hog warden
Smoking Fanatic
- Feb 10, 2009
- 411
- 27
I always love Pop's Posts. Experience matters and besides that, he has the best Avatar on the Internet!
This deal with the spices brings up an interesting dilemma. Namely what is a small quantity sausage maker going to do about spices? The Butcher-Packer prices for a spice mix for 25 pounds at $4 or less? You can't touch that. My breakfast sausage recipe calls for summer savory and where I could find it, it was $6 for less than 1 ounce. OK, I can justify that because it's a lifetime supply, assuming the quality holds up over time. So you start buying this stuff and as Pop's says, it won't be long until you get a spice rack full of odds and ends of various quantities and degrees of freshness.
Most large quantity sausage makers buy premixed, pre-packaged spices. Buy enough of them and you can even have custom mixes made for you. But until you get up to a large enough quantity, that doesn't work either, so if you buy the pre-mix, you have to get happy with the mix they offer. Depending on one's taste, it may or may not be good. One of the advantages of little guys like us is we get to make what we like....unless we cave and buy someone else's taste in spices. The best situation would be finding one you really like. Problem solved.
Lacking that, perhaps another solution is to figure out what you like and make your own large quantity. Mixing batches using cups instead of tablespoons. Go to the bulk spice section of the grocery store or Sam's Club and buy a pound of ground pepper instead of a 4 oz can. Same for all of them. Bulk up!
But assuming you do that, how can you keep spice mix for 100 pounds of sausage fresh? Vacuum pack it?
(While you all think about this, I'm off to the store up the road, which as of today is selling whole butts sliced into pork steaks for 89 cents a pound. About 10 pounds of those are going to be converted into cold smoked breakfast rope sausage. Gotta check the spice rack before I go to see what I'm short of).
This deal with the spices brings up an interesting dilemma. Namely what is a small quantity sausage maker going to do about spices? The Butcher-Packer prices for a spice mix for 25 pounds at $4 or less? You can't touch that. My breakfast sausage recipe calls for summer savory and where I could find it, it was $6 for less than 1 ounce. OK, I can justify that because it's a lifetime supply, assuming the quality holds up over time. So you start buying this stuff and as Pop's says, it won't be long until you get a spice rack full of odds and ends of various quantities and degrees of freshness.
Most large quantity sausage makers buy premixed, pre-packaged spices. Buy enough of them and you can even have custom mixes made for you. But until you get up to a large enough quantity, that doesn't work either, so if you buy the pre-mix, you have to get happy with the mix they offer. Depending on one's taste, it may or may not be good. One of the advantages of little guys like us is we get to make what we like....unless we cave and buy someone else's taste in spices. The best situation would be finding one you really like. Problem solved.
Lacking that, perhaps another solution is to figure out what you like and make your own large quantity. Mixing batches using cups instead of tablespoons. Go to the bulk spice section of the grocery store or Sam's Club and buy a pound of ground pepper instead of a 4 oz can. Same for all of them. Bulk up!
But assuming you do that, how can you keep spice mix for 100 pounds of sausage fresh? Vacuum pack it?
(While you all think about this, I'm off to the store up the road, which as of today is selling whole butts sliced into pork steaks for 89 cents a pound. About 10 pounds of those are going to be converted into cold smoked breakfast rope sausage. Gotta check the spice rack before I go to see what I'm short of).
