Meat Hacks: Cooking cured sausages at the correct temperatures

Jonathon

Meat Hacks:Cooking cured sausages at the correct temperatures

Learn about the importance of protein extraction when making a cured sausage with Walton's and Meatgistics. Watch the video, read the guide, and then post your questions or comments below.

Meat Hacks

Why is cooking cured sausages at the correct temperature so important?
One of the issues a lot of home processors have with cooking snack sticks or other cured sausages is that they end up with an overly dry snack stick. A snack stick is not supposed to be as juicy as a bratwurst but it should retain some of its moisture. There are a few reasons for this, the two most common are that you did not have the correct fat content or you cooked your product at too high of a temperature. You want to start cooking a cured sausage of any kind at a low temperature and gradually step it up 15-20° every hour or so. This allows the meat to cook evenly throughout and retain as much moisture as possible.

For snack sticks you really want to start them out at 125 for 1 hour and then 140 for 1 hour before moving on to 155 for 2 hours and then 170 until the internal temp of the meat reaches 160. Some people go right to the 170 degrees to cook the snack stick, this is going to cause a few problems for you. First it is going to dry them out and second if it overcooks the outside of the product it will stop transferring heat to the inside and you end up with a burnt outside ring and an undercooked center!

To show you what happens we are mixing and stuffing two batches the exact same way together but we are going to cook some of them with the approved method and some of them we will start out at a high temperature and let you see the results when they are done.

The snack sticks are done cooking and as you can see the ones that we cooked at the correct temperature are pretty much perfect. The other batch however are tough, dry and the casing looks very unappetizing as well! So on your next batch of cured sausages make sure you are stepping up your cooking temperatures gradually!

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