Brianzipperdog123 asked about these in the Roll Call thread. I posted the recipe there, but that’s a great place for it to get buried. Plus, I’ve done a couple of batches since and made a couple of changes. I dropped the egg wash and am much happier with the crust on the top of the roll. I also made them larger (8 to a batch instead of 10) to better accommodate fillings and baked a little longer to make up for that. A batch of 10 was closer to a large dinner roll. In fact, I bet dividing the batch into 12 rolls would be about a perfect dinner roll size (and baking more like 12-13 minutes, total).

HARD ROLLS FOR WURST
YIELD: 10 buns or rolls

INGREDIENTS

 500 g flour (unbleached all purpose 4 cups) (or sub 100g whole wheat)
 313 g water (11 ounces)
 10g salt (1 2/3 teaspoons table salt)
 3g instant yeast (1 teaspoon)
 5g sugar (1 teaspoon)
 10g butter (2 teaspoons)
 (optional, but not recommended) 1 egg (beaten with 1 teaspoon water for wash

DIRECTIONS

 Mix all dry ingredients except salt well and add water until all of the flour is wetted and there are no
lumps.
 Let the dough sit covered for 20 minutes, then knead with bread hook for 3 minutes.
 Rest for 15 minutes, sprinkle the salt over the dough, and knead for additional 3 minutes until the
dough is uniform and somewhat smooth. Cover and let rest 10 minutes.
 Stretch and fold the dough letter-style (top to bottom and side to side) and let sit for 30 more min,
covered.
 Stretch and fold and place dough in fridge overnight, covered.
 Next morning, If the dough didn’t double in volume, let it sit out until it does.
 Divide into 8 pieces weighing 85 to 88 g each and shape as desired.
 Preheat oven to 450 F with a pan for steaming at the bottom of the oven.
 Cover dough with oiled plastic and let proof until it’s 1.5 to twice it’s volume (about 90 minutes)
 Just before baking, slash each roll lengthwise across the center. If desired (but not recommended), brush with the egg wash (BEFORE slashing).
 Add 1 cup of hot water to the steam pan and bake for 8 minutes. Turn the
pan and bake for 8 more minutes or until 205-210F internally. Remove baked rolls to a cooling rack for at least an hour to properly cool (although dinner rolls can be served warm from the oven).

I have all this sausage around, but no proper rolls.

Fixed that!

Howdy, y’all!

I’m in Bellaire, Texas, a small municipality pretty surrounded by Houston. We like to say that Houston is our suburb.

Both my parents are avid and excellent cooks, so I’ve been cooking for as long as I could pull up a chair to the stove or grill. I’ve been into cooking and food science for a very long time, and I’m always looking to learn something new. More specific to here, I’ve been into low-and-slow smoking for about 20 years. Other than what happens with barbecue-style smoking, I’ve done only a bit of curing here and there (mostly corned beef or pastrami or something like that), and I only started making sausage about a month ago.

My current cookers are a Weber kettle, a Klose 20x36 offset, and a Camp Chef Lux pellet cooker. I’m strongly considering a PK 100 and probably will pull the trigger on that sooner than later.

My favorite meat snack probably is dried sausage of just about any sort, followed up very closely by jerky and cracklins.

I’m very happy to have come across Walton’s when looking for sausage-making gear, as well as Meatgistics for what I’ve already learned. I’m looking forward to more.

Cheers, y’all!

I did back when I started this sort of cooking, but I left the stress behind a long time ago. Some of that is due to experience with what might happen during a cook, but most of it is having made peace with the fact that things will happen. Just take it as it comes and move along. If you have any idea what you are doing, you’re going to make something far beyond what just about anyone normally gets.

Time is the greatest luxury, so give yourself plenty of it. Anything smoked holds well. Anything smoked also reheats well, so make it in advance and reheat, if you can get away with that. On that, you can reheat on site and make it look like you are “cooking.”

As for large events, choose your audience wisely (i.e., know you’re dealing with someone who won’t ride your butt about everything). Be confident in your knowledge and ability. Be humble, and accept comments graciously (no matter how they may be intended). In all likelihood, the negative comments sound louder than the positive, but that’s just because folks with negative comments tend to make much greater efforts to get them across. A lot of folks that like what you did may never say so to your face. If you know you delivered what you promised, then, you delivered what you promised.

Know that you never, ever can please everyone with everything you do, so never be disappointed when you don’t. Learn any lessons that are there to be learned, and then drive on.

I here you, man. I always bake bread, but it’s much more on an occasional basis than it is right now. In the last month, I’ve done rye bread, ciabatta, semolina bread, biscotti, farinata, pita, and I don’t know what all else.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be a member of a number of online communities, and this one rapidly has become an important one. It really does make a difference when a business is interested in getting to know its customers. Y’all want interaction beyond just orders, and you like to see your customers interact with each other. Not only do you want to teach your customers, you also want to learn from them, and you want them to learn from each other. It’s a wonderful thing, and it takes a genuine effort.

I echo Chef’s words that y’all are doing something right. This community is another example of how Walton’s wants to provide for its customers, how y’all want us to have the best experience we can, and how y’all know that works to everyone’s benefit on every level. Bravo!

All I wanted to do was make sausage!

“Low and slow” does not mean “as low and as slow as possible.” The idea of “low and slow” is to “cook” the collagen (the primary protein in connective tissue and what makes meat tough) to get gelatin. That both tenderizes the meat and retains moisture. Gelatin is what makes something “lip smackin’”! That reaction requires moisture, and one of the best cooking methods to make it happen is braising.

The idea behind wrapping is to achieve something of a braise. It also slows down evaporation. That keeps the meat from drying out on the pit, and it gets you through the plateau. In “Modernist Cuisine,” the authors finally showed us that the plateau is pretty much due to evaporative cooling. In other words, you aren’t so doing much cooking during the plateau. Instead, you are spending a bunch of time and fuel to dry out your final product. Or, you can wrap the brisket and get through that point (and get a better product).

