Total Failure

This weekend I ruined a perfectly good batch of sausage by trying to be clever. Call it the just reward for the sin of Pride. I had nailed this batch. My test patty tasted exactly like I wanted and was flat out delicious. I had formed the sausages into extremely nice individual sized ropes that were going to make a beautiful presentation. I was going to be bragging about this sausage; “Look at me, look at what I can do!” And so the Lord says, “Well clever little man, let’s make you a little too clever.”

I smoke my sausage on an 18 inch Weber Smokey Mountain bullet. The WSM is awesome by every single measure except for surface area. You can only fit so much meat on an 18 inch grate and sometimes that just isn’t enough. When I am working with ropes of sausage they typically weigh about a pound and I can only fit two at a time on the grate. This means I have to do multiple batches which takes a 2-3 hour process and stretches it out to 6-8 hours. I decided to eliminate this headache by not using the grate. I bought an 18 inch length of a 3/16” stainless steel rod and hung all of my ropes from the rod. I rested the rod on the tabs that the top grate rests on so that all of the sausage was hanging just below the top grate. I had made my ropes much smaller than usual so their bottoms would hang several inches above the bottom grate and water pan. I then placed a thermometer into a sausage link and placed the single link on the top grate. I fired up the smoker and let it run gentle for a few hours until the sausage on the top grate read 168F (yep, I overcooked it…got distracted with other stuff).

I brought my rod of sausage into the kitchen to cool while I munched on the link that I had used to monitor temperature. I took a few pictures and was quite smug with my cleverness. It wasn’t until a few hours later when I went to slice some up for my neighbor that I realized just how bad I had screwed up.

There is a temperature gradient in the WSM and the magnitude and DIRECTION of the gradient are dictated by how you use the water pan. Some people run the water pan empty, some fill it with water, some fill it with sand and cover with foil….there are ~20 different variations and each gives a different operating characteristic. There are no right or wrong answers to the water pan question, just different approaches. My approach is to place a 16 inch heavy ceramic saucer in the pan. One result of this approach, which I had forgotten, is that the resulting temperature gradient is inverted. The temperature a few inches away from my water pan is actually lower than the temperature at my top grate. Significantly lower. The end result is that my hanging sausages were overcooked at the top (farthest from the fire) and were still raw at the bottom of the rope (closest to the water pan). Judging on the different degrees of doneness in my sausage I am going to estimate that they were exposed to a 30-50 degree temperature gradient while being smoked.

Time to be humble again. I obviously still have much to learn.

Andouille

I'm playing with andouille sausage..I won't claim it to be perfect but it is pretty darn good.

2387 g pork butt

36 g salt

10g black pepper

4 g paprika

2 g red pepper flakes

2 g thyme

100 g diced garlic (5 Tbls)

1 tsp cure #1

The pork was cut to roughly 1 inch cubes, mixed with the seasonings and cure and rested in the fridge for two days. I turned the mixture every 12 hours or so.

I diced about a quarter of the pork and ground the rest. The ground pork was mixed with 1/2 cup ice water for a couple minutes with the stand mixer and then the diced pork was folded in. I got four good ropes of sausage as well as two nice sized links. I grilled the links with some pecan wood thrown on the coals to get the great smoke color. The ropes with be treated with a little more care. I'll slowly smoke them for ~4-5 hours to get the true smoke flavor andouille requires.

This does not have as much red pepper as most andouille recipes as I wanted my family to be able to enjoy it. Still, it's a pretty good sausage.

Fresh Sausages

I am getting back into fresh sausages and am having a pretty good time. My recipe framework is pretty standard; 1.5% salt and 1% other seasonings. I am playing around with binders (milk powder, breadcrumbs) at a 3% level but have not made up my mind if they are worth adding or not. For this batch I went with:

2038 grams pork butt

30 grams kosher salt
10 grams black pepper

7 grams granulated garlic

3 grams fresh rosemary

60 grams breadcrumbs

1/2 cup ice water

The pork went through the grinder then was mixed with the seasonings and stuffed into hog casings. One thing I am certain about is that I love working with hog casings and do not care for collagen. You cannot get the collagen casings to curl and they do not hold a twist when linking, they must be tied. Pig guts rule!

A first class outfit.

This post is a big, “Thank you!” to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Service.

A few weekends ago they sponsored a youth feral hog hunt at the Nannie Stringfellow Wildlife Management Area. I was able to attend with my boy and was thrilled with what the Parks and wildlife department made available.

There were roughly 6000 acres of land made available for hunting that they split into 19 compartments. In each compartment they provided a 5x5 enclosed box blind that was located along working paths and game trails. The parks department had heavily baited the areas around the blinds a week in advance to get the hogs used to coming into the kill zones.

It had been raining heavily the week before and much of the land was either marshy or a mud pit. I do not have an ATV and was dreading the mile hike through the mud and slop to get to our blind. “No problem” they said, and drove us out on their ATVs. They dropped us off just steps away from our blind then gave us a phone number to call as soon as we were ready to leave so they would know when to come and pick us up.

For hunters that killed hogs they would drive out and help load the animals onto an ATV and bring it back to the cleaning station. The cleaning station had at least six gambrels mounted from beams under the covered pavilion. There was a fresh water hose for cleaning as well as a front end loader to dispose of the carcasses.

