lunch. I'll give the effort a solid B+. Jake gave it 4 1/2 out of 5 slobbers!
Darren
