How to Make Homemade Sausage – Part 2 (Smoking)

If you read Part I you know that I recently made my own homemade sausage.  I wasn’t sure the best way to prepare the sausage so I decided to try two different styles of preparation, smoking and grilling.

Smoking

Since I had never smoked sausage before, I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of control over my smoker, so I used my [easyazon_link identifier=”B00TJ1OZR0″ locale=”US” tag=”backyardmov05-20″]Masterbuilt Electric Smoker[/easyazon_link].  I chopped up the sausage links into two sausage bundles.  By using little toothpicks I was able to suspend the sausage links from the top rack, to give it a nice old world look and allow the circulation of plenty of smoke around the sausages.

I didn’t add a lot of fat to the sausage filling so I was worried about all the fat rendering out and the sausage becoming too dry if I cooked it at too high a temperature.  Based on my internet surfing, I decided to set the smoker to 175F, with a target of 165F internal temp for the sausages.  I used apple wood chips for my smoke flavor, but I wasn’t getting much in the way of smoke at such a low temperature, so I also used my [easyazon_link identifier=”B00CS6YFIC” locale=”US” tag=”backyardmov05-20″]A-maze-n Smoke Tube[/easyazon_link].  The A-maze-n Smoke Tube solved the smoke issue.

175F took entirely too long though, so I raised the temperature to 200F, with no discernible impact on the sausage other than cooking them a little faster.  All in all, it took 6-7 hours to get the sausages to temp.  I was a little concerned about the amount of time the meat spent below 165F, since I didn’t use curing salt.  In the future, I will definitely use the curing salt to mitigate the risk.  I took the risk and I am still alive to tell the story, but I don’t recommend taking the risk.

After the sausages came to temp, I plunged them in an ice water bath to stop the cooking process.  I then patted them dry, vacuum sealed them, and stored them in the fridge.  I served the cooled sausage by slicing it up and offering it with slices of smoked cheese and crackers.  They were pretty tasty, but not amazing.

Grilling

I had spared a few sausages from the smoker, so I put them in a pot with some homebrewed beer and brought the sausages to a boil.  While I cooked the sausages in the pot, I brought my [easyazon_link identifier=”B00FDOONEC” locale=”US” tag=”backyardmov05-20″]Weber Q[/easyazon_link] up to high heat.  After the sausages appeared be cooked in the beer, I grilled them to brown them up and make some nice grill marks.  We ended up serving them in individual slices.  While the sausage recipe still needs some tinkering, the sausages were pretty freaking delicious.  The family all decided that the fresh sausages were definitely the way to go.

Conclusion:

I still have some work to do on the smoked sausage.  I think my technique was sound, but I need to work on my recipe design to make it friendlier/safer to the smoking process.

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