Making a cured pork loin or Canadian bacon, using a liquid brine Equilibrium Cure, and pumping/injecting meat at same time for cure speed.
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Splitting this off from old thread of mine on same thing but with a dry rub/brine, for easier search and tag future reference.

This has been gone over many times many places, many many folks here do this. I like to document my work as it gives me a good reference for later, so I might as well post it up in case it helps others. I will hit the main points for future readers that this may be their 1st exposure to Equilibrium Curing (will use EC as acronym).

Basically it is a brine cure with the total amount of meat plus liquid calculated for, and the salt/cure1/sugar is just enough that when it all equalizes between meat and liquid, the target amounts are perfect everywhere. This is slower than a high concentrated salt “gradient brine”, but has the benefit you can’t ever overshoot the target salt levels, and can leave it brining extra weeks if needed for your schedule.

The dry rub or dry brine EC is easiest, just rub into meat and dump it in a bag. But meat loses moisture, ends up drier, and it takes 10 to 15 days. If you calculate total ingredients to be spread over the meat plus liquid, you can inject or pump the brine into the meat, put some on outside too, and get a faster cure and juicier final product.

Commercially, I believe they mostly don’t pump an EC brine, but still use a higher concentration brine for even faster curing. But then you have to calc and measure exactly how much gets taken up by the meat to ensure correct final nitrites and salt. Usually 10% of the meat weight can be injected amd held, so they use that for the calculations. In our case, since it is an EC brine, it doesn’t matter if we pump 0% or 20%, since it will all equalize out and the totals are at correct amounts.

The meat takes up almost as much brine, salt and cure, as if it was pure water, but not quite, due to it being mostly water but some is free, some interstitial, some bonded, some inside cells, etc. I use a calculator that takes the properties of meat vs. water into account, made by Dr. Greg Blonder Equilibrium Cure Brine Calculator . There is also a tab that tells you how long you have to wait for it all to equalize, without the internal injection.

That’s the intro info. processhead posted a nice 10% by weight injection on my dry rub thread, great post and info, I will paste some of his info below 🙂

My little shop is in the final stages of being built. What would you make sure to include in a dedicated processing room? What do you use the most that might be overlooked? Or what would you do differently next time?

Any suggestions on how to make patty’s without having to paper stick to the patty? Both times the patty requires scraping the meat of the paper. Using Walton’s patty paper, LEM hand patty press and water added to the meat mix. Second attempt no water added.

Made a batch of jalapeño popper sausage. I added 10 fresh jalapeños to the grinder to bump up the heat. Jonathan had said it was lacking on heat with just seasoning. It ended up with the perfect heat for me. Also did a batch of cheese burger cheddarwurst. I really like it also. I think I am going to use some to make a bacon cheese burger pizza.
I added 1 pound of bacon to each batch also. Hatch green chili is still my favorite fresh sausage/brat, but I think this is number 2 for me.
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I have made tons of whole muscle jerky but never restructured. When I bought the new stuffer during the Christmas sale, I added the jerky maker attachment to give it a go at some point. This weekend was the time. Started with 15 pounds of 93/7 ground beef. It was on sale for two bucks a pound cheaper than any whole cuts, so I used it instead of grinding my own. Added meat, seasoning, cure and smoked meat stabilizer to the mixer. After 4 minutes it dead stopped my #22 grinder attached to the mixer. Added 16 oz of water and it was turning again. This is the second time this week my #22 has dead stopped. Earlier this week it stopped while grinding pork and cream cheese at the same time. Wish I had waited 3 months to buy the grinder and gotten the new one with reverse. Anyway, got it all mixed up and into the stuffer with the jerky attachment. Man does that thing work slick! It made quick work cranking out two strips at a time. I can’t even imagine how much time it saved compared to using a jerky gun. Got them all extruded and did some in the oven and in the smoker. Both turned out excellent!

Couple lessons learned.

#15 of restructured jerky takes up a lot of space! I had my whole counter top plush the top of my deep freeze full of jerky on just the first run through the stuffer. It also takes a lot of room to cook it. The first run through the stuffer filled my smoker, my Traeger, and my oven. Second run filled my Traeger and oven.

I wish I didn’t have to add the water. The Traeger handled it but the smoker and convection oven both struggled to dry it out. 2 1/2 hours in the Traeger and 6 hours in both the smoker and oven.

