Sausage Stuffer

[MWJ]

Looking for any advise on sausage suffers. There's just know way to make that sound better...

Anyway, I have been making Summer Sausage and forming them into loaves and cooking them; my thought is that I could use casing to make the sausage more uniform. Does anyone have any suggestions/recommendations for this process?

Thanks
Mike

 

[gh1950]

What kind of sausages are you making?

 

[MWJ]

What kind of sausages are you making?

Summer sausage.

 

[KingTuna]

cheese cloth?

 

[hbrad3]

Arnall Grocery Co. in Downtown Newnan sells a Summer Sausage kit. Not sure what all is in it but might be worth looking at.

 

[10-8 Gunworks]

http://www.butcher-packer.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=283

 

[Kahrnut]

www.lemproducts.com

 

[gh1950]

If you want to improve the presentation without investing a lot of money try this - it will work well for big sausages like summer sausage.

Get a good work surface, like a sheet pan. Lay a strip of plastic wrap on it. Take your hand shaped loafs and put one end of the wrap. Roll it up, compacting it with your hands as you go.

When you have the sausage entirely encased in plastic, ( a couple of wraps for strength.

Now here's the secret. Twist the overhand on the end, and then just start tightening the little tail on each end, The more and tighter you twist those tails, the more shapely the sausage will get, until it's bulging with the wrap. You can duplicate a store bought sausage doing this.

Now take a large pot and put in enough water to cover each wrapped sausage. Bring the water up to about 140 deg. - just hot to your hand. You are not cooking the sausage (although you can), but put the wrapped sausages in the water, and let them sit a few minutes. This will "set" them, and when they cool off, you unwrap them and cook and smoke them as you normally do, taking into account that have partially cooked them already. If you bumped the water up to 160 deg. you can cook them all the way through (in the plastic), and there are many traditional sausages cooked this way. If you are going to cook to 160, you really need a thermometer to check the temp.

You actually can cook them in plastic up to boiling, but the fat will separate, and make some greasy looking and tasting sausage. That's why you want to "set" it at a lower temp, them bring it up to temp.

 

[MWJ]

If you want to improve the presentation without investing a lot of money try this - it will work well for big sausages like summer sausage.

Get a good work surface, like a sheet pan. Lay a strip of plastic wrap on it. Take your hand shaped loafs and put one end of the wrap. Roll it up, compacting it with your hands as you go.

When you have the sausage entirely encased in plastic, ( a couple of wraps for strength.

Now here's the secret. Twist the overhand on the end, and then just start tightening the little tail on each end, The more and tighter you twist those tails, the more shapely the sausage will get, until it's bulging with the wrap. You can duplicate a store bought sausage doing this.

Now take a large pot and put in enough water to cover each wrapped sausage. Bring the water up to about 140 deg. - just hot to your hand. You are not cooking the sausage (although you can), but put the wrapped sausages in the water, and let them sit a few minutes. This will "set" them, and when they cool off, you unwrap them and cook and smoke them as you normally do, taking into account that have partially cooked them already. If you bumped the water up to 160 deg. you can cook them all the way through (in the plastic), and there are many traditional sausages cooked this way. If you are going to cook to 160, you really need a thermometer to check the temp.

You actually can cook them in plastic up to boiling, but the fat will separate, and make some greasy looking and tasty sausage. That's why you want to "set" it at a lower temp, them bring it up to temp.

Thanks for the elaborate discription, I will give this a try on the next batch.