The boys and I love making homemade sausage, but our favorite to make is snack sticks! Not the greasy Slimmy Jimmy things you get at the gas station on a road trip, I’m talking snack sticks with real meat and nice spices.
These critters are perfect for a quick snack, freeze easily, and almost anyone can eat them! Toss a couple of packages of these into a cooler with some beverages of choice and enjoy while fishing or hunting as well!
We start all of our snack sticks with good lean beef and add just enough pork fat to make them moist, but not have greasy fingers when eating. All of the meat is ground in our grinder and then the spices are mixed in by hand. This is really getting into your food!
Notice that the picture above is mostly all red meat, very little white is showing because you only have about 20% fatty meat in the mixture.
The meat and seasonings are mixed by hand until the meat begins to get very sticky, at that point you know that the meat has released its myosin. Myosin is already in the meat and as you mix it, it begins to be released from the meat which makes it bind together better and provides a very uniform sausage product. If your meat mixture isn’t sticky, mix some more!
After the mixing is complete, it’s time to stuff the casings. I used 22mm collagen casings for this batch so that the sticks will have the “snap” when you bite into them, however, you can use natural sheep casings if you want to.
After stuffing the links, we coil them up, put them in a ziplock bag, and let them rest in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours. This allows for all of the seasonings to really meld together well. The links above are around 3 feet in length each, these will get cut down to a smaller length after smoking and cooking.
Once the time in the frig is complete, they are taken from the bag and hung on a rack to dry a bit and come to room temperature. This is safe to do since you’re using a cure in your meat mixture.
When the sausage links come from the refrigerator, they’ll have some condensation on them. These need to dry on the exterior really well before smoking. Hot smoke hitting moisture turns into creosote, and that’s bad! Creosote tastes nasty and has some carcinogenic issues as well, but we’ll be fine, because the next step is to put the links into a smoker that’s preheated to around 130 degrees with just heat, no smoke. Run at this temperature for an hour and the casings will dry really well.
After drying for an hour, it’s time for smoke! Ramp the temp up to around 180 and apply smoke for a couple of hours or until you get an internal temperature of 155 in the sausage.
In the picture above, you can see that I have a very light smoke. Heavy white smoke will also make for creosote, a thin light colored smoke is what you’re after. Also note that I have a temperature probe in the meat and another in the smoke chamber, these provide me with my temperatures without having to constantly open the door.
Once I have reached my internal temperature of 155, I pull them from the smoker and let them cool on the rack once again. This gives the exterior of the links a wrinkled effect, if you don’t want them to look wrinkled, just dip the links into cool water as soon as possible after pulling from the pit. That will leave the casings fairly smooth.
Notice the darker color and how much slimmer the links are now after smoking! They are also quite stiff as you can tell be the ones resting on the end of the rack. At this point, you can cut them up into the lengths you want and package! These freeze really well and are a perfect snack or quick protein fix!
Here is a recipe I’ve used in the past for some good snack sticks:
- 5-pounds lean beef
- 1-pound fatty pork butt
- 7 grams Cure #1 (grams, not spoons!)
- 5-Tbs powdered milk
- 3/4 cup dark brown sugar
- 3/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
- 3/4 cup soy sauce
- 1.5 tsp dry mustard
- 1.5 tsp course ground black pepper
- 1.5 tsp red pepper flakes (optional)
Grind the meat fine and refrigerate while mixing the seasonings.
Mix all dry seasonings into the wet seasonings very well. Pour seasoning mixture over the ground meat and mix very well by hand until all seasonings have been distributed and the meat is very sticky.
For cooking, follow what I did above and you’re good to go!
Until next time, Bone Appetite!