Overall, the flavor and texture is great. I will definitely do it again.

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I’m about to vacuum seal 22 pounds of bacon I cured. I realized that the plastic sheets that store bought bacon is laid on would be great to use so I can store the vac packed packs much easier. Does anybody know where to get “bacon plastic” or what it is actually called?

Meat coming over piston on stuffer problem

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Started a pork loin for Canadian bacon today, 7lbs. My first try at this.
Read a ton of different recipes. Was going to go with the pumped brine method in Marianski’s Home Production book, even bought a good injection pumper from Walton’s. That is a liquid brine, pump meat to 110% it’s start weight with brine, and soak in brine. But it is done brining in 5 days, and keeps getting saltier after that… and I will be on a trip unable to finish it then.

So I went with a dry rub or dry brine, using just the correct amount of salt etc, an “equilibrium brine”. Eric at 2guysandacooler youtube channel uses that method almost exclusively. Since I had a video of his to reference for good results with the recipe, I used his.
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Read some outstanding dry brine research by former Bell Labs director Greg Blonder on rates of salt and nitrate penetration, final chemical distribution, etc, at genuineideas dot com if anyone us interested in some clever science, processhead mrobisr .

In 14 days or so I will smoke to 155 IT and see how it is!

Never made this, so here we go. Goal is a shelf stable canned/jarred dried chipped beef suitable for SOS.
1 Eye of round
10% salt
Vacuum packed for 2 weeks for curing then I plan on removing and washing salt off the meat then vacuum sealing for 5 days to equilibrate the salt content. Sous vide to IT of 160f per USDA current guidance for jerky then slice and dehydrate to complete dry. Then sealing up in glass jar and pressure canning @10lbs for 75 minutes.
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Recently we’ve come across some Honey Ham Snack Sticks that we really like which I think are branded Klements.
Now I find myself with an excess of cured and smoked ham and was wondering how I might take that and stuff it into a snack stick.

Not sure who might have tried something like this so this is the place to go. I would think the ham could be course ground and mixed with a few other ingredients to make something pretty tasty but it would have to be a ‘stuffable’ consistency. Then not sure what do with it after that? - Smokehouse again?, Sous Vide? Looking for ideas.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Hey Ya’ll. I am new to all this. We raise cows and have one processed a year for the freezer. I am looking for ways to use the abundance of hamburger. I tried the fake bacon recipe and it worked great. Now I want to try making something like beef smoked sausage. But am worried about the fat ratio. Since we don’t process it ourselves, I have no idea what the fat ratio is. Can you tell by looking at the meat? How vital is the ratio in these type of recipes???
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Once every couple of years I like to make some jaternice (pronounced eater-nit-see).
WTH is that, you ask?
Every culture has a few sausage types intended for using up the leftovers from hog butchering. Eastern Europeans and specifically the Czech’s version of this sausage is jaternice.
For a lot of people, these sausages, and their ingredients, were considered “cheap cuts” and food that people of modest means ate. True, but they were also nutritious, tasty, and wholesome.

In various parts of the Midwest, Czech immigrants settled, and brought their sausage making traditions with them. Traditionally made of pork offal, pork head meat, a cereal, and seasoning, jaternice is considered an uncured cooked liver sausage that is ready-to-eat. It can be served cold, or heated and browned in a skillet (my favorite). It makes a nice breakfast meat served with eggs and toast.
Served cold it has a firm texture from all the natural gelatin in the head meat. When it is heated, it has a loose pudding-like texture.
Our family grew up eating and liking foods like this which we made in the family sausage business.
Here are pictures of how I dit it.
Ingredients: Pork snouts, pork liver, pork butt, bread and seasoning.
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The liver is poached for 10 minutes and the other meats are simmered for 2 hours.
Unrelated Bonus Question: What do diving pigs look like when they come up for air?

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The cooked meats are allowed to cool, cubed up and ground.

The bread is cubed up and mixed with the ground meats, seasonings, and kettle broth.

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After mixing, I stuffed in large hog casings and tied them into rings. Cooking was done in a large meat lug using 180 degree water until an I.T. of 152 degrees was reached.
This was followed by a cold water bath and refrigerating overnight.
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Anyone have any ideas in what makes some pork turn more quickly then others. We produce a wide variety of pork sausage. The products without cheese hold up longer then the products with cheese.

