After spending many hours looking at everyone's sausage cooks here and learning a lot in a short amount of time I decided it was time to try it out myself.
I started with 8.4 Lbs of butt and 2.8 Lbs of Chuck roast. I used LEM polish for my first try, I will make my own on the next ones. Also cure #1. I bought LEM natural casings but learned later that the home packs were not the best. They seemed to work OK for me.
Small cubes of pepper jack and jalapeno were frozen for about half the mix. 1/4 were plain and the last 1/4 my wife ground up a huge amount of fresh garlic for me to add.
I didn't want another appliance so I ordered a stainless steel grinding attachment and stuffer for our Kitchen aid mixer.
10 Lbs was a lot to grind up. I mixed it all up and let it marinade in the fridge for a while before stuffing.
This part was not fun and took a lot more work than I was expecting. We started out by me feeding and my wife guiding but she gave up pretty quick so it was up to me to do the other 8 Lbs or so. I was able to get pretty consistent but was getting a lot of air in the casings. I did get a couple of blowouts and a few air pockets but I think they came out OK for the first time.
Now they are in the smoker. I found out the new PID will only go down to 160* I thought I had it lower before but it said no.
I also picked up a vacuum sealer for when these are done.
I started with 8.4 Lbs of butt and 2.8 Lbs of Chuck roast. I used LEM polish for my first try, I will make my own on the next ones. Also cure #1. I bought LEM natural casings but learned later that the home packs were not the best. They seemed to work OK for me.
Small cubes of pepper jack and jalapeno were frozen for about half the mix. 1/4 were plain and the last 1/4 my wife ground up a huge amount of fresh garlic for me to add.
I didn't want another appliance so I ordered a stainless steel grinding attachment and stuffer for our Kitchen aid mixer.
10 Lbs was a lot to grind up. I mixed it all up and let it marinade in the fridge for a while before stuffing.
This part was not fun and took a lot more work than I was expecting. We started out by me feeding and my wife guiding but she gave up pretty quick so it was up to me to do the other 8 Lbs or so. I was able to get pretty consistent but was getting a lot of air in the casings. I did get a couple of blowouts and a few air pockets but I think they came out OK for the first time.
Now they are in the smoker. I found out the new PID will only go down to 160* I thought I had it lower before but it said no.
I also picked up a vacuum sealer for when these are done.