Sumtime

Summer Sausage

Hot 'nuff? when the going gets hot, the hot get smokin. As ritual for inhabitants of every great metropolis at the heights of summer, it is incumbent upon us to escape the grit for the country airs. What you don't have a summer home? Yeah, me neither. So one must ply great friends with sausage and mustard so that his family can share a woodsy hole for a quiet weekend in the country. Actually there wasn't much plying involved, just planning, and we were off for the wilds of Wisconsin.

The prep started the Monday before for summer sausage. I don't have any in-depth research to present on the origins of this particular sausage (during the summer the library only stocks romance novels and historical fiction, I finally broke down and checked out Heat, it was actually very good) but suffice to say, as any Midwesterner would, being the oft the recipient of the Hickory Hills gift boxes thus being very familiar with the cased meat, summer sausage strives (and succeeds) to be a heavily smoked fermented semi dry salami type sausage. Except instead of drying and curing for three weeks or three months, you can make it (at home!) in three days.

The recipe uses a few exotic ingredients: Fermento, dextrose and pink salt. Fermento is a dairy derived powder that provides a tang that takes fermentation months to achieve. I got mine from Sausage Maker. Dextrose is corn sugar. Pink salt is 6.25 percent sodium nitrite and is an ingredient used to keep botulism at bay when curing meat. I got mine at the Spice House. I adapted the recipe from Charcuterie:

Summer Sausage

631 g Pork shoulder, cubed

204 g Pork Fat (in this case from the shoulder), diced

835 g Chuck, trimmed and cubed.

30 g Salt

22 g dextrose

5 g pink salt

60 g Fermento

12 g whole black mustard seed

3 g coriander

1 g garlic powder

I combined the cubed meats (not the fat) with the salts and ran it through the large plate of the meat grinder.

Next I mixed the Fermento with about 100 ml of cold water making a thin paste. Then I ran the whole spices through the grinder and added them along with the garlic to the Fermento paste. Using the paddle attachment I mixed the paste with the meat mixture and continued to to mix until it started to come together, about one minute. Finally, using a really big spoon I folded in the diced fat. I put the mixture in a Ziploc, squeezed all the air out, then into the fridge for three days.


On Wednesday, I ran the mixture through the small plate of the meat grinder, and stuffed it into hog casings, then then let the links rest overnight on hooks. Sorry I didn't take any photos here, but you can look at last years summer sausage post to see what's going on.


On Thursday, ( wait I thought you said three days? Well yeah, if you are in a hurry, but things taste better when you don't rush) I set up the smoker. I wanted to smoke the sausage for as long as possible so cold smoke was the order. In the Spring when the neighbor and I did Sausage Mania, I bought and some hickory sawdust, a steel bowl and a hot plate, in an attempt to simplify the cold smoking process. I figured I could put the hot plate in the bottom of my bullet smoker and smolder the hickory dust for a fine cold smoke. Except it got too hot. Cold smoking (so I have read) is supposed to be done at temperatures below 100F. This time I wasn't as fussy, I was going to let the smoke take its own course. Besides it was already above 90F outside anyway.

The hood temp settled around 125F. My plan was to smoke them as low as possible for five hours then crank my K-Mart hot plate to white hot and finish the sausages to an internal temperature of 150F.

While that's cooking why not relax and make some sausage?

The boys cranked out four pounds of Bratwurst with marjoram and caraway.

Back to the summer sausage. After seven hours of smoking I couldn't get the internal temp past 135F, so I finished them in the oven(final internal temp 160F), then put them in and ice bath, then let them rest unwrapped in the fridge.

On Friday we drove to Wisconsin.

photo credit harryspiderman

photo credit harryspiderman

When weren't pursuing important activities such as sleeping in a hammock or hiking, we ate our summer sausage with cheese, specifically Pleasant Hill Reserve from the Uplands Cheese Company.

Sausage and Mustard?

Amerikanische Rostbratwurst in natural habitat (Wisconsin).

I hope you are making good food and enjoying beautiful Summer weekends.

Cheers.