I do not want to give the impression of deluxe accommodations, wasteful spending, etc. There was not much out there….these guys are hoping to get a parking lot in a year or two instead of having to slog through a mud filled path every day. There wasn’t much but what was there was just right. I could not have asked for anything nicer and all it cost me was the $48 public hunt permit that I had bought for dove hunting late last year.

As far as the actual hunt itself, well, it was quality time spent with The Boy. We had a big time eating jerky, peeing in plastic bottles and playing Rock Paper Scissors. We saw plenty of deer, squirrels and birds but the hogs were scarce. After 14 hours of sitting in blinds over the course of two days we finally had a sow come in with dusk falling fast on the last evening of the hunt. We saw her at 250 yards out and patiently waited until she was ~140 yards. The boy took the shot and missed: too little light, too far a shot and needs more practice at the range. Let’s call it a teaching moment.

I’ll line up another hunt soon. Here piggy, piggy, piggy!

Venison Pastrami

Thank you, Mr. Deer. Thank you very much.

The recipe is pretty straightforward; per pound of meat make a cure of:

1 Tbs Morton Tenderquick

1 Tbs brown sugar

1/2 Tbs black pepper

Apply the cure to the meat and let sit in the fridge for 3-5 days depending upon the thickness of the meat. This was a roast from the hind leg that weighed in at 2 lbs. After the roast cures let it soak in water for ~1 hour then dry with paper towels. Apply a rub of black pepper and cook to an internal temp of 160. Wrap tightly in foil and let rest for ~30 minutes.

I've seen pastrami recipes that called for coriander in the rub and some that called for juniper berries. I like things simple so I stuck with pepper.

Pretty damn delicious. Very juicy, flavorful....it has me questioning why so many hunters I talk to keep the back straps and have everything else ground into summer sausage.

Salt and Time and Lemons

We were going to have a hard freeze here on the Gulf Coast and the plants were going to take a beating. Step one in freeze prep is to salvage what fruit you can. So out I went with the girl and we picked two large bags of oranges and four monster bags of lemons.

Oranges are not a problem. You can make orange juice, eat a bunch and send the large pretty ones over to neighbors as belated Christmas gifts. But what the heck are you to do with four monster bags of Meyer lemons? One thing is for sure, the kids will learn to either love or hate lemon pudding.

Another trick is to preserve the lemons in salt. The preparation is pretty straightforward. First you clean and sterilize your containers; I use scalding water and Five Star San. After the containers are clean put ~2 tablespoons of salt across the bottom. Next you wash and scrub the lemons to get off all the bird poop. Quarter the lemons but leave them intact at the base. Pour massive quantities of salt into the cuts and place the lemons into the containers. You should not be dainty. Really press the lemons in there and cram them together. It is important that the lemons are covered in lemon juice and all the pressing and squeezing helps. After the lemons are packed I used the juice of extra lemons to completely cover then topped with another tablespoon of salt. These guys will hang out in the fridge for a few months before I pop them open and start playing.

The only time I have encountered preserved lemons is in a Moroccan chicken and olive dish. I will be scouring the internet in search of more uses. Who knows, maybe I should just drive them up to Austin and drop them off in some guy's salumi shop.

Christmas Deer

Kids really do end up acting like their parents. Once I got on my quest to shoot a pig my boy got the bug too. The first problem was that he is just a monkey and it takes a pretty big gun to take down a big animal. "That's no problem!", he said. He asked for a big gun for his birthday in September and ended up with an H&R single shot 7mm-08. It came with a scope and a youth model stock.



The first time he shot it he held it too loose and the scope smashed him in the forehead. This thing is loud as hell and kicks hard. Neither one of us liked the damn thing...but we pressed on. Three months and ~100 rounds later the boy is hitting his targets at 100 yards.

We finally got a chance to hunt deer over Christmas at my folks place back in Kentucky. We froze our butts off but we managed to bag a small buck. I made the blind and helped my boy spot the deer, but once he saw it he took over. A perfect shot at 100 yards. The buck stumbled for ~30 yards and dropped. Neither my father or I had ever shot a deer before so we were pretty much jumping out of our pants when my boy dropped one on his first hunt. Way cool.

So.....I have been up to my elbows, literally, in venison. We took the backstraps, both hindquarters and one shoulder (the other should had a huge hole in it :) ). We also took a bag of random trimmings not associated with the major cuts. I did not save the ribs, they looked like not much was on them and I did not have the cooler space. I also pitched the organs...I know a deer heart/liver pate would be cool to write about but I honestly did not want to make or eat it.

Butchering the deer has been super fun! Seeing how the leg muscles are connected and pull apart is awsome. It has helped me understand various cuts of meat better now that I actually figured out how to find them. Oh....so that's where a round roast comes from. The deer weighed ~150-200 lbs before we field dressed him. I am guessing we ended up with ~30 lbs of meat. The leg bones have been saved for a stock session this weekend and the skin is being tanned for use as a blanket.

So far we have had peppered steaks, country fried steaks (I am in Texas after all), bacon wrapped, stroganoff and by far my favorite...bratwurst burgers.

3 lbs venison trimmed of all fat, membranes and silverskin.
1 lb pork fat
1/4 pint heavy cream
1 egg
2 Tbs kosher salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder
1/2 nutmeg, grated

Put the meat and fat through the grinder then into the mixer with the seasonings. Mix well for ~2 minutes. You could easily stuff into casings at this point but I was out. Instead I formed the mix into 6 oz patties and pan fried them like a burger. Pretty incredible.

Go hunting. It's fun.