OK, saw videos about cold smoking with wood “dust” and was smitten. Gotta do some salmon at true cold temps and what better time, than in the winter.
The grand daddy of wood dust burning setups is the ProQ, but they are spendy and lots of Amazon knock offs. Mine is a spiral and for the first 4 hours, was doing great. Then it jumped, or rather penetrated the barrier (which just as in the ProQ, is mesh and a little amazing that it works).
Subsequently lots of smoke and burned up the 18 hour spiral in about 4 more hours.
My wood dust is just pellets that I watered down to cause them to disintegrate, and then dryed back out. They seem very “dusty”. Sawdust is plenty fine I think. Maybe too fine or too dusty?
Anyone have experience? The specialty sawdust is kind of expensive.
Just finishing up the last few pounds of my chicken jalapeno summer sausage. Bring it in to sous vide when it hits 150 degrees. If you make chicken summer sausage you really have to get good protein extraction. I also use sure gel for chicken. I use soy protein for my pork sausages, just seems to work well with pork.
Funny that auto-fill reminds me how many of my posts start with “25lb batch of…”. Well, I guess here is another one!
Anyways I was literally at Costco with a cart full of eye of round at $4.69/lb when a buddy I had earlier complained about the price to sent me a picture of a local grocery (Jewel) that had a app coupon for $1.99/lb bagged whole eye of rounds. Limit of 15lb so after creating an account for my wife I was able to grab what I needed for this 25lb batch. My guesstimate puts it at $2.75/lb when you account for loss due to trimming.
Did an “8” which is around 1/4" on my slicer. 25lb isn’t easy to marinate overnight and I wanted good coverage so I split the seasoning/cure in half and mixed up 12.5lb at a time in a huge stainless bowl with 3.5 cups water. I dredged each piece in the bowl liquid as I added it and then gave it a good mix by hand before laying it into my 12QT cambro. It was layered like an eggplant parmesan. Dumped remaining liquid on top and repeated with second half.
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The meat had a 12 hour cure before loading it up this morning. This batch filled my Pitts & Spitts 1250 (threw winter jacket on it too), my PK100, and 4 trays in my Excalibur dehydrator. Have never made beef jerky in a dehydrator so will be curious how it is.
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Currently have the dehydrator at 160F and the smokers each at 180F. I had preheated the smokers to 250F for awhile before loading. The P&S recovered instantly. The PK100 is taking some time and was at 140F a bit after loading. The trays were all filled inside so was just open enough to load 6 trays in. Currently all vents are closed on PK100 and may leave like this for 2 hours before adding smoke depending where smoker temp is. Outside temps are in low 20s with a decent wind.
Hello, this is my first post
Today I smoked up my first batch of snack sticks in probably a year almost with my PK 100, I’ve done many batches of snack sticks with the smoker and I’ve had no issues except the weather turned on me (got cold and really windy)
It was about -6°C and I had issues getting the smoker up to temp with the final 180F step with all the dampers closed.
Needless to say, everything was going good until the temperature of my snack sticks randomly started dropping after they hit 141°F down to 135°F once they were in the final cooking stage. So I opened the door to see what was going on and the moisture pan was empty so I dumped a bunch more water in and plugged off the chimney almost completely with a board. This boosted the temperature up to 180° inside the smoker and within 1.5-2 hours the snack sticks had a temperature of 165, so I open the door to check things out everything was covered in moisture (probably from me blocking the chimney), so I removed the pan of water and opened the chimney a bit to allow things to dry out for a little while but wile I had the door open the internal temperature of the snack sticks dropped to about 142°F. After this I couldn’t get the temperature of the snack sticks to recover. I ended up getting frustrated and pulled them after an hour. Where they were close together the casing is a bit soft and lacking that nice red colour.
My biggest question is do you think they are actually safe to eat or are they under cooked because the outside is soft and not fully died if spots?
is there a possibility the humidity was to high inside and would this cause an issue to promote the growth of bacteria?
I’ve never had these kinds of issues before.