Building a Cold Smoker: The summer sausage episode part 2

Dear Gentle Readers:

Sorry I have not updated you sooner. Didn't realize the summer sausage would become such a cliffhanger; a regular who shot J.R., huh? For all of you writing in clamoring for closure, I'll give you the short answer so that you can get back to work translating German or whatever it is you do between instant messages, everything turned out very nice. As for the long answer, well....

If August is the Fairest of Months, then September (October too) is the shank of the year. It is the beginning of the season for the art world, school, tv and, oh yes, OSU football. The garden is still plump with tomatoes, squash and eggplant, but the weather is starting to nip. It is simply a beautiful time I feel best enjoyed by sitting around a table with friends and family enjoying something good. To that end I have been cooking like crazy and I have a bunch of episodes ready to go. Future updates may include: Chorizo in the morning, My First Pate, Bacon Madness, and Jerry's Kielbasa. But as we are here on the last day of summer let's finish what we started.

The summer sausage episode part duex.

So we left off last time with sausages hanging to dry in the refrigerator. The recipe called for ten hours or drying, it ended up being two days. So after a couple of days I finally had time to set up the cold smoker.

3. The Rig

I didn't do a whole lot of research on this design, I needed to get the smoke out of my Weber smoker and into my other grill and reduce the smoke temp to under 100F. Me and the boys made a trip to Menard's.

We picked up a galvanized roof vent thingy and some aluminum dryer vent. I fashioned the roof vent to fit into the fire door access on the smoker. I secured it with toggle bolts.

Next I attached the dryer vent tubing. I first tried foil tape, but learned quickly that the adhesive fails at temperature. Some drywall screws solved that problem. Time to get the rig smokin.

4. The smoke

The cold smoke temperature stayed around 90F. I let it go about 4 hours then I hot smoked the sausages to an internal temp of 150F. To raise the temp I simply moved the meat. The hot smoking took about an hour.

For the fire I started with a little charcoal then used split hickory. Since I kept a small fire, I had to tend to it a lot. I suppose you could use the wood chunks that Weber makes but I would trim off the bark first.

So why cold smoke? For smoke you need fire, fire cooks things, so if you want to put a lot of smoke on something without overcooking it, cool the smoke. One of the concerns in holding meat in the 100F zone is that bacteria can thrive; the meat must be cured.

After the cold smoke, the sausages did not look much different but after the hot smoke..Now that looks like sausage.

special thanks to the boys for providing the risers.

5. The finish

So anyway the thuringer and the summer sausage were among the featured attractions for an office party S put together. The German guy from the Dubai office said he had never had thuringer cured and cooked like this but he thought it was good. The guy from the international sales department wanted to know what made the summer sausage spicy, I wasn't sure..Maybe the combination of pepper and the smoke? I had forgotten that I had put in a secret ingredient.

Secret ingredient.

As I mentioned in the previous post (I know, so long ago you forgot) The ingredients for both sausages are virtually identical except one is beef the other pork. Additionally, The pork thuringer had whole peppercorns while the summer sausage had no pepper at all. The spicy flavor came from ground mustard. In the thuringer I used plain old Coleman's mustard powder, but for the summer sausage, I ground up whole black mustard seeds (see photo). I picked it up at the Spice House. I think the mustard made a made the difference. While S thought both sausages were good, I thought the summer sausage was way better. The thuringer seemed rather one dimensional. The fermento was very interesting, both sausages had that salami "tang."

As for cold smoking, it idefinitely worth the trouble. I recently used the rig to smoke bacon and kielbasa. I'll have to do some research to maybe simply the process. A lot of cold smokers use hickory sawdust to create the smoke, maybe that's next. In the mean time I will try to keep you up to date on the state of the sausage in a more timely manner. As fall brings in the cool weather it is time to work on dry curing salami and maybe some guanciale.

Cheers.

P.S. Update on the Prickly Pear Episode: After a month in the basement we had a syrupy tart purple liquid which no one bothered to mix into margaritas. To drink it straight it was peppery, then floral, then a sweetart pucker followed by a hot breath that went through your throat out your shoulders then tingled down your back. Needless to say the entire liter was drunk in one night (the office party). All that was left was several plastic cocktail cups half full of maserated fruit. I said the fruit was too seedy to be eaten(like giant raspberries with seeds the size of Mini Chiclets) but once you start chasing the prickly pear, I guess you have to find out for yourself.

