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I am doing summer sausage in my SM066. I put it in around 11:00 am yesterday. I went through the 130 degree drying process with the smoker door cracked open, then put in the wood and closed the door. Bumped the smoker temp to 140 degrees for an hour, then 150 degrees for an hour, finally hit 170 degrees for 2 hours. The sausage was at 145 degrees. I let it go another 2 hours at 170 degrees and the sausage was at 150 degrees. 2 hours later and it was at 153 degrees. 1 more hour and it was 151. Somewhere around midnight I bumped the smoker temp up to 180 degrees. 2 hours later the sausage was at 155 degrees. I bumped the smoker to 190 degrees and an hour later the sausage was at 157 degrees. I could go on, but I finally got the sausage to hit 160 degrees at around 5:00 am. The smoker temp was 210 degrees. Some of the sausage had started to render the fat. What the heck am I doing wrong, or missing?
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Ok., not sure what you're trying to do. If your talking about dry-cured summer sausage, it really does not require cooking. That is if you indeed used #2 cure and bacteria form as required.

If you used #1 cure, it does require heating to be a fully cured product. What was your target temp? My guess was 152-153ish. Beyond that, the fat will break and your sausage will be grainy. It sounds like your temps were bouncing off the fat break right above 150 and busted thru, leaving with broken fat. Smoke till 153, then ice bath it. The ice bath (or cold water shower) will quickly lower the internal temps of the product, preventing carryover.

Oh, and not to get too technical, but differently-raised animals have different melting points on their fat.

Others, thoughts please.
Ok, Cure or not, it sounds like your fat broke. Sometimes you can't take sausage to 160, it depends on the pig and what it ate to make the fat either hard or soft.

Lucky for us, the USDA, some years back, changed the 'safe' temp for pork to 140. I'm sure they left the ground pork temp up to 160 (like they do with beef).

152 is usually my target temp for smoked sausage, anyway, sorry you had a bad experience.

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