Any input would be appreciated.
We are bringing in a towel that excels at evaporating water up into the air of your smoker from your water pan. This all stems from several years ago when I was obsessed with increasing the Relative Humidty in a home smoker. Doing that speeds the cooking process and helps prevent your food from drying out.
However, we are struggling with the name of this product. It is a “towel” that is designed to increase the relative humidity of your smoker…so SEO is going to be a nightmare whatever we do. I still prefer the word towel to be somewhere in the name but if that doesn’t happen it isn’t going to destroy things.
So, list some favorites and the winner will get a free one and a few other goodies!
I’m curious what jerky seasonings should be using water and which ones shouldn’t. Maybe they all are, but that’s why I’m asking. I noticed the pepper and garlic lists water on the bag but I believe the bold does not. Is there a table or list anywhere showing what seasonings should be using water vs which are dry marinades?
Someone please help me figure out snack sticks!!!
Yesterday, I attempted to smoke 20lbs of snack sticks for the first time. I failed miserably! According to what I’ve read, what should be a 4-5 hour task turned into 11 hours and all 20 pounds of snack sticks ruined. All of the fat rendered out of the meat and looked like a sheath of fat between the meat and the casing. Entire process is below…
Friday, I thawed out 20 lbs. of ground venison that had somewhere between 10-20% pork fat in it from the deer processor. I ran all 20 lbs. through the grinder once (even though it was already ground by the processor). After grinding, I put all 20 pounds in a meat mixer and added the seasoning and cure packets from a “Hi Mountain” snack stick kit and then 5 cups of water. I mixed for what seemed like forever. Probably 20 minutes or so. I mixed for a while because I felt like the 20 lb capacity mixer was too full and it just didn’t seem like it was mixing very well. I used a spatula to help churn things around as the mixing blades passed by. I did that until I thought I had, what in my opinion looked like, good protein extraction. I’m new to this so I’m only going off of watching Walton’s and Meatgistics videos over the last week. Next, I stuffed 17 pounds of meat into the 19mm smoked collagen casings. I ran out of casing so I stuffed the remaining 3 pounds into a summer sausage casing that had been soaking for 30 minutes. Finally, I put everything in the refrigerator overnight (12 hours).
The next morning, at 11am, I weaved the long stuffed casings up and down in between the slots of the top rack of my Masterbuilt smoker. The casings hung down about 20 inches from the top rack. Then I turned the smoker on and followed the Mestgistics smoking schedule to a T. Or at least I tried. 120° for 1 hour (no water, no smoke, vent wide open). Bumped up to 130° for 1 hour (no water, no smoke, vent 3/4 closed). Bumped up to 150° for 1 hour (added full water pan and soaked mesquite wood chips). Bumped up to 160° for one hour (added more wood chips). At this point, I was 4 hours in and the temperature of the meat was only at 130° and VERY SLOWLY climbing. I’m talking like one degree every half hour. I Bumped up to 175° hoping to be done when the meat reached 165° but now the temp was climbing even slower. Thinking the meat should’ve been done by now, I decided to bump the temp to 190°. Still very little increase in meat temp. It’s now 9pm (10 hours from when I first turned the smoker on) and still had 10 degrees to go according to my meat thermometer. I cranked the temp to 225° and finally got the meat temp to 165° an hour later. I immediately removed the meat and put it all in a cooler ice bath for 10 minutes. I pulled everything out of the ice bath and placed it on the kitchen table. What I saw was something along the lines of what you’d see if your wife gave birth to an alien. I didn’t know what I was looking at and how “THAT” was the end result of all my hard work. Most of the entire length of the casings had large, long white streaks. Several spots even had like fluid in the casing that I could move around by sliding my finger along the casing. I cut a section open length wise and not only was the casing not adhered to the meat, but the white sections I originally noticed was all of the fat that had rendered out of the meat. Like a sheath of fat between the meat and the casing. Even the 3 pound summer sausage casing turned out the same way. I did rinse the fat sheath away and taste the meat and you couldn’t even taste the smallest hint of smoke. Needless to say, it was all a disaster and I’m very discouraged. Especially wasting 20 pounds of venison. Extra notes: the meat thermometer works as it should. The smoker was outside in 35° weather. PLEASE HELP!6EB18F25-D4C9-413F-82D2-BDFDD7466199.jpeg 78FC92C9-47E9-4906-8975-30149BEFCD59.jpeg ABCC7EC2-38BE-4A27-9CF3-30E62520BB5B.jpeg
