- Hey everybody I'm Chef
Tom with All Things Barbecue and today I'm gonna be
making summer sausage. (splashing) (dripping) This summer sausage we're making today will be two-thirds venison
and one-third beef fat. Now the venison is already ground, it came from the processor that way. But the beef has come
off of some strip loin and it's all still in tack. So, we're gonna grind
those together first. Now as always, when we're
making sausage we want our components to be as cold as possible, so that we're not melting any of the fat. So, all of this stuff has
just come out of the freezer. And since about two-thirds
of our meat as already been ground, we're just gonna
finish this with a finer die. This is actually a 4.5 millimeter. This is our partially frozen
venison, it's nice and cold. And we're gonna be making, two
roughly three pound sausages. Like I said, this just came
off the chain of a strip loin, so it's mostly fat. If you don't have some beef fat, you could always use pork
fat, especially a port butt, take that fat cap off of
there, that'll work great. But for this sausage, generally speaking, I wanna go with at least 30% fat. (meat grinding) Now that this is all ground,
it's pretty warm out here so I'm gonna go throw
this into the freezer just for about 15 minutes,
to make sure none of that fat melts before we start mixing. Alright the next step in
this process is for us to mix up the sausage. So, I'm gonna take the meat,
we're gonna add our seasoning, which we're gonna dissolve into some water and then we're also gonna
mix in some high temp cheese. Now, what we want to do
here is get all of this into a mixing bowl and beat it
until it gets nice and tacky and forms that primary bind which gives us a nice sausage texture. That seasoning mixture that I mentioned is the LEM Backwoods
Summer Sausage Seasoning. And this makes this whole
process really simple. So, this already includes
the seasoning itself. Of course, we've got salt and some garlic, black pepper, some other spices in there. So I'm gonna add that
to five ounces of water. This is set up to do five pounds of meat, so we'll be just a little
light on seasoning. But it also includes a cure packet and this is that pink curing salt that's going to cure the meat for us. All we have to do is mix that up with the proper amount of water. You can smell those spices
in there, it's awesome. I'm just gonna evenly
distribute this over our meat. And I wanna quickly just
move everything around so we know it's nice and even. I'm not gonna handle this too much cause I don't want to melt the fat. Alright, this is a pretty big batch, so I'm gonna move half of
this over to our mixing bowl. And we'll start beating
this over medium speed, to help form that primary
bind that gives our sausage such a great texture. (mixer whirring) Alright, so what we're
feeling for is to see if this is kinda tacky, kinda
sticky and does it hold together. So, it's not falling apart, that's good. The last thing we're gonna do
before we get this out of here is add a little bit of
our high temp cheese. Now we're working with about
three pounds in here right now, and we wanna go with
about 10% weight in cheese so that'll be roughly five ounces. We've got a couple of these
high temp cheeses today. One is the hot pepper,
the other is the cheddar, these are both from LEM Backwoods as well. What these do for you is they
make sure that they don't melt while you're smoking it,
so that you actually bite into nice, gooey bits of
cheese in the sausage. We'll just go slowly to incorporate these, so that we don't break them up too much. Alright. That's all that takes. Now we're just gonna repeat the process with the other half of the meat. Alright, I still want to handle
this as little as possible, but we're gonna use our
hands for what we need to use our hands for. I'm gonna take this first
half, kinda spread it around. This is gonna make sure
our two summer sausages don't come out completely different. Alright and once again, we're
gonna go back into the freezer just to make sure everything stays cold before we stuff this into it's casing. Alright, we've got the
sausage stuffer set up, we've got our chilled down meat, it was in the freezer
for about 15 more minutes and we're gonna get this
down here into this hopper. Push it down, force all the air out, so we don't get any air
pockets, while we're working. You'll also notice that
we have the widest horn that we have installed here on the end and that's because we're
gonna be working with these large fibrous casings. These are inedible casings
that you'll just cut off after you've smoked your summer sausage. As far as the preparation
of the casings go, it's really easy, just
soak it in some warm water for about half an hour before
you stuff your sausage. As soon as we meet resistance
we'll stop cranking, grab one of our casings. Get any excess water out of there. And then we can begin to fill
with the sausage filling. Just give it a good pinch around the horn that way it gets all the way filled before it moves down the line. And then when we get near the end here, you want to leave a little
extra room for us to tie off. So, I'm gonna move this whole part off. And then I'm gonna cinch this down and kinda push the
filling down a little bit. Twist that up and put our knot on the end. Got a long piece of string,
I'm gonna tie it one end. And then what I can do is kinda cinch this a little bit tighter by
swinging this string around and working the string lower and lower so we have a nice compact sausage. Now we gotta give these
guys overnight in the fridge for that cure to get working. We're gonna smoke these tomorrow morning. So, we'll see you guys tomorrow. Hey good morning you guys. These sausages have sat overnight, the cure has worked on the meat, they've really firmed up, which is cool and we're gonna go ahead and
get them onto the smoker now. Now we're cooking on the Yoder's
Smoker YS640 Pellet Grill it's set to 200 degrees and I've got some cherry and pecan pellets
mixed together in the hopper. We're gonna smoke these guys
at 200 for several hours. We're gonna go real low
and slow with these. So, we're gonna wait until
these get to 160 internal before we remove them from the grill. But for now, we've got several
hours of smokin' to get into. The summer sausage has been
on for about five hours now, so it's soaked up a lot of smoke and the internal temperature is sitting at 160 degrees fahrenheit. So these are ready to
come off of the smoker. Now we had to poke a hole in here, so that we could see
what the temperature was and you can see just how
much fat is coming out of that hole. So, what I want to do
now is transfer these to the refrigerator to let
all that fat chill down all the meat chill down,
it'll kinda solidify and then we can cut the casings off and go ahead and slice
these up and taste them. Unfortunately this is the hard part. You gotta wait, you gotta
wait until they're cooled off. Hey guys, the wait is over. We let these things chill overnight, it's been a three day process, I can't wait to dig
into this summer sausage and see how it tastes. Oh, that's beautiful. Fantastic texture. Look at that beautiful red color. Oh, all that fat. Oh man, the texture is
perfect, just holding together. The only pockets we have in
there is the cheese pockets. That just looks fantastic. Let's check it out. Salty and fatty, those
things work great together. The flavor is really incredible, I mean, definitely tell
there's venison in there, but the beef fat kinda changes
the whole flavor profile. The very first thing you
notice though is the texture. Classic summer sausage texture. Largely due to the cure,
that's in that packet, but also properly mixing this
and keeping your temperatures just right, always keeping it cold. You lay these out on a
platter with some cheeses and some of our homemade pickles and this is gonna be a hit every time. Know that LEM Backwoods Summer
Sausage Seasoning packet is a really great jumping off point. You know, for me, I wouldn't mind a little extra heat in there. You could always fold
in some diced Jalapenos, add some red chili flakes There's a ton of different
things you guys could do to change this up and
make it uniquely your own. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video,
please hit that subscribe button and if you have any questions or comments, if there's anything you'd
like to see us cook, let me know in the comment
section down below. For more recipes, tips, and techniques, head over to thesauce.atbbq.com. All Things Barbecue, where
barbecue legends are made.
