Homemade Sausage Making

I started on this last Friday and after 10 hours in the pear wood smoke this is what I got.
Almost four pounds of shoulder butt. cured with 1.5% salt and brown sugar, water and sodium nitrite. Shut of the gas heat at 145°F and it finished at 151°F

Let's slice that gorgeous thing open and have a look inside!
Have you got a new smoker? It looks pretty good.

Ross,
That looks very appetising and a good colour. Maz, always calls it FOODPORN. He is right.
Congratulations,
Jan.

Knife action camera !



That looks very appetising, the old saying we eat with our eyes is very true when pics like that are posted.

Looks fantastic.

Congrats Ross

You got me drooling on my key-board.

It is the sister to one I made for a friend last spring. Sits on my grill. Inside it is 14x18x24
I stick a thermometer through a hole in the side and spear the meat and have another in the front to check the air temperature.
My post was a little misleading I started the curing on Friday the 2nd and tied it on the 9th and dried it for all of saturday and smoked it on Sunday.

Slices,
The whole end,

That looks fantastic Ross. It seems the butts I get from Danny's food stand have far more fat that yours. That's why I quit making ham from the butt. Did you get that from Wegman's?

Dave that was only about 1/3rd of a whole butt. About 3.8 poundsI spent sometime tieing it into shape after I had removed the scalpula. Much of the fat went into trimmings for sausage later. I did get it at Wegmans but they are all pretty much the same.

Boy howdy Ross, that's some beautiful looking ham and a perfectly tied roast! I'm going to try that and fillet off the top-fat to save for mixing with some wild hog sausage. Do you inject the brine solution, or just pickjle and refrigerate for a week? RAY

Ray, I weigh out salt and sugar to equal 1.5% of the meat weight and cure #1=.25% add a bit of molassas and just enough water to make a slurry. This I rub on the all of the surface and into all of the nooks and crannies. Into a zipper bag and turn it everyday and massage it often. It soaks up all of the exudate and is very slimy at the end of the week. That is when I tie it up. It is as slippery as an eel and I don't rinse it. The first tie is a slip knot and the rest are half hitches to gently coax it round. Then I use a large crochet hook to hitch the longitudinal strings over the circumferential ties all the time tucking in the bits and pices that try to go adrift. Thre were six strings along the length and about ten roundabout. A length of netting would be quicker.

Ross,
I second Sawhorse remarks, the smoked ham looks beautiful and moist.
Great photos and instructions. I am just looking a pork specials now!!!!!!!!!
Thank you,
Jan.

Thanks Ross, I've copied the formula and saved it in my recipe files, this is definately on my to do list. I learned how to tie a roast the same way I learned to de-bone a pork butt a few years back, youtube! I wish there would have been youtube available when I was 18 years old and killed my first deer, field dressing it looked like something the Manson family would have pulled off, tho I got pretty good with experience. I've got some netting that will be perfect for this endeavor. Thanks again! RAY

Nice work Ross,

So, it cures for a week in that slurry, and you immediately smoke it - hot smoke ? how long ?
Quite a bit of the shoulder was removed wasn't it ?
Bet it tasted good !
Gus

After the cure, it gets tied and hung to dry. When it is dryit goesinto a cold smoke house and I start the smoke and a small heating fire. The smokehouse temperature rises about 15°F per hour. This piece took 10 hours I allowed the smoke to stop after about 8 hours. This was just a small third of the original the rest had been cut for cutlets.