He has been making sausage for about 15 years but he said he still has problem with the texture. It drys out after reheating out of the freezer. After doing research and picking his brain, I think the main reason is he cooks it too hot. And maybe not enough fat. We used his recipe but we added cure and Trehalose. We also changed the technique and smoke temp. I told him that it would help if the meat was almost frozen, this was not a problem, the hog was almost frozen and the fat we had to wait for it to thaw enough to cut up. Also, after stuffing we let it hang and dry before stuffing. Then I started at 130 degrees for 90 min and then slowly ramped the temp up to 170 degree, cooked to 155-160 internal meat temp. In the past he cooked it at 180 degrees and never checked the meat temp, he said that when you bent the sausage and it snapped it was done? After it was done we ran it through an ice water bath.
All in all we had a great time, good Father / Son bonding. Next time we will use less fat, we just went ahead and used what we had which was over 30%. I also like the way my new Smokai generator performed although next time I will use Pellets rather than large chips.
More photos to come
http://www.smokai.com/products/ssg-1100
{edit: I had to edit some of my spelling, sorry I was in a rush when I typed this up. My spelling is not the best anyways but it looked like I was having a stroke while typing this
}
