Making summer sausage sounds easy, after all, you’re just smoking some meat; but there’s a lot more going on here than smoke. Proteins sets up and fat renders. This give it both a firm consistency and the dark skin we come to associate with the finished product.
If many home smokers does one thing wrong, they increase the heat too fast, producing a crumbly interior. Keep the internal temperature below 160 degrees Fahrenheit (the chart above explains why). This ensures that the meat proteins gels and form a solid block, which help hold in the fat instead of letting it leak out of casing.
How to Make Summer Sausage
To get started, Prague Powder number one helps. But it doesn’t just keep things from going bad; it also plays a role in curing, starting well before you fire up the smoker. When combined with heat, it also prevents *Clostridium botulinum* and turns meat pink by reacting with myoglobin at about 130 degrees. That’s important, since otherwise bacteria would multiply during storage in warm, low-oxygen conditions. The guide explains why it needs to be used correctly (at the right ratio) because of its interaction with heat.
It takes time for the salt to extract myosin proteins and allow them to congeal into a gelatinous mass that holds fat globules. Failing to do this creates a mealy texture. This happens if you skip this stage and increase temperature too quickly.
There’s a lot of patience involved in the smoking phase: Slowly ramp up the heat. Begin with wide-open dampers and a temperature of about 120 degrees. That’ll dry out those fibrous casings, which create a sticky exterior for later when you want your smoke to cling. The temptation is to throw some wood chips on right away, but the guide says wait until casing feels dry to the touch before doing that. Smoke does not stick to wet surfaces. Once the temperature hits 135 degrees, add very gentle smoke. Letting it slowly seep into the meat instead of sitting atop the surface will give the smoke time to soak in.
Watch the smoker closely when the temp hits around 175 degrees. That’s the high end of the cabinet. Beyond that, the solid pork fat in the sausage begin melting and oozing out the sides before the interior are done. The thinking is that cooking it hotter will hurry things along, but what happens is you get a stringy, dry mess. Just wait till the core probe registers 160 degrees, then quit.
And now we plunge the steaming sausages into ice water, bringing the cookout to a halt and locking in that mix of fat that you worked hard to keep intact. At the same time, the ice bath cinches the casing snugly around meat without any wrinkling. Leave the logs in there long enough and they will firm up even more, enough that you can leave them at room temperature for a couple of hours, refrigerate them overnight, and then slice them. (A few days longer would of been better, but I don’t have patience.)
What you end with is a tight cylinder of firm pink-cored sausage… The outcome of careful control all along the way. You shouldve seen the moddern results when it’s done! It looks luxurios. Just dont let the temperature get too high than that and everything will be naturaly fine.