Guide on Smoking Uncured & Fresh Sausage

Sausage’s distinctive taste no other cuisine can match. The flip side is that it might be more expensive than you would expect when purchasing from a storefront. It is due to the fact that it involves a great deal of time, work, and expert seasonings to achieve that delectable and mouth-watering taste. Nevertheless, you could save much money on this procedure by smoking your own summery sausages and making a different twist on these meat recipes.

To some extent, a certain kind of meat used in the making of the sausages and the smoking method determine whether or not curing is necessary. There are sure sausages that need curing before you can smoke them, and there are those that do not.

You will learn all you need to know about smoking sausage, including how long it takes to smoke a pound of sausage and what temperature you should keep it at. Keep reading this article to know what to avoid and do while smoking fresh and uncured sausages and how to achieve the perfectly smoked sausages you desire!

Overview: Smoking Uncured & Fresh Sausage 

When making smoked sausage at home, Prague Powder is an absolute must-have ingredient! Botulism, a hazardous type of food poisoning, is caused by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum, which this curing powder might prevent. Smoked sausage recipes are not complete unless you include this ingredient.

Smoked sausages manufacturing requires an overnight drying procedure, which then, in conjunction with drying out its casing, mainly enables enough for the curing powder to spread throughout the sausages evenly. In this section, I will explain how to smoke both hot and cold sausages. 

The primary objective of manufacturing smoky sausages is to enhance the flavor of the finished product. Smoking was formerly utilized as a method of food preservation. However, the anti-bacterial protection afforded by smoking is limited except if a prolonged phase of drying follows the smoking. By then again, dehydration also has a more significant impact in the making.

Cold smoking and hot smoking are two separate procedures that you may use to make sausages:

• When it comes to cold smoking, temperatures lower than 30°C are used, while hot smoking is done at temperatures around 60-80°C.

• Hot smoking allows the sausages to be cooked, but cold smoking doesn’t really cook.

• Cold smoking produces a richer and more sophisticated smoky flavor over time, but hot smoking produces a more mild and delicate smokiness.

It would help if you always kept in mind that your sausages are dry before you begin making them, regardless of whatever process you use. Nonetheless, always make sure that the sausages you are making are dry before making them.

How to Hot Smoke Fresh Sausage?

Making fresh sausage is a personal preference, and whether or not you cure the meat will rely heavily on whether you are using a cold or hot smoking method for the process. Several people believe that curing using salts could enrich the taste of the meat, but you should attempt to determine if you can get a good flavor.

If you plan to hot smoke your fresh and uncured sausages, you must heat your pellet smoker at temperatures ranging from 200°F up to 250°F. In order to prevent any problems with contamination and foodborne, wait until your smoker gets at 250°F temperature before beginning to smoke your chilled fresh sausages.

Depending on the size of your fresh sausages, the process of smoking them should take anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours. While they are smoking, you should turn the sausages to ensure that they are cooked uniformly throughout the process. The internal temperature of your fresh sausages should be 165°F. However, this can be determined by the use of a meat temperature probe.

It is also worth noting that they will most likely become gray instead of pinky appearance as they cook because of the lack of curing chemicals in fresh sausages.

So here are some basic guidelines to follow to ensure that your fresh sausages are properly smoked:

• Prevent food contamination by ensuring that your smoker has attained the average temperature required for smoking fresh sausages.

• In order to get a more pronounced reddish-brownish appearance after cooking, you may choose to dry out your sausages first before trying to smoke them.

• As much space between the sausages as possible should be allowed for uniform cooking and smoke absorption, at least two inches away.

• One or two sausages may be used as “testers” instead of poking all of them to assess their internal temperatures.

• To avoid looking unappealing, do not keep your sausages out in the open for too long after they have been grilled or smoked.

• If you want to preserve your smoked sausages, they can be put in a freezer for up to three months or kept in the refrigerator lasting up to four days, where they will keep their smokey taste.

• When it comes to smoking sausages, natural casings sausages are by far the most preferred. It is possible to smoke and eat sausages with fibrous casings as well. However, the smoking time is significantly increased.

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How to Cold Smoke Uncured & Fresh Sausages?

Raw meat has a better chance of absorbing the flavor of smoky grilling. Although meat begins to smoke at around 50° or 120°F, the cold smoking procedure that needs to occur below or around 85°F temperature is only used with raw meat (and not cooked meat). It might imply a variety of things, including:

• If you cold smoke for a longer time, the smokey flavor becomes more pronounced, as previously suggested.

• It is critical to maintain the lowest feasible temperature in the smoker grill.

