Summer Sausage Time

Although deer hunting was not as productive as I would have liked, a couple of events gave me the needed venison that I was looking for to get a couple of homemade sausages made.  First was my neighbor Jake.  Jake found a freshly killed doe on the road in front of our neighborhood so he called the police, gutted it out and quartered it up.  Volunteering to help him we did the 2 front quarters and my reward was some trimmings.  Second, my friend Kevin and his son Ben did pretty well this year and had some leftover trimmings, about 25 pounds worth and gave them to me.  The first project was to try and make some venison summer sausage.  After ordering the seasonings from Psseasoning, a good source for sausage seasonings in Iron Ridge, Wisconsin the intent was to make 25 pounds of Summer Sausage using 1/2 venison and 1/2 70% lean pork trimmings.  One of my big complaints about Minnesota made summer sausage is it's pretty plain.  Locals like it but if you ever had Pat's Summer Sausage from Arcadia, Wisconsin you would know what I am referring to!  Most Wisconsin based summer sausage has a distinct tang to it cause by using bacterial starter cultures to change natural and added sugars in the meat to lactic acid which adds that tang to the flavor.  Because the curing takes a few days in a moist and warm environment, there is a product called Fermento, a dried whey/protein mix (essentially dried buttermilk) that can be mixed with your sausage meat prior to stuffing and smoking and it gives the same effect without having to cure the meat first.  So last Saturday my neighbor Lory and I tried our luck at our first batch of summer sausage.  I got 13 pounds of  70/30 (70% lean/30% fat) pork trimmings at the meat market in Rogers, MN.  Using a premixed Psseasoning's Blue Ribbon Summer Sausage seasoning, 12 pounds of venison trimmings and some sausage casings from Cabela's Lory had ground the meat before I arrived and we were ready to go.  Because I like mustard seed and garlic in the sausage, we split up the meat into 12.5 pound batches as I have a meet mixer that does a great job of mixing the pork, venison, seasonings, the fermento,

Fermento

together.  The seasoning mix comes with maple cure which give the sausage the right amount of salt and sodium nitrite to assure the right flavor and food safety while smoking.  Although I have an old fashioned sausage stuffer, Lory had his grinder/stuffer set up in place so we decided to use that.  Mixing all the ingredients together we ended up with a nice tube of meat ready to be stuffed in the casings.  It took longer than we expected because the grinder/stuffer set up wasn't exactly the ideal situation as the meat being re pushed into the auger, then another auger to push the meat down the stuffing tube, it tended to mush up the meat somewhat.  Never the less we were able to get all 20 smaller casings stuffed and thanks to out neighbor Tim, it was easy to seal the ends with his hog ring pliers.   Because it was easier to track the progress of the smoke from his family room overlooking the patio, we brought my electric Cookshack insulated smoker over and set it up where we could easily see it.  As well, I had ordered a Bluetooth Smokehouse temperature probe that has 2 separate sensors, we could monitor the progress right on our cell phones.  The first part was to preheat the smoker to 100 degrees F then put the meat in the smoker for about an hour.  What this does is slowly heat up the meat so the outside stays moist and doesn't have a tendency to dry out.  The next 3 hours, we turned the temperature up to about 175 degrees and put some apple wood in the wood drawer and induced a heavy smoke for about 3 hours.  After the smoke had done it's job it was simply a waiting game until the meat got to 146 degrees F, about 4 total hours in the smoke house.  Once the correct temperature was obtained we removed the meat from the smoker and put them in the sink with ice water, for about 2 minutes.  The first sample tasted fabulous but the casings stuck to the meat and it needed to sit for a while to dry out somewhat.  As stated before the texture of the finished product was not very coarse and was quite fine, as stated a product of the stuffing method.  Both Lory and I agreed that we need to use the old fashioned stuffer the next time.  The flavor was pretty good however, just the right amount of smoke and the fermento did it's job.  As well some time in the refrigerator has helped to firm it up somewhat.  We have decided it is good enough to try again as both Lory and I have plenty of venison scraps.  We've ordered more seasoning, fermento, casings, and did get some high temperature cheese to see how that works.  Our goal is to make another batch sometime in late February depending on how long our current supply lasts.

Jared and Ben with a nice walleye on Lake of the Woods

The weather forecast for last weekend was snow on Friday and Saturday.  Although we did not get the predicted 8 - 12 inches, it still made for a wintery weekend, a good one for making Summer Sausage.  On the other hand my good friend Ben went with his wife and son Jared back to Springsteel Island Resort to fish the weekend.  We stayed in touch as he arrived on Thursday night as they planned on staying in the heated ice house for the weekend.  Our new friend Dave was going up as well.  Ben kept me updated throughout the weekend as they said Thursday was slow, Friday picked up quite a bit, proof is in this picture, while Saturday was slow again.  They were supposed to get a good dumping of snow up north but it sort of fizzled out before they had to leave.  Ben left his skid house up there which presents a great opportunity for me to drag my wheel house up there for a weekend of fishing on the ice.  Normally Mark Applen, Russ Praught and a few others would be on Red Lake this weekend however the significant amount of snow has really dampened the opportunities on Red as they are only getting out 2 - 3 miles.  As well they have a layer of slush under the snow and on top of the ice that makes getting out and back in a problem.  Red closes at the end of February but Lake of the Woods is open till April 15th, so there might be more opportunities to fish and Springsteel Island is only about an hour further north than JR's is.  I feel sorry for JR's but it's pretty hard to fight Mother Nature.  Anyway the winter is far from over!  The next few weeks may determine what is the next ice fishing strategy as Bill Lundeen and I have made some definite plans to fish closer lakes.