Veniham

Post Reply
User avatar
Butterbean
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 1955
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2012 04:10
Location: South Georgia

Veniham

Post by Butterbean » Thu Dec 20, 2018 15:29

My family eats a lot of venison because its cheap and plentiful. I'm always looking for different ways to prepare it but being we have busy schedules we often don't have the time to cook properly and have to resort to quick meals like sandwiches so often I make sandwich meat with the venison. After reading Redzed's thread about his pork loin sausage I thought this might work well with venison and decided to use his process with a venison pork mix. Since venison has a lot of myosin in it and is a dark meat I envisioned the end product to be speckled in color and of course his spice mix is spot on to most people's tastes so I figured it would be worth the effort to give it a go. And it was.


Basically I followed Redzed's process but here is info from my notes.


Pork Loin 2.8 kg

Venison 1.9 kg


Meats were cubed and kept seperately


Meats were then salted and put in the refrigerator for three days to cure and extract myosin.

After three days I separated out what amounted to 20% of the venison to make a paste to serve as the "glue" for the bits and pieces. To this I added this spice mix based on the total weight of all the meat.


Per KG - total meat weight

White Pepper 3g

Toasted ground coriander 0.6 g

Fresh garlic 2 g


Next, I tempered the 20% venison paste meat in the freezer then ground it fine and mixed the spices to this paste. I ground it twice - goal was to make an emulsion.

Image


Once emulsified the emulsion is mixed with all other meats and mixed till very sticky. Adding a little water along and along not to exceed 10% water by weight. What I found when doing this is I held off on the water at first. I then found the meat to begin getting firm and stiff so I'd add a little water to the mass which softened it and I mixed more till it began to firm up again. I repeated this process till I had added 8% water and the mass just seemed "right" in both texture, mix and stickiness.

Image

I followed the mantra of "go big" and stuffed the mass into a 7" collagen casing and put hung this in the cooler for two days.

Image

Third day the sausage was removed and hung in the smoker at 125F with no smoke for 3-4 hours till it had warmed and the casing was dry enough to take smoke.

Image

I then smoked the sausage at 150F in heavy smoke for 4 hours then bumped the heat up to 170F and left it there till other things in the smoker had finished then removed it and finished the veniham by poaching in water. I believe the internal temp was 132F when removed from smoker. I poached it for a couple hours to an internal temp of 152F. After poaching I hung the sausage and showed it with water till cool then hung in the fridge overnight.

Image


After resting overnight the veniham was sliced. I was real pleased with the color array of the different meats and the flavor is incredible.

Image

Splitting hairs and being critical of myself you can see from this photo there are a few small air pockets in the meat. Though they are insignifant in one way they also offend the OCD in me. I wonder if adding the other 2% water could have helped remedy this or cutting the meat into smaller cubes. I cut them into roughly 1 ince cubes. I don't know but in the future I think I'll try running the meat through either a 3/4" or a 1" plate rather than cubing with a knife.

Image

I see a lot of doors opening to this process. I am also reminded once again to the importance of being patient when making sausages and allowing the salt and cure to do its magic before making sausages. I am so guilty of this due to time constraints but based on the other sausages I had in the cooler waiting on the veniham to get ready patience is rewarded in a much better quality sausage.
User avatar
Bob K
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 2232
Joined: Sun Jun 02, 2013 15:16
Location: Northwest Ct

Post by Bob K » Thu Dec 20, 2018 23:11

Looks Good!! Pretty hard to eliminate those air bubbles in the larger diam casings especially with the fine mince.
User avatar
Butterbean
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 1955
Joined: Mon Mar 05, 2012 04:10
Location: South Georgia

Post by Butterbean » Thu Dec 20, 2018 23:42

It was really good. Have had a lot of raves on it so far. Picture doesn't do it justice. The white flecks are actually pink and the venison is a rosy deep red. I think it would be interesting to do this again only add some of the dark meat from a picnic and have three different color contrasts.
User avatar
redzed
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 3852
Joined: Fri Apr 20, 2012 06:29
Location: Vancouver Island

Post by redzed » Sun Dec 23, 2018 02:11

Very nice experiment BB! I could not respond earlier because we were without power for 2 days. Lots of and wind and trees down all over the place.

I'm glad you explained the brown/gray colours because I was going to ask wheter you added cure. If you shoot with a flash the red colours come out.
Post Reply