Just like ribs, brisket’s high ratio of surface area to volume makes it particularly vulnerable to evaporative cooling. That’s why we wrap 'em both.

As for pink butcher paper v. foil? I’ve used them both and do agree that butcher paper sets the bark better than foil. It seems to allow enough evaporation to set the bark but not so much to stall the cooking. However, I get the same result just by opening up the foil when my brisket gets close to finishing (not on the bottom, mind you, but that’s the point, and I’m not as concerned about the bark on it). Since I’m only cooking 1 or 2 briskets at a time (instead of the 100 or so that Franklin’s cooks in a day), I don’t mind the extra trouble. Of course, it’s not like wrapping with butcher paper is much trouble.

So, I’m quite happy using either. Whatever is in front of me will do. If Aaron Franklin says that pink butcher paper is better, then I believe him. The man cooks more briskets in a few days than I’m likely to cook in my lifetime, so I’m going to listen to him. However, in my situation, it doesn’t really make much difference.

Yesterday’s lunch. I grilled up some of the latest batch of what’s becoming our “house” sausage.

Tex_77 Good gracious. The prelude to that review was something like “this car was the most amazing thing we’d ever driven . . . until the wheels came clean off.”

Brianzipperdog123 I couldn’t agree more. Metric makes things so much easier, especially when you need to adjust the batch size.

Tex_77 Yes, replace up to 100g (20%). I recommend it, actually. It just adds a little something.

I’m a big fan of Hatch chilis. I still need to go get my year’s supply, though!

DeerSlayer That doesn’t sound like a bad plan at all for kielbasa. You probably can just set that sous vide wand to your target 152 and drop the kielbasa in for 45 minutes to an hour (probably not even that long, but it won’t hurt, and you’ll know you got it where you want it.)

For Summer sausage, I recommend putting in the time to slowly bring it up to 150F (or so) in the smoker and then finishing briefly in the sous vide at 158-160F. It might take all dadgum day, but the texture is worth the work. I did my first batch of Summer sausage along the lines of your kielbasa schedule, and the texture was more like baloney. Not bad, mind you, but not what I wanted.

Happy cooking!

YooperDog said in What did everyone cook today?:

Anyone have a good recipe to try or techniques to make sure I don’t dry them out?

How do you go about cooking them? What’s your temperature? Do you wrap? What determines when you take them off the pit?

Butts can take a little more heat than briskets or ribs because they have less surface area, but just a little. You don’t want your grate temperature to stay over 250F if you aren’t wrapping them. I usually don’t wrap pork butts, because I like to have that hard bark to mix in with the softer inside pork (nice texture), but I will wrap them if I don’t have the time to cook them unwrapped. I’ll wrap them like I wrap a brisket (somewhere around 160-165F internal).

You need to make sure you’ve cooked it until it’s done. An underdone pork butt can feel like it’s dry. If you are pulling, you want the internal temp to be at least 200F, but the best test is that you can pull the bone out cleanly.

You also need to rest them before you pull them. If you pull them while they are “right off the pit” hot, they can dry out quickly. I know some folks that do that, but those same folks mix in a sauce at the same time they are pulling. Adding that sauce effectively cools the meat so that it doesn’t dry out (and adds moisture back).

YooperDog said in Grinder for Stuffing:

I have the KitchenAid set up also and I have relegated it to small test batches 5 lbs or less and emergency use.

I have a third party attachment for my Kitchenaid grinder (Smokehouse Chef). It’s more robust than the KA branded attachment, but I’ll still use it only for something probably 3 pounds or less (maybe even 2 pounds or less). For anything more, I may as well haul out the #12. It’s hardly any more trouble to set up or clean up, and it leaves no more in the augur.

I know the manual mentions using the 625 W setting for smoking, but I’ve not found that practical at all (and others have commented the same way) unless I was at much lower temperatures (at or below that 120F you were talking about. I pretty much keep it on the 1250 W setting.

Yes, indeed. Sous vide is fantastic. My last batch of Summer sausage came out wonderfully.

I brought that batch very slowly up to 150F over about 12 hours to get it semi-dried, but I finished it by sous vide. The shots vide took something like 30 minutes, if that. Then, the water bath, and then I let them sit out for a good hour or so to dry out the casing enough to package and freeze.

Just to toss in my two cents, I’ve been using Super Bind (carrot fiber and potato starch), and I like it quite a bit. I’ve not used straight carrot fiber, so I cannot compare the two. As much as folks rave about straight carrot fiber, though, I have a feeling that I would still be quite happy with it.

I really need to try soaking my casings overnight. My last couple or few batches have had problems with the casing sticking on the horn.

A grinder with a stuffer attachment will get the job done, but it takes a lot longer and a lot more work.

I didn’t think that I wanted a stuffer when I started making sausage. Then, after a few batches stuffing with a grinder, I changed my mind. It was so much better to use. I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be a member of a number of online communities, and this one rapidly has become an important one. It really does make a difference when a business is interested in getting to know its customers. Y’all want interaction beyond just orders, and you like to see your customers interact with each other. Not only do you want to teach your customers, you also want to learn from them, and you want them to learn from each other. It’s a wonderful thing, and it takes a genuine effort.

I echo Chef’s words that y’all are doing something right. This community is another example of how Walton’s wants to provide for its customers, how y’all want us to have the best experience we can, and how y’all know that works to everyone’s benefit on every level. Bravo!

All I wanted to do was make sausage!

Yes, skim milk is a binder and does a decent job. There are better binders, which is something I learned quickly after checking things out around here. Sure Gel is fantastic for cured sausages.