Thanks, but......
No hardwood pellets here. Can't even buy sawdust, except for floor sweepings.

I can use the planer to make some wood chips, but haven't gotten much further than that.

I have been using a pro/q cold smoke generator to smoke my sausages and bacon etc and been finishing them off by poaching in hot water. I have tried the oven, but it is very difficult to keep it below 100 oC, let alone below the 93-94 oC that is recommended. Lately I have also been smoking at a high...

I am not the biggest sauce eater. I stick with mustard and chili paste (home made). I like serving pickles with the sausages. I just like the combination. If there are other people around I sometimes make some mayonaisse, but I think the sausages are good enough by themselves. Oh, and fried onions g...

I like the look of those, Graybeard! I leave it to the others to answer your smoking time questions. I had a total different issue when smoking my canadian bacon. I use a proQ csg and the thing just didn't want to light. In the end I got so frustrated that I placed the whole csg on the hot plate and...

Thanks Graybeard: I will have to look for a bottle brush. So far I have been using a chopstick wrapped in serviette or towel, but it's a bit of a mission. Shuswap: So you take the air valve off to clean? Any thing I should look out for when putting it back? Changing the bolt for a wing nut sounds li...

Nice looking bacons and sausages! I have a couple of questions after making the smoked/unsmoked sausages and working on my Canadian bacon: 1- Is it necessary to prep cook or fully cook the smoked sausages or could you just cool them down and freeze them and make sure that you heat them to the requir...

You might have a point with the air pockets, David!
The casings I have are just a tad too small for the biggest stuffer so I use them on the middle sized one and ended up with a couple of air pockets.
Nice looking sausages!

The pork loin pictures will come later (after smoking it). For now: super spicy sausages (based on L. Poli recipe for Goan Chourico)). Because of the spicing I was going to call them CAGLIBID sausages (Chuckwagon Ain't Gonna Like It, But I do :mrgreen: ) Anyway, https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s1...

Hope I am not posting this twice (can't see the post I just wrote)... Sorry to hear about your hard times. I was in Christchurch years ago. Loved it. If you really want a proper change of scenery, you are more than welcome in my part of the world and you can teach me how to make better sausages (onc...

I'm always game, but after project kb ends.... I find these projects helping me getting my act together and more importantly making me try things that I would be too scared off to do on my own, like the Canadian bacon thing in the current project. I really appreciate all the time and effort people t...

My pork loin is lying in the pickle, weighed down with a bag of water (next time I will make more pickle for inside the plastic bag in case of leakages). The loin is fully submerged so there shouldn't be any need to turn it, isn't it? Cut up some pork shoulder and now need to decide on a type of sau...

I just picked up my piece of pork loin today. It look more like a slab of belly pork than the nice pieces shown here.
Luckily Duck's looks more like mine......

Should be able to put it in the cure tonite and then I have a couple of days to figure out why my proQ csg keeps going off.....

I bit the bullet and decided to go for the lem #8.
In the end I rather have too much capacity instead of too little.
And I did not forget to order a transformer either (as we run on 220 volt)

Thanks for all your input

Ray, On the LEM site it's 280 and I found a promotion code to bring it down to 250 or so.
Where did you find the 219?

I have been looking at different grinders, but not in the top range. The affordable Cabelas have either nylon/plastic gears and sometimes not even any spare parts, so I have been looking at LEM. More in specific the big bite #8 and #5. So far making sausages is (just) a hobby, although I might consi...