I was lucky enough to get a monster buck this season, and ended up with way more ground venison than I normally do. So I decided to buy a summer sausage kit from Hi Mountain. With so much meat to process, I also decided to skip my little hand crank grinder and upgrade to the Kitchenaid grinder attachment. Good call on that one!
The grinding of the venison went smoothly, except that I had to stop regularly to clean the blade of excess connective tissue. I was using 12 pounds of venison and 3 pounds of center cut bacon. I would not recommend doing this much at one time with basic equipment because it's hard to keep everything cold.
The kit came with 2.5"x20" collagen casings. I bought the sausage stuffer attachment that goes with the Kitchenaid grinder attachment, but the Kithenaid grinder is terrible for stuffing. My advice to anyone is that all grinders are terrible for stuffing. Trust me...it isn't worth your time or the frustration. I ended up stuffing the meat into the cases by hand. I plan on getting a 5 pound vertical stuffer from Northern Tool.
So here's where things got confusing. The directions with the kit stated to heat the sausages for 1 hour at 120 to dry the casings, then smoke them at 140 for 1 hour, then 30 minutes at 160, then 180 degrees until you get them to 156 internal. I read on this forum to do roughly the same thing. The problem is my SM20 doesn't go lower than 140. So I used my SM20 with the door open for the first hour, then followed the rest of the instructions.
After 14 hours, my five 3-pound sausages finally reached 156 degrees...or so I thought. Three of them were at 156 degrees. One was over 160 degrees and one was at 149 degrees. I also found that if I took temperatures at opposite ends of the sausage, I got different readings. All five of the sausages shrunk noticeably. I put the four that were up to temperature in an ice water bath until the internal temp was under 90, then left them to dry for two hours. The last one is still in the smoker.
Any ideas what I did wrong? Maybe I should have stepped up the temperature slower and gone hotter up to 190. Maybe less meat in the smoker would have allowed for more even and faster cooking. I don't know.
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