# Vension sticks with pics (not really Q-view)



## big casino (Jan 21, 2012)

I am not considering this Q-View as it was too cold to play with the camera outside ... lol

A first for me, I am not a fan of deer meat, but a guy I know asked me to make these for him, and since my wife likes deer meat I figured I would trade my skillz for some of his deer meat,

I told him I wasn't sure how much pork or beef to add he said he didn't care which I added beef or pork, but that he like it mixed at a 50/50 ratio of vension to beef or pork, so I decided to use 80/20 beef and some pork fat

this was a 10lb batch

First I ground up the pork fat through my fine plate around 3/16








I went straight into the Venison from here, I had the Venison chilled almost perfectly.







at this point I started to have trouble I heard people complain about grinding venison that is was kind of stringy, and that it tends to clog up grinders faster than beef and pork, but this just seemed like it plugged to quickly , so I threw the venison back in the freezer and started tearing apart the grinder, to this day I still am not 100% sure why I had this problem except for possible human error of placing the knife in my grinder backwards some how, I didn't notice that it was on backwards, but after I tore it apart  and put it back together the grinder worked perfectly..







I then added in the pork fat and the 80/20 ground beef and mixed in the cure, and seasonings







Then I put the nice mound of meat mixture into my 11lb Weston Stuffer and proceeded to stuff some 19mm mahogany casings, this is where problem 2 started,

I had never used collagen casings b4, normally I would use 22/24 sheep casings, but I noticed a lot of guys using the collagens here so I thought I would try it out for a couple of reasons

1) casing are already colored so there is no need to go through the drying period of natural casings, in order to get them to accept smoke and to take on that nice red hue

2) Since you don't have to worry about the casings coloring you can actually space them a little closer together.

both of these should save you time

Sometimes saving time isn't worth it, the casings seemed harder to work with I had blow outs with this stuff, could have been the casings were old or some thing even tho I just bought them, ya never know how long they were on the shelf b4 you get them, but they did get easier by the time I was done playing with them







When my tray would get full I use the drying rack I built for when I stuff natural casings (even tho these dont need drying)







so after I got them all stuffed I moved them from the rack onto smoke sticks and then off to the MES30







I had let these cool down at room temperature and then I tried them, the casings were pretty tough, I put them in a paper bag and into the refrigerator they went and a day later the casings had become softer and more pliable and 2 days later they were perfect

a third reason I bought these collagen casings was I thought they might be a cheaper alternative to naturals,  at around $30.00 a hank for 22/24 sheep casings,

but after playing with collagen and finding that one tube of collagen only lets you stuff around 8lb of meat, and one hank of naturals lets you stuff 60 to 70lb of meat

well 8X8=64lb so that would be 8 tubes at around 5 bucks a tube is $40.00

you might get a better price than I did on collagens or a worse price on naturals then I get so I suggest if the price is a factor for you to do your own math...LOL

here is the recipe I used It is a  tweeked version of a recipe I found that looked  good, everyone loved them and are looking for more

this is for a 10lb batch

4.5lb venison

4.5lb 80/20 beef

1lb pork back fat

2tsp of instacure#1

5TBS of salt

1TBS of black pepper

1TBS of brown sugar

1TBS corn syrup solids

1TBS ground corriander

1tsp ground ginger

1tsp whole mustard seed

1tsp ground mustard

1tsp garlic pwdr

1tsp ground ceyanne

I put in a preheated smoker 125 degrees for an hour, then bumped up the temp every so often till I got the MES up to bouncing between 165 and 170 degrees

took the IT to 152

Thanks for looking

Harry


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## DanMcG (Jan 21, 2012)

Looks like q-view to me

Nice


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## erain (Jan 21, 2012)

nice... i bet those make the place smell good hangin out like that!!! looking pretty good man and good observations on the collagen. they too have a shelf life, think its a year.Thumbs Up


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## bluebombersfan (Jan 21, 2012)

Wow those looks awesome!!


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## sprky (Jan 21, 2012)

Looks like Q-view to me, and it


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## big casino (Jan 21, 2012)

they turned out way better than I imagined they would, as I stated I do not care much for deer meat, and the 50/50 ratio hid the flavor of the venison very well if not completely,  if anyone uses this recipe and you want to taste more of your deer meat lessen the amount of Beef, and make up the difference with ground venison, but the more venison you use the more pork fat you would need,

so let say if you used 8lb of venison, I would skip the beef and add 2lb of pork fat, I don't think I would use anymore venison to fat ratio than this


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## solaryellow (Jan 21, 2012)

Those sticks look great Harry.


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## sib55 (Jan 26, 2012)

Great job.  I use the 22-24 mm sheep casings too due to the blow outs as well.  I am going to try the 20-22 since the other ones were a little too big.  Nice job on the custom drying racks too!


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