Im a newbie at attempting smoked summer sausage. I took out my sausage at 157 deg. Internal temp. After 13 hrs. Of smoking. Outside temp was 33 deg.F. My sausage looked thinner and wrinkly when I took it out of smoker (3 lb. Fibrous casings) I did not use a waterpan. My temperature steps were
145 / 1 hr. Open damper
160/3 hrs with smoke 3/4 closed damper
185/3hrs closed damper
200/6hrs closed damper
I did not use water bath I used a snow bank to cool off sausage? After cooling completely I put in fridge overnight. Now some of them are really wrinkled. I used a grinder to stuff the casings ( I soaked the fibrous casings 45 min.) I used hog rings to seal. I could use some good advice. TIA. The flavor is great i used waltons H seasoning.
Dew Point towel
My father in law wants to make a small batch of snack sticks on his pellet grill. He hasn’t done this before and needs some tips. His pellet grill only goes down to 180*f. Is it a bad idea to even try it? Anyone have experience making sticks this way?
I’m curious if anyone has used pork loin to make snack sticks? I’m toying with the idea, as we have pork loins on sale at a very good price from time to time. Knowing it is very lean, I would add in straight pork fat to achieve a 25-30% fat content.
My snack sticks have been in the MES smoker since 3:00. 1 hour of drying at 100. 90 mins @ 120 with smoke, 1 hour @ 140 and then turned the Masterbuilt up to 170, but sticks are still at internal of 115 after about 5 hours ? 50/50 pork with Willie’s seasoning, #1 cure, and ECA. I have brought them in and put them in to the oven to finish. But I’m afraid they were in the ‘danger zone” too long. I know the cure helps with that, but I don’t know how much? Will they be safe to eat when I get them to 160 internal? Thanks for your help!
Thanks Waltons for another perfect turkey. As always turned out great.20221225_194228.jpg
I am going to make venison summer sausage next week. Am going use waltons h seasoning can I add liquid smoke and if I can how much for 25 pounds
I found a package of perch fillets in the freezer and was thinking about curing and smoking them.
Salmon is the only other fish I have experience smoking but I am wondering if anyone here has smoked perch before?
Since they are fillets and small ones at that, I am concerned about them drying out.
Has anyone smoked cheese,chopped it up,put in the fridge overnight to dry it some.Then use it in summer sausage,snack sticks?
If anyone is looking for an awesome grill/smoker temp probe, the thermoworks smoke is awesome. I highly recommend it to anyone.
Not affiliated in any way shape or form. Just an extremely happy long time user. I have others but my go to, is the thermoworks smoke, and thermopen one.
I was in the retail shop putting something back that we stole for a video and a customer asked me a very interesting question. With the processes for snack sticks and summer sausage being so close, why couldn’t he put them both in the smoker at the same time if he had the room. My initial response was no, that shouldn’t be done because the ending schedule would cause, or risk causing case hardening. BUT if you temped the sticks first, and then the summer sausage what would the downside be?
Now, he is not using ECA, only additive was Sure Gel Meat Binder after thinking about it more I don’t see an issue with it other than minute differences in smoke schedule, and since he has an electric smoker, that will have a greater wave variability than the differences between the 2 schedules he was using, there really isn’t a good reason that I could think of.
Interested to see if anyone is thinking of something I am not.
IMG_1309 (002).jpg My boss got me this for christmas! Anyone have any experience with one. Any tips?
Visit waltons.com to find everything for meat processing.
Walton's - Everything But The Meat!