The summer sausage episode part 1

August in the garden. See previous post regarding feelings on August.

The summer sausage episode part 1

1. The Get

I paid twice as much (per pound) for four times as much as I wanted, and I said thank you.

Saturday I went to my local meat packer/processor, twice. Even though I have been there five or six times in as many months, when I go, I still have the nervousness of a tourist asking for baba ganoush in Beirut. The first time we pulled up an older man was walking out from one side of the building, chasing off the casual pecking chickens in the lot, cursing in a combination of English and some eastern European language. He wore a white coat with a white apron and heavy boots. It was uncomfortable with how he yelled; I felt like I was in a stranger’s back yard where a father was yelling at his children to pick up the toys for the tenth time. I followed him towards the store, he went in the out doors, I went in the in doors. I looked around there were maybe ten people in line maybe another ten at the meat counter. The old man stood at the end of checkout preparing to bag still grumbling. The woman behind the register said to him, "It’s okay Dad." He turned and looked at me as I was surveying the crowd, and said gently: "I hate it when it gets crowded, it should be McDonald’s, fast service, but the people are not so fast."
"I’ll come back later."
"No, no don’t worry, take a number they will help you."
"Yeah, I’ve got the kids in the car, I’ll come back, thank you."

I came back about an hour later and it was empty. I asked for some jowl, The man, clarified my request: "Pig?" He squeezed his cheek, "Cheek?" Yes. He grabbed a plastic bag and walked to the back room.

The retail room of the processing plant is not very big, you walk in the meat cases are arranged in a U shape with an island of spices and additives in the middle. On one side are open cold cases with packaged chicken, beef, sausages, tripe hooves, trotters and various smoked and cured bits. Forming the bottom of the shape are two glass cases one with chicken and catfish, then another with beef. On the far side there is one case for lamb and three for pork. Each of the pork cases get gradually more interesting starting with pork chops and loins, then finishing with bellies, ears, and snouts.

At the corner between the beef and the lamb case, a small cutting table was set in the crook. The man returned with a large piece of meat in his arm. He set it on the table.
“how much do you want?”
“Just one, I just need a pound”
It was a pig’s head.
“Skin on, skin off?”
“Skin off, please.”
He took a long knife and started at the ear. No good. The knife was dull, he looked around for another, then he walked to the back room. It’s not too often you see a pig’s head, he had big ears and blue eyes. I started to feel a little queasy so I turned away.

The man returned with a short knife and quickly went to work. I leaned close to watch. He made a light cut below the ear then with his fingers he pulled the skin, it came off like a wet sheet of wallpaper. With bigger cuts he worked the cheek off and down and around the jaw line. Side two, repeat.

“Four pounds, you want...” He starts to remove…
“No I’ll take them both, it’s beautiful, thank you.”

Diced Jowl

2. The Prep

Good thing I got two cheeks, each one yielded only eight ounces of pure fat, which was a little less than what I needed. The recipes are thuringer and summer sausage. I had planned on only making the summer sausage when I realized that I had the ingredients on hand for both. The recipes are almost exactly the same except that summer sausage is mostly beef, and the pork thuringer has the added ingredient of whole peppercorns.

Both sausages are fermented, in this case, the fermentation is simulated by an ingredient called Fermento. Fermento (according to the cookbook) is a dairy based product that creates a tanginess that is similar to bacteria fermenting over a long period of time in a controlled environment. But we only have three days and a fridge. Fermento looks and smells like really sour powdered buttermilk. The other ingredient making its first appearance is dextrose. We’ll use that (again, according to the cookbook, I’m following the recipe this time, I promise) in place of sugar because it more readily distributes in the mixture. Each recipe calls for grinding and mixing together the ingredients, then a fermentation period: For the thuringer, three days, for the summer sausage two.

It's like watching sausage being made.

After I let them sit for a few days I ground them again and stuffed them into casings. Now put them onto smoke sticks and let them air dry…wait a second who has smoke sticks?

How about some stainless steel S hooks from an old IKEA pot rack. After drying for ten hours cold smoke…wait this is getting complicated, a cold smoke? Ice cubes in the water pan? Tune in next week we’ll see what happens.

cheers