You can dangle your sausages using rods at the top of your smoking cabinet or try using a rack to hold them. Depending on your preference, you may tie the sausages together in one of two methods, which both require binding the sausages together to prevent them from unraveling. Make a knot within every sausage using butcher’s twine and loop the links around the rod afterward. Two knots should be tied across each sausage’s links, with one of the knots leaving a substantial length of twine. 

By hanging, the sausages are prevented from coming into contact with one another. When two surfaces come into touch, there is no accessible surface from which the smoke may absorb. If you just place the sausages on the wire racks, then smoke will not have a chance to permeate in your sausages, leading to creating light markings on the casing. Flipping your sausages every once in a while will help to diminish the effect of the markings.

After dangling, the next phase in preparing smoked sausages is to guarantee that the casings are completely dry. You can do it by opening all ventilation in your smoker cabinet and using a fan to produce sufficient airflow. You will require a few hours of drying time before you can begin cold smoking!

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Things You Need to Prepare Before Cold Smoking

Food Chamber

It might be anything as essential as an old wooden cabinet, or it can be something more sophisticated like your grill. Additionally, for instance, several people have utilized a barrel for the food chamber.

Cold Smoke Generators from ProQ, Grillson, and A-MAZE-N

Among the most well-known and renowned brands are Grillson, ProQ, and A-MAZE-N. This cold smoke generator is made out of a wire mesh tray funneled into a spiral pattern.

The pellets or sawdust of your choosing should be inserted into the spiral channel. It has to be pellets or sawdust. Otherwise, wood chips will not work since these pieces are too big to smolder in the generator’s hopper. Avoid overfilling the channel by leaving a 1 to 2 mm space at the top.

Sieving your sawdust before placing it into the smoke generator can help to extend how long the smoke is until re-filling is necessary. An incandescent tea light candle is hidden beneath the spiral’s outermost point. Once you have lit this, put it beneath the wire mesh of the holder, and then your pellets or sawdust will begin to smolder and begin to smoke.

It is safe to put out the candle as once the pellet is smoldering, and the air circulation underneath the mesh will preserve the sawdust from smoldering as it makes its way through the channel to the inner portion of the spiral.

Airflow

Keeping the dampers wide open on your BBQ smoker is necessary if you are using them. Make sure there are openings at the top or bottom of your handmade cabinet underneath the cold smoke generator to enable ventilation.

There are two factors why airflow is required:

• As a means of keeping the cold smoke generator smoking.

• You can hardly tolerate the stale flavor of confined smoke. Thus new smoke is required to keep everything tasting delicious. 

Cooking

Cooking is still required after your favorite sausages have been smoked. Using any of the ways described in this article on how to smoke sausages, or even just lowering its temperature and cold smoking the sausages, you may get this result.

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When Smoking Sausage, Do You Need to Cure It?

To some extent, a particular variety of meat used throughout the creation of the sausages and the smoking method determines whether or not curing is necessary. There are certain sausages that need curing before you can smoke them, and there are those that do not.

However, there are certain advantages to curing, including that it may enhance the taste of the final product. It may also allow the sausages to maintain their moisture throughout the time if the proper curing ingredients are used, preventing them from drying out.

While curing is essential for keeping you healthy, it is also crucial for keeping the sausages protected from getting infected with different harmful bacteria, particularly those that cause botulism and other maladies. Bacteria that cause botulism may be found in meats when subjected to a low-oxygen atmosphere that is just mildly acidic, warmer, and its moisture, which happens to be precisely the setting that gradual smoking generates.

Consequently, if you intend to slow or cold smoke your sausages, it is essential to cure them beforehand. It will help prevent these potentially harmful bacteria from taking root throughout the smoking process, which may be hazardous. Another benefit of hot smoking sausages is that they do not require to be cured as cold-smoked sausages do. 

During the smoking process, it also simultaneously cooks as it imparts a smokiness to the sausages. It is worth mentioning that sausages that are thoroughly cooked before being smoked do not require curing. While curing is not necessary for long-term preservation, curing will kill any bacteria present.

Furthermore, if you rapid smoke your sausages rather than slow smoke, they do not require curing since the meats do not have to be cooked beforehand. In contrast, if you want to slow smoke raw sausages, you will undoubtedly need to cure it first. In some instances, curing cooked sausages in a slow-smoked method is recommended.

Taking a close look at several various sausages, we will determine whether they have to be cured prior to smoking:

• In order to preserve the freshness of cold-smoked sausage, you must first cure the link.

• Pre-curing is not necessary for fast-smoked fresh sausages.

• Curing is not necessary for completely cooked sausages.

• Dry sausages that are not cooked, including such salami, must be cured before consumption.