There are a ton of great posts on this site about using sous vide to finish meat sticks etc. I would never have tried it or even considered it without all the great posts. But the more I read here, the more I find myself using it just for daily cooking, especially just tossing vacuum sealed sausages from freezer right into the water. And I’ve found there are some benefits I don’t remember seeing mentioned, I thought I would post.

I made 3 sausage batches of 12 lbs each one night, different flavors. I tried to put grinder and mixer into fridge between batches, but by the 3rd batch… well, I think my meat and fat got smeared a bit compared to the first 2 grinds. This was before I had stuffer using the 1hp#22 grinder to stuff, so cold farce and metal was critical. It was a venison pork brat that I used cure and smoked, german brat spices like a Hunter brat maybe. Anyways, when I cook them, I get a lot of fat-out frying them up in pan to heat thru and get some brown. Like 30% weight loss, all juice going into pan. However, if I just toss the vacuum sealed bag into sous vide and keep temp at 140ish to reheat, there is almost zero fat-out, and I can even toss for 1 min in hot CI pan for color. So the SV is also great for recovering from production errors, lol, though I know most of you probably don’t run into this smeared grind fat out too often 😉

It is surprising how few people are using sous vide, like general families I mean. I had 4 families over today, none of them had heard of sous vide yet. I happened to be heating up some Italian sausage I made, in my sous vide, and was able to make a really nice visual demo of at least one of it’s benefits. The sausages were really plump in the sous vide, just perfect. I took them out and hit a hot pan super quick to get some brown on them, no fat or juice loss at all. I then fried one up straight from the fridge, and it lost a lot more fat, juice, and size. Not bad on the Italian, but noticeably less plump. They were all pretty impressed how that 165f water could improve the juiciness of the meat.

So anyways, thx for all the great SV info, just passing a bit more field results on 😉

Hey folks, I recently was given some venison summer sausage that was made by the Bavarian Sausage Co. up in Madison. Im not sure how to describe it other than it was a little drier (in a good way) than stuff I’ve made and it was pretty dang delicious. Has anyone had their summer sausage and can reccomend how to get mine closer to their product? I typically make H and jalepeno from waltons, and while they are both good, when I make them they aren’t brag about it to your friends good. Thanks!

Jonathon is gone today, so I felt like I had to man the studio kitchen and keep it running, so I made just a few pounds of brats today! Just two 5 lb batches. One was Cheeseburger Cheddarwurst Seasoning and the other was Jalapeno Popper Sausage Seasoning

Cheeseburger was made with 1 whole pound of High Temp Cheddar Cheese!
Yes, Jonathon 1 whole pound to 5 lbs of meat! I’m definitely going for cheese overload on this one!

Jalapeno Popper was made with another 1 whole pound of High Temp Mozzarella Cheese

Both were a 50/50 split of beef and pork. Thought that might make them different and interesting, so we’ll see what the comments are and if people like them that way.

I have the family coming over for lunch on Sunday after my daughter’s baptism, so I needed some sausage to cook. My wife immediately asked for Jalapeno Popper, and I figured Cheeseburger Cheddarwurst anyone would like, but hopefully/especially the kids that will be there. Jalapeno Popper is a newer flavor that has really risen up our list of favorites here!

I got the electric stuffer out and going, and it was amazing to do it all so easily by myself with that thing. I can’t wait until we get them in later this year and others get a chance to use them.

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Seems like a lot of folks just getting into meat processing and sausage making have trouble wrapping their heads around food safety and correct smoking time and temperature. Commercial processors live and breath the food science because they are required to, but DIYers like us mainly just want their finished meat products to taste as good as possible and not make anyone sick.

I wanted to share this link and maybe get folks to comment on it’s relevance to home processors. In particular, check out Appendix A on page 35.

Most commercial processors have equipment that gives them far better control over their thermal processes than us home-processing guys have. For that reason, I try and factor in a bit of safety cushion into my meat smoking and cooking.

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/bf3f01a1-a0b7-4902-a2df-a87c73d1b633/Salmonella-Compliance-Guideline-SVSP-RTE-Appendix-A.pdf?MOD=AJPERES

Ream’s makes fantastic sausages so am honestly curious on this one. May have to replicate since I can’t make it there to buy any:

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I’ve started working on a recipe for Jagdwurst for my next project. It’s a German-cooked sausage that is all pork and contains fine and coarse particles. I’m curious if anyone has made this before?

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