Jalapeno & Cheese Sticks Snack Sticks: Start to Finish.

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of from what i gather where today i'm putting together these delicious smoked jalapeno and cheddar snack sticks that everyone's gonna love so let's get started for the sake of getting everything ground and mixed together quickly while it's still very cold i want to have my spice blend ready to go before i begin grinding the meat and for this sausage i'm going to start with 150 grams or about a cup and a quarter of dried milk and that may vary depending on how fine the dry milk you have is i've also got 17 grams of pink cure number one i've got two tablespoons or about 15 grams of garlic powder and 6 tablespoons or 150 grams of plain salt i also wanted some jalapeno powder here but i couldn't get it in time so i got this jalapeno pepper sauce which has a ton of jalapeno flavor and not a lot of other flavors going on in there so it's going to work out really well for this so i'm probably going to use about a quarter cup of this to get the flavor i want i've also got my dehydrated jalapenos and the high temp cheese out in the refrigerator so i just want to mix all my dry ingredients in here and give this a real good shake to get everything blended together very well and then i'll get to grinding the meat now you can get creative and have a whole lot of fun making your own spice blends for your sausages and you can of course use those commercial made mixes and those work very very well i use them all the time in this particular sausage i really want jalapeno flavor to be the star so i'm just going to add that little bit of garlic to make it pop and the rest is going to be jalapeno and cheese i'm using 15 pounds of meat today and i like to go two parts lean to one part fatty so we have got 10 pounds of lean beef you could use venison or elk or bear or goose or whatever lean red meat you want and i've got five pounds of pork belly and sometimes i can just get fatty pork trimmings for my butcher but if i can't i can always get the pork belly i'm going to run these one pass through the 1 8 inch plate on my grinder if you want the texture to be kind of more hot doggy inside go ahead and run it through twice and that's going to give you a little more emulsified type texture but i want some meaty little bits in there so one pass is what i like to do and this is all partially frozen and very cold so i'm going to glove up with some cotton liners and some rubber gloves and go ahead and run this through the [Music] grinder now i want to work fairly quickly and get this all mixed up with my spices while it's still very cold so i'll sprinkle around half of this on here give it a mix this is real cold so this is this is where this cotton liners really come in handy now just kind of fold that over and put in the rest of my seasoning [Music] get that with a bunch of that hot sauce normally i'll dissolve that pink salt in some water before i mix it in here just to kind of help it incorporate a little easier but i just got a little too excited and forgot to do that so it's just mixed in with the rest of the dry seasoning here comes that water it's a cup and a half now i just want to mix the heck out of that and get all of that evenly distributed make sure everything gets cured and seasoned [Music] i've got it partially mixed and now i'm going to come in with my dried jalapenos and these babies are spicy but i'm not going to be shy with them because i want this to be a spicy batch but use your best judgment when applying dried jalapenos i got at least a cup of those mixed in and i'll see how that looks when i get it really distributed i want a little jalapeno in every bite you know i'll grab a little bit no jalapeno in that little bit so i'm gonna add a little more so we're gonna be at about a cup and a half of those dried jalapenos seems to be about right for me oh this smells so good oh baby that's probably enough at this point everything's thoroughly mixed together so i want to take a little piece of that and just make a little patty and i'm going to fry that up and check it for seasoning the reason i'm doing this before i add the cheese is that if i need to add any more salt or garlic or whatever and really have to stir it up i don't want the cheese in there because i don't want to break it up let's give that a try oh it's really good saltiness is right there good jalapeno flavor but i'm going to go ahead and put in the whole bottle of that so i want to leave it a little more jalapeno flavor so i'll put in the rest of the hot sauce mix this together and then we're going to toss in the cheese let's talk about cheese i'm using high temperature cheddar cheese in this recipe today and this cheese has a melting point of around 400 degrees which is much higher than regular cheese and the reason i want to use this cheese is so that it holds its form in shape after this is cooked i've used regular cheese in this before and it'll kind of melt and the fat will run out and it'll either leave a little air pocket there or kind of a grainy bit of cheese it still tastes pretty good but this is designed for making sausage so if you can get this it's definitely the way to go for 15 pounds i'm gonna use about a pound of these little cheese cubes but that is again up to your own personal discretion oh i don't need that so i want to mix this in i feel right away these are real firm chunks but this is the last thing i want to do because i don't want to really i don't want to break them up i certainly don't want to run them through the grinder and smear them so i want all those little little cheese nuggets in my snack sticks they're going to be beautiful and delicious that looks great so now i'm going to cover this i'm going to put this out in the refrigerator overnight to let that cure do its job it's time to set up my sausage making station and let me show you what i got of course i have the sausage mix that's been curing for a day i also have my stuffer if you do this a lot you're going to want to get a dedicated stuff or this is just a little five pounder but it makes this job so much easier than trying to use an attachment on a grinder or a stand mixer i also bought this horn separate because i wanted a good long horn and this is a 3 8 inch horn for making these pepper sticks i've got the casings these are collagen casings they work perfectly for this because they are edible of course and they're one consistent width all the way through so it makes this real easy ah scissors for snipping the sausage and one of these little corn handles for popping any air bubbles that develop