Summer sausage shrinking after sitting in fridge for 1 1/2 ]weeks
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I smoke small batches of summer sausage , and it usually turns out pretty good. I usuall get a premix seasoning add curing salt and smoke. This past winter i got seasonings from Waltons and smoked 20 lbs. And dint add anything else besides seasonings and cure salt, thats it. I had 4 logs of sausage in fridge after about 2-3 weeks in the fridge it had shrunk down to nothing , it was all shriveled up. What happened
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Dehydration
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I had the same thing happen I made a dozen logs of summer sausage and had a few left on the refrigerator. They shrunk considerly. The taste and texture was great more like a salami
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paugy Were they vacuum-sealed in your fridge? Usually, a fridge has too much humidity in it to allow your summer sausage to do that even if you did not have them in a vac bag but it sounds like that is exactly what happened. Perhaps, and this is a guess, they were right in front of a fan in the fridge? Any pics would probably help!
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paugy My guess is that all of the moisture evaporated from your sausage and you are left with just the meat and fat. Meat is 75% water and you are adding more water during the mixing. Now, some of that original water will have evaporated during the smoking process but you still have a product with a lot of water in it. I’ve never left summer sausage in the fridge for weeks without putting it in a vac bag. I might do it on my next batch just to see if we have similar results.
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paugy Example: when you fry a hamburger patty it will shrink in size (i"m sure you have seen this). It shrinks because the water content in the meat evaporates. Same thing happens with sausage if you fry it or leave it in the fridge. Water content will evaporate and eventually very little will be left. Also, did you use a binder of any kind? If not water content will evaporate more quickly. Cover with plastic wrap. But that is a little strange that it did that in that amount of time.
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paugy
I’d have to agree with shane102 . I was doing the exact same thing as you prior to finding this site. Used Excaliber’s Sure Gel with my last batch of snack sticks and turned out great. Very good at holding moisture in. In fact the last couple of bags I’ve taken out of the freezer and left in the fridge ends up with a bit of juice in the bag. They are very pleasant tasting and super moist. Previously without they are drier and a bit more chewy which is also very good. Just depends on your own taste’s and whoever else is eating them. Same goes for making summer sausage. -
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binder does help with the casings setting correctly with the meat. Without the binder its hard to control the casings (sticking to meat, not binding to meat at all, chewey casings, casings coming off after freezing, etc. But I think the ice bath contributes to casings forming correctly or not a lot of the times. I’ve found that you need to put sausage in ice bath immediately after pulling and the colder the ice bath the better the casings turn out. I use lots of ice and leave in ice bath for at least 20 mins. If I skip the cold ice bath and use water with no ice or no ice bath at all then problems occur.
