Smoking sausage


 
W

Will Tory

New member
After 6 years cooking on my 18" WSM and Weber Performer, I'm attempting to smoke sausage on the WSM. Would appreciate some tips/lessons on how to correctly smoke sausage on the WSM.
Am looking for some training on home sausage making. I love the Texas style all-beef sausage, and want to make for myself and family. My attempts up to now are good tasting sausage links with very tough casings (hog) and a seemingly long (10 hours?) smoking process.
Is there any home sausage-making training available in the west valley?
 
You should be able to dial it in, and certainly, 10 hours sounds like a long time! Can you give us a few more details, Will? How are you setting up the WSM? What kind of temps are you shooting for? How much sausage are you smoking at a time? What kind of sausages ("standard" 32-35mm? smaller? larger?) I saw that Eric responded to your question on his old sausage thread, and the snake method is the same that I used in my WSM for sausages as well. You might have to play around a bit with the snake, to get the right set up for the temp you want. I would think that a 1x1 (side by side, single height) or a 1x2 (two lower rows, one more row on top) would get you in good sausage temp range.

180F is as high as I will go with sausage. Any higher than that, and you're going to render out the fat that you want to keep in there. I actually shoot for lower temps these days (150-160F), and just put smoke on them until I'm happy with color, then I poach them in a 170F water bath until they hit 150/155F. Also, note that all of these sausages for me have Cure #1 (pink salt) in them for safety.

So, give us some more info on what you are doing, what you want, and maybe what you aren't happy with, and I'm sure we can get you fixed up!

Rich

PS: Welcome to TVWBB! :)
 
I've got a little different approach to this, and I'm sure I'm probably wrong but I like to use brisket fat in my beef sausage. This fat is harder to render. I like to cook sausages at a similar temp to what I'm smoking other meats at, so around 225 to 275. I'm just really careful not to overcook them.

The standard approach now seems to be to cook them twice. In some cases 3 times, but I think that's excessive. So basically warm smoke them at around 150 to 180 mainly until you get the color and smoke you want or to an internal temp of 153. Then shock them in an ice water bath to stop them from cooking and shrink the casings tight around the sausage. At this point you can freeze them, whatever. Then when you want to serve them throw them on the smoker at a normal barbecue temp. Supposedly this gives you better snap but also a better appearance . I feel like it makes the casings tougher. Maybe I need better casings. A lot of guys that do this professionally in Texas barbecue joints take more of this approach. If you go the cold or warm smoke route use cure#1.
 
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