I'm getting one or two requests a week lately to teach sausage making classes.

I have room in my commercial kitchen for 8 students, in the evening several nights a week when the kitchen is not being used.

I have two mincers and two stuffers appropriate for classroom use. I would not use the...

Fellas, I use soy protein concentrate when I smoke kielbasa. Running low and am doing some research on the use of soy flour. I can get a 50 lb bag of this for under 60 bucks with shipping. Throughout my investigation I see that it is also advertised as a meat binder at some sites. A LOT cheaper if...

How Salt Is Measured In Brine

If the salt in the sea could be removed and spread evenly over the Earth's land surface, it would form a layer more than 500 feet thick. Seawater averages 3.5% salt. When a cubic foot of seawater evaporates, it yields about 2.2 pounds of salt. In contrast, the fresh...

Does anyone roast their whole spices before grinding and adding to sausages?

Speaking Of Salt...
Salt is just salt, right? So why do so many people get excited over the simple seasoning? Although most of us are concerned with its application inside the kitchen, in today`s world salt has more than 40,000 applications from manufacturing to medicine! The ancient Greeks traded...

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy

Did anyone happen to notice that in the news last Monday there was another reported case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy? Yup pards, this time it was in California. It was amazing to me that the second thing from the reporter`s mouth was, Officials state that...

Rytek Kutas said the first rule of sausage making is, If it can't be cured... it can't be smoked! Casing the sausage cuts off oxygen. Anaerobic bacteria do not require oxygen and certain pathogenic bacteria in sausage being smoked certainly present a risk. Meat covered with plastic wrap for...

Testing pH Using Litmus Paper

U.S. Government FSIS meat inspectors and professional commercial sausage makers use battery powered devices for measuring the acidity (pH) in meat as well as Water Activity (Aw) during dehydration. The PawKit (for testing Aw) is a quality-made product by Decagon...

Woods Used For Smoking

Acacia is similar to mesquite but not as strong. Acacia should be used in small amounts or for limited amounts of time.
Alder has a light flavor that works well with fish and poultry. Alder is the traditional choice for smoking Salmon.
Almond is similar to pecan and...

Brining And Brine Curing
Immersed And Pumped Products

A BRINING solution is simply water with a specific amount of salt added to it to change the protein structure of meat. There is no standard strength, but some recommendations are made. Poultry brines seem to work best at about 20 degrees...

I saw this cure on Butcher and Packer. What do you guys think of this stuff?

:cool: My chicken sausage contains no GMO or hormone feed beef. :cool: :lol:

I have been making various kinds of sausage for about six months now, (sweet and hot Italian, Hot-smoked polish, bulk and stuffed breakfast, all received rave reviews BTW) and this morning my wife asked me to make some Bockwurst.

So, being the good little geek that I am, I headed for the computer...

While waiting for a few odds and sods to put my curing chambe together I decided to have a bit of fun.

Having a bit of fun. I have been given a temperature and humidity data logger.

Aim: Is to find out if I can use an aquarium heater in a water and salt bath as a method of creating a humidifier...

I just finished reading Home Production of Quality Meats and Sausages by Stanley Marianski. Good book with lots of interesting information, though it feels in sections like it was written as separate books and merged.

Anyway, Mr Marianski says several times that fresh garlic is not a good idea,...

I gone through the BBQ section on this forum and saw that many interesting recipes require Yellow Mustard. Such kind of mustard is not available in Poland. I assume that Yellow Mustard may be substituted by another one. Would someone be so kind to describe the taste of Yellow Mustard ? Is it finely...

I have been using a grinder to stuff, and though I'll buy a dedicated stuffer soon, I suspect they have the same problem.

When I finish emptying the grinder, the stuffing tube still has several sausages worth of filling inside.

I have been removing the tube and pushing the meat out manually with...

Has anyone done any work to quantify binding duck fat into beef sausage using powdered milk?

I'm trying some formulations this weekend and looking for guidance.

Thanks.

-t

I gave some smoked summer sausage to a friend of mine back at Christmas. I guess with all the foods everyone gets during the holidays he forgot about it and left it in the fridge for four months after which time he ate it and complimented me on the sausage. I told him I wasn't sure if he should...

This is just a rant from a frustrated spice shopper - in the spice capital of the world!

We grow Nutmeg in Penang. Lots of it. Harvesting Nutmeg it is a tradition that goes back centuries.

We have Nutmeg farms here, and you can buy candied nutmeg, nutmeg jams, visit the Spice Garden and see how...

Draft of project outline for salt/cure uptake in brined pork meats.

Make a brine of the desired strength with a volume equal to one half of the weight of the meat .
Example: 1 cup of brine for one pound of meat
The target salt absorption is 2% of the weight of the meat.
Monitor the brine strength...

I try and stay up on the latest and greatest with regard to proper procedures for commercial kitchens with regards to cleanliness and food safety. I try and mirror some of the more applicable procedures when it come to food prep in my own home. This is of particular concern when the food being...

Hi everybody, I am Marko and I am new to sausage making.
In a close future I intend to make slow fermented sausages. I wanna have enough tehnical knowledge so that I could, without worries, create my own recipes.
So I really hope that somebody would be kind enough to spend a few minutes answering...

I'm just getting started in dry curing meat, have read a few books and read the website here, but just getting my cure chamber up and running. While I'm waiting for a fridge in my price range (free) to come around I was trying to make a list of the things I would want to keep track of when curing...

