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I don't know about you, but my first time had me sweating bullets about the money I spent on equipment vs. what I actually made. Hope they tasted great!
They tasted good, but a bit dry IMO, everyone else said they were fine. The 2nd batch I ground up everything there was and was moister. Yeah I was a little stressed too, wondering about the investment
may want to cook them on a lil lower temp if they too dry. also want to make sure no links are touching because the smoke cant penetrate evenly if they touching. looks great for a first time. practice makes perfect. bad thing is you can spend alot of money before you start getting it right. I've prolly made 150lbs of sausage and the last batch I made finally got the recipe down just perfect. Only thing I've got to work on is the smoke time and temp. they came out great but needed another 2-3hours in the smokehouse
I have been slow cooking kielbasa for about 15yrs and have had some same results of being too dry. I found through trial and error cooking/ smoking sausage for a long perod of time at a low temp tends to dry the sausage out. I have found sausage should not be cooked for more than 4 hrs. I cook my homemade kielbasa at 180 degrees until the internal meat temp reaches about 140. It seems there is a hump at 140 degrees. The sausage must cook for a long time to go from 140 to 160 degrees. With the oven temp at 180 sausage reaches 140 degrees in about three hrs. When the sausage reaches 140 degrees I Raise the heat to 250 degrees and the internal temp of the meat goes up to 160 to 170 in about 10 to 15 minutes. I then remove the sausage and immediatley put in a cold water bath to stop the cooking process. this has worked for me.... hope this helps
Now your sausage looks good to me. I also think that it has been in the smoker alittle longer then it needed judging by the color. Now I could be very easily wrong but that's my pennies.