inside the sausage so let's put this all together and make some sausage so we'll load up the stuffer just take the sausage mix kind of pack it a little bit reduce the air pockets there at least on the outside pop that down in there and i want to pack it in again to try to reduce any air that gets trapped in here [Music] all right now we'll load this on to the stand and another one of the nice things about these casings is they're usually they're set up real nice to just slide onto the horn super easy in one shot just like that perfect and i'll just leave a little tidbit on the end to hold on to while i get it started all right so okay cranking once that part on the tip gets full up i'll let it go and i'll just really apply really light pressure just to hold the casing on the horn really and just it'll just kind of flow out of there nice and easy you'll get the hang of it another good thing about these casings is i don't need to tie the ends off or anything they're going to hold that sausage mix in there just fine like holding your thumb over the end of a straw there's a vacuum in there it's not going to let that meat fall out of there now i've got my sausages all stuffed up and hanging out on their dowels spaced out just a tiny bit so they're not touching each other and the first step in this is gonna be to let these hang out at room temp for an hour to an hour and a half and that's gonna just let them come up to temp slowly and help that sausage and casing develop a really strong bond after hanging out inside for around an hour these guys are ready to move out to the smoker and begin the process of bringing the temperature up very very slowly the first step is going to be around an hour hour and a half again at 120 degrees and this is meant to dry the casings out really well i'm not going to use any smoke right now and i'm not going to have any water down in the water pan below i want to get those casings very very dry and then add the smoke and the water because a good dry casing and a humid and smoky smoker is going to be the very best to get great smoke penetration now i could feel those casings are all very very dry now so i am going to put smoker chips down in the bottom of here and as soon as i start to smoke i'm going to put water in the water pan and so i'm gonna start this out at 140 give that about an hour and a half of smoke then i'm gonna come out and raise that up to 150 and let that go for a couple hours now these have been going for about an hour and a half at 140 they're starting to get a real nice red color from that smoke now i'm going to bump it up to 150 to continue this slow smoking and cooking phase now this is where you can really customize their sausages to how you like them the length of time that you hit them with the smoke is greatly going to affect the flavor and the longer you hold them at these low temperatures before finishing the cooking is really going to have a big impact on the texture now let me show you what i mean i've got a couple of prop sausages here and they're pretty good but once you start making your own you're really not going to have any need for these so a shorter drying slash smoking time is going to give you this kind of smooth and plump sausage whereas if you let it go longer it's going to get firmer it's going to wrinkle up more and be drier overall and they're both really good so it's really up to you so play around and find your sausage sweet spot so i'm going to go fairly light on the smoke today because i really want to taste that jalapeno flavor so i'm gonna give these guys probably four hours of smoke but then i'll continue to dry them for a couple hours after that before bumping up the temperature and finishing them off i'm also going to take time now to put a little temperature probe down into the middle of one of these i've been holding these at 150 for about three hours and they're starting to just wrinkle a little bit and i think that's just about where i want this batch to be so now i'm going to raise the temperature to 170 to 180 to finish the cooking i want to get these to an internal temperature of 155 degrees and i don't want to go much higher or all the little bits of fat and they're going to start to melt and if it hits 180 they're all going to melt and run out of your sausage and you're going to have a big old mess on your hands they're at 155 degrees fahrenheit internal temperature right now and i want to stop the cooking as quickly as possible now some people like to go with an ice bath for that but i prefer to just hammer them with some ice cold water out of the hose and it's going to take a little while to get the temperature in the middle to actually start dropping so i'm going to hose them down for several minutes and now these are going to hang out out here until they're completely cooled off but oh man it's hard not to just cut into one right now but it'll be better after i wait now let's see how we did they look really good that's just about the dryness i was aiming for they got a nice color from that smoke i can see there's some intact cheese bits and jalapenos in there but now let's give it a try [Music] i'm gonna need a minute hot dog that is some fine sausage now i love it when a plan comes together and this recipe came out pretty much exactly how i wanted it to it's got a nice snap from that casing light smokiness i can really taste the jalapeno still and the cheese chunks are intact and really cheesy it's absolutely fabulous let me see if i can get a good cross section of what's going on inside [Music] there you go you can see right there we got some nice cheese chunks little fat bits jalapeno bits it is some really really good sausage i couldn't be more pleased with this recipe now now i got to get to vacuum sealing this stuff up and get it out of sight or i'm just not going to be able to stop eating it i really hope you try this one and i guarantee you're going to love it and if you do please like and subscribe for more thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Age of Anderson

Views: 843,335

Rating: 4.9096022 out of 5

Keywords: Jalapeno cheese snack sticks, venison snack sticks recipe, wild game snack sticks recipe, wild game recipe, venison pepperoni, venison recipes, deer jerky, deer pepper sticks, homemade pepper sticks, homemade snack sticks, venison snack sticks, snack sticks recipe, smoked snack sticks, smoked game recipes, smoker recipes, smoked deer sticks, deer sausage recipe, wild game sausage recipe, deer sausage, beef snack sticks, jalapeno cheese snack stick recipe

Id: GPpO1Yoi8ZQ

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020