I have a friend (yeah ! I know that's hard to believe) whose 9 year old son was sickened by food poisoning derived from a boiled egg that he ate a reinactment gathering a couple of weeks ago. With considerable medical care and some antibiotics he is recovering.
I am wondering if when peeled boiled...

I started this little piece of bacon on Thursday evening March 14 with a dry cure 2% salt .25% cure#1 and a tablespoonful of molassas. That mixture makes a thick paste. I turn the package every day and this is the accumulation of exudate today. By Thursday or Friday I expect it to all be...

Ok I tried some summer sausage and Landjäger a local butcher shop made. The homemade stuff I make from recipes on this forum is better. Why is that? The butcher goes through the same process we do. Also when they make summer sausage how do they get their tang? Are they using starter cultures or are...

Hey there. Who has used celery powder or cherry powder as a replacement for Instacure? What have your experiences been?

Hello All,

I am getting ready to make a pile of bacon and searched the suppliers for a 5 lb. container of Cure #1.

I found that Butcher Packer sells ir for $7.45/5 lb. tub. But it contains Silico Aluminate 2% as an anti-caking agent.

Does Instacure contain this?
Anything we should know about...

I purchased some beef rounds from butcher and packer back in December. They have been in the fridge since then. I want to make ring bologna and their instructions say to soak the casings in lukewarm water before stuffing. I have read that warm water in a no no. If it is what is the correct method...

I've got a hog going to the butcher today. I've never done this before so I dont know what all cuts are available.

Im thinking:

2 sides of bacon
2 whole hams (or cut in two)
2 racks of spare ribs
1 rack of baby backs
pork loin attached to the ribs, so I can have the option to cut into chops or...

Many sausage recipes include juniper berries in the ingredients. Do any of you gather your own berries for this purpose? Can anyone suggest the suitable varieties, especially those found in the Pacific Northwest? When is the best time to harvest them?

One year ago I smoked two pounds of cheddar cheese. I cut the brick into several more or less equal sizes and smoked them on the same shelf in my smoker for a time and then wrapped time in new clean plastic wrap. This is a picture of two of the pieces wrapped equally and stored on the same shelf in...

It seems to me that there can be some confusion about the terms used when we smoke meat. Someone please correct me if I am in error here.
1.Cold smoking is a long process that results in substantial drying.
2. Hot smoking is a shorter process that results in a product that is precooked to about...

Hi,
Are there any members that have used ECA in semi dried sausages or in any other application to get the tang in sausages without culures?
What I can't seem to understand is that ECA get released in the sausages over 135 F, so where does the semi-dried sausage fit in.
I always thought that they...

I am new here and not knowledgable much on sausage making. My butcher makes 6 or more types of fresh brats. He always has plenty frozen, vacuum sealed in four packs. I thaw them in hot water for 20 to 30 minutes before cooking, the color looks good to me. If I can get him to tell me what he adds...

For those of us who have the land and facilities to raise our own sausage not the hoof , this was a favorite breed of the American pioneers.

Just thought I'd ask if someone had some pic's or tip's of removing the bone from a butt? with its odd shape I thought some might find it hard to do. I just follow around the bone with the tip of my knife till I remove it but I'm sure someone here is an old pro at it and would like to share their...

Why does garlic sometimes take on a blueish, greenish or grayish hue?

Two recent reports from the House Foods Corporation in Japan detail exactly how the garlic and garlic-onion pigments develop. Their creators are the same handful of sulfur compounds and enzymes that give the allium family its...

I need to thaw 50# of butts by saturday morning,I don't have room in fridge so I have them in a cooler on the porch,temps are low out side is this safe?thanks orf...

I have on occession seen larding needles which are really long skinny tubes like hypodermic needles with a cutting tip and a rod for pushing the fat out. The technique as I understand it calls for loading the needle with raw pork fat and the depositing this same fat into lean meat to creat an...

A friend of mine made these spread sheets and I find them very useful.
Here is a base excel spread sheet that will recalculate your spices for different batch sizes.
It will allow you to change sausage batch sizes and all the spices are recalculated for you, including the cure weights.
Just down...

I bought a large jug of insta cure #1 in 2008. I was wondering how long the cure is good for? Does cure ever go bad?

I am putting together some polish sausage and am out of fresh garlic so I resorted to garlic powder. The bottle tells me that 1/8 teaspoon equals one clove. I weighed the 1/8 th teaspoon and came up with .45 grams. A little more or less garlic is not something to start a fight over. I tend to use...

Hi folks! One of our members has written a question by email. I'm forwarding it to this part of the forum. Anybody out there want to help him with this question?

Our fellow sausage maker writes:

I have been doing my readings and I am seeing all of these techniques for cold showering sausages....

In our modern usage of language we can have a tendency to be rather casual in our attention to precise use of words and symbols.
Temperature is the first on my list. We are an international forum and some of us use the celsius scale and some use the Fahrenheit scale. So when we post we ought to be...

Today I saw an absurd statement concerning the protein content of fresh vegetables and went hunting an authoritative source be fore I responded. This is the web site that I found:

Various ingredients that are used in sausage making:

Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein
Amesphos
Acid, Ascorbic, Citric, Lactic
Corn Syrup Solids
Soy protein concentrate
non-fat dry milk powder
whey
gums
Non-Fat High-Heat Dry Milk Powder
Special Meat Binder

Hello All,
I've been wanting to make some...