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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   417 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for November 19, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Deer processing is going well- mild sausage is all stuffed and spicy sausage is just waiting on a new sausage stuffer(a minor hiccup was when I dropped the nozzle on my old one and had to order a new one). Chili grind is all made and the steaks are cut out and packaged.

I do this every year and it’s always an experience.

Did you just cut out the backstrap, or do the whole thing? What cuts went to the grinder?

Cutting out just backstrap is illegal in my state- I took backstraps, fore and hind quarters, the neck, and a few odds end ends. Basically everything except the backstrap went into the grind pile.

How much of an ordeal is this? Is the grinder a pain to clean? Is it easy to get the sausages to taste right? Is it only cost-effective if you are able to obtain a lot of good meat at a low price? Is it fun, or just messy/tedious? Is it easy to get the meat-to-spice ratio correct?

  • Grinders are disassemblable for cleaning, for obvious reasons. Cleanup is mostly a wipe-spray-dishwasher if applicable thing. That being said, some mixtures are much messier than others- the liver in boudin, and eventually the rice, take flossing over anything hard to get to.

  • The meat to spice ratio can be a few grams off without messing anything up; taste is pretty simple to get right as long as it’s mixed thoroughly and evenly, although offal as an ingredient can be difficult to manage. Consistency is much trickier because the meat to fat ratio is much more tedious and particular. Sausage is almost definitionally much fattier and saltier than most meat, and exactly how fatty or salty is a major driver of what you wind up with.

Fortunately I was using venison as the meat, from which all the fat is removed as part of processing, allowing me to straightforwardly weigh beef suet or pork fat cap in. In the past, when I have made boudin, or used commercial pork, the correct fat percentage has been much more difficult.

Cutting the fat out of the venison was tedious and messy and took more time than the rest of it combined. I find it a satisfying hobby, if definitely ‘work’.

  • You would not, as a rule, use ‘good meat’ for sausage when you have to pay for it. Scraps, parts that otherwise don’t get eaten, trimmings and suet+ seasonings+ fillers. This tells me that it is not cost effective to buy good meat at full price for sausage making; I’ve certainly never tried.

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