Meat sticks with sous vide finish, in bags

[Dave in AZ]

Thought I would add some details for recent meat sticks I made. There are a ton of posts and questions on water sous vide finishing, including whether to bag them or not during the sous vide. I ended up bagging them in 2 gal ziplocks, worked great. Here’s some details.

Recipe:
7.5 lb final meat block of which 1480g venison, 400g pork fat, 900g ground beef 80/20, and 650 ml or so ice water. So 6.1 lbs meat plus the water to 7.5. I ended up using more water than expected, 23%.

• 159 g Willies seasoning
• cure#1 @ 2.5g/kg meat, so 2.78kg * 2.5g = 6.95 g
• binder, non fat instant dry milk @ 3% = 84g
• cure accelerator Ascorbic acid i.e. vitamin c, @ 0.1% so 2.8g or 2800mg or about 3 normal tablets, ground and mixed in some water to spread evenly AFTER CURE ALREADY MIXED IN! Don’t add with sodium nitrate in water, it will rapidly off gas the nitric oxide… add separate.
  

Mix the cure in some water before adding so you get good even distribution. Can do it with the spice mix, pour water blend over mixing meat.

I used a 6.5 qt kitchenaid mixer with beater blade. Dough hook was worthless. Too much meat for it, 5lb would have been OK. I ran on speed 2 for 4 or 5 minutes, holding spatula horizontal above meat to keep it forced down into bowl. Worked good, outstanding protein extraction. Added extra water due to how stiff/sticky the milk binder plus mixing made it, and not wanting to burn motor on Kitchenaid.

All meat almost frozen, barely thawed, separately ground about 3 to 4.5 mm I’d guess as deer was processed elsewhere and ground beef bought. Pork fat was 4.5mm, ground while frozen, from cap on boston butts. Meat mixed first 2 min with spices and cure, fat added with accelerator and mixed 3 or 4 more min. If using Walton’s 20 lb mixer, I would have gone more, but the Kitchenaid was incredible mix.

Stuffed in 16mm collagen casings from Walton’s, I loved them! Highly recommended, liked better than larger 19 or 21 mm size. Looked like commercial meat stick. However you need a true 10mm stuffer tube for these.

I have a 15lb stuffer from another company. Terrible design choice to use a 2 in stuffer tube base… not 2-1/8 in everyone else uses. No such thing can be bought, and company didn’t have smaller than 3/4in conical plastic. Bought 10 mm 54mm ie 2-1/8in base from smokehouse chef, ground down to 2in to fit.
– stuffing went well except for last 1/4" piston travel when another serious design flaw was revealed in stuffer. Had to jerry rig a seal. Wish I’d bought a Walton’s, but didn’t know about company at the time

Thermal Cook sched. Used a Thermoworks Smoke X4 for all temps, one probe for ambient, 3 probes in meat sticks one per rack level, center and edge.

1. Dry, 30 min in oven at proof setting, 120f with door open, convection fan on
2. Traeger grill, all sticks in 2 ropes on 2 levels. Smoke setting stabilized at 145 f ambient, less at start with cool grill.
   A. 1 hr 125 to 145 grill. Meat IT to 120.
   B. 2 hrs 145, IT to 133.
   C. 30 min 155, meat IT to 143.
3. Pulled meat at 141 to 143 internal temp.

Sous Vide
1.Cut meat sticks to 11.5 in to fit sideways in 2gal ziplocks.
2. Packed 1 deep, sealed ziplock around straw, sucked air out and finished seal. Pretty good vac seal! Filled just 2 bags, 1 stick deep for good thermal conduction.

3. Used an Anova pro sous vide 1000 w, cut a hole in the tray of a cooler to hold it.
   Got water to 172f by boiling 4 qt, adding to 5 qt hot tap water, boiling 4 more qt. Turned on Anova to hold 165f.
4. Placed 2 x 2 gal bags with sticks into water vertically using 2 cookie racks to hold upright. Burped the air bubble from top of each with a straw. Water pressure deflates bags good.
5. Cooked 30 min at 165 f. Internal temp went from 130ish where they had cooled during bagging, to 154 f. 10 more minutes gave 160f IT, I lowered sous vide to 160, held 5 more min for 45 min total.
   
   Ice bath.
   Dumped bags into ice water 15 min, IT 50 f.

Dry… dried on racks out of bags 30 min.
Package
Cut in half, vac packed.

Sticks plumped back up nice from the smoker, during the ice bath.

[mrobisr]

They look fantastic, wow good job.

[mrobisr]

Glad to see you truly doing the ice water bath, in my opinion that really makes a real difference in the quality of the finished product.

[Dave in AZ]

mrobisr thx, and I got a lot of great info from that sous vide thread. Just wanted to throw some times and numbers, which can help a lot on first few times thru a procedure.

[wdaly]

Dave in AZ Great info. Thanks. The sticks look fantastic.

[Jamieson22]

mrobisr Been curious on this. When you pull from a smoker you will likely get carry-over temp increase however for sous vide they will never creep up past water temp. So wondering how necessary ice bath is.

Also when I do a bath I usually just use cold tap water versus ice. I have always figured it is more about the delta to quickly lower temp and 155F meat will come down as fast in 45F tap water as it would in 32F. SO save me from dumping my entire ice maker.

[gus4416]

Them look perfect to me I have never made anything but sausage I am giving bratwurst a try this weekend

[mrobisr]

Jamieson22 said in Meat sticks with sous vide finish, in bags:

they will never creep up past water temp.

Since my water bath temp is 170f there is some room for excess temp creep.

“45F tap water”
Unfortunaly I don’t know if I ever have 45 degree water without ice, so you may have the advantage there.

[Jamieson22]

mrobisr Why not set water to IT temp you are chasing? That is one of the big benefits of sous vide.

And I guess Chicago winter gives me a nice cold water temp. Even so, using tap water for initial chill then a quick drain and ice bath may be more effective and use less ice.

[Dave in AZ]

Jamieson22 heat transfer thermodynamics. Speed of the internal temp rise. Heat transfers between two things in relation to the temperature difference. If you set 160 in the water, the meat internal temp will approach 160 asymptotically, tapering off below it and approaxhing super slowly.

By setting 170 or so and just monitoring temp, the meat IT will get to 160 waaay faster. There is no cooking benefit going on at 160, you are just reaching the USDA instantaneous kill temp for meat pathogens. To my mind, faster I get there and stop and cool, less issues with my fat sitting at 160 and melting out due to long exposure.

I set 170 to 175, stick a probe in the meat, as it approaches 160, like 159, I might pull the water temp down to 163 so I don’t race past it.

In my pic, you can see I had sous vide at 167, actual water temp was 163. It was taking longer than I wanter to reach IT 160, so I was heating it up a bit.

But yeah, if you don’t mind sitting around extra time that IS a huge benefit of sous vide, that I use for steak all the time. But after 4 hours on these meat sticks and kids clamoring to eat them, I don’t want to waste any extra time at end

[mrobisr]

Jamieson22 Dave said it very well as he said it is a fat thing, a time thing, and since I have found the pasteurization times and temps on the USDA website I usually go to about 152f-155f then go straight to ice bath.

[Jamieson22]

Dave in AZ I guess in my experience when I pull sticks/links off smoker they are often varying temps. So when I drop them into bath with water at desired IT I can guarantee all of them will end up where I want them. If I were to overshoot water temp and monitor I’d need to check quite a few of them and pull in multiple stages else risk some being over/under cooked.

[cdherman]

Can I just vac pac the smoked but not yet fully cooked sausage and then sous vide the vac packed stuff? Anyone tried? Suspect would come out with some too much liquids around the sticks. Or the caseing would not adhere. But the process is very interesting.

[Dave in AZ]

cdherman
I tried that, but like you said there was slight juice produced. So you have to take them out of bag anyways after ice bath, to let them dry out and color bloom. This final surface drying is when the casing firmly adheres. I had hoped to bag once, SV, ice, then freeze… but no, you need that drying step.

However, if you don’t mind wasting the bag, vacuum sealing makes for easy SV. But it is simple and quick to use ziplock and just suck most air out with straw. OR, as many do, just toss the snacksticks bare into the water. The partial cooking from smoker has set the protein, so long as you get above 130f or so, so there is nowhere near as much juice lost to the water as happens with fresh brats. I’ve lately been doing 7 lbs of fresh brats directly in the water with no bags, and that isn’t an issue at all. So I now think just tossing snacksticks in bare would be about the same on cases as bagged. But since bagging is fast, I’ll probably keep doing it.

Here, these bags are cheap from Amazon, and are MUCH superior to ziploc for not leaking and giving good seal, I recommend them for this process as well as brining in bags in fridge.

https://www.[link removed, put amaz on dot com in here]/First-Street-2-Gallon-Reclosable-Freezer/dp/B008M1H8HM

[Jesser]

Dave in AZ was looking over a posting you did in 2022 on making meat sticks and finished with a Sous vide. my question is how did you know you had the desired temperature you wanted while using the Sous Vide? I did not see any probe sticking in bag. Would you share that info?
Also now the you have used that brand Sous vide would you recommend it?
Ok thanks in advance for your reply.

[processhead]

Jesser said in Meat sticks with sous vide finish, in bags:

Dave in AZ was looking over a posting you did in 2022 on making meat sticks and finished with a Sous vide. my question is how did you know you had the desired temperature you wanted while using the Sous Vide? I did not see any probe sticking in bag. Would you share that info?
Also now the you have used that brand Sous vide would you recommend it?
Ok thanks in advance for your reply.

I won’t speak for Dave, but would just add that the temperature controls on the SV unit will give an accurate temperature of the water.
Past experience while monitoring the IT of the sticks would give you the time frame in which the sticks would need to be in the water bath to reach the target IT.
With enough past experience, a guy could very likely just go with the time in the bath to know that the sticks had reached the target temperature and since the target temperature and the water temperature are one in the same, there is little danger of fat-out if you left them a few extra minutes to be safe.

[Jesser]

processhead ok are you saying the IT you want for sticks is 160 and you set the SV to maybe 165 and you put your bag of sticks in at maybe 150 then maybe when the Water temp is around 160-165 your sticks IT are at 160? Or maybe leave the sticks in 30 extra minutes to make sure? Then you are done toss in a water or ice bath?

[Dave in AZ]

Jesser
Just as processhead says, the heat transfer in Sous Vide is extremely high and fast compared to anything with air. The generally accepted rule of thumb I’ve seen referenced manyvtimes is this: from fridge temps around 33f, to 160f in a sous vide, use 1 minute per mm of diameter, up to 32mm or bratwurst size. So, about 20 min for snacksticks.

Because temps are low and controlled, there is little risk of fat out from going long, so I usually go 10 or 15 minutes over. Then I pull a bag, and from a corner I shove a temperature probe thru plastic to check some sticks. That way I can reseal if needed. However, I have never checked and NOT already been up to temperature. So, 45min has always been plenty.

Also, from the FSIS meat cooking tables, you only need 12 min at 140f, 4 min at 145f, 72 seconds at 150f, etc
So I now tend to set lower temps like 150 to 155 to avoid all fat out issues, and don’t try to get to 160f at all.

[salmonmaster]

Dave in AZ here’s a post from another web site that I had on my phone for years

[mrobisr]

Jesser Follow this and you will be safe every time.

Pasteurization Time for Meat (Beef, Pork, and Lamb)
(starting at 41°F / 5°C and put in a 131–151°F / 55–66°C water bath)
Table 5.1: Time required to reduce Listeria by at least a million to one, Salmonella by at least three million to one, and E. coli by at least a hundred thousand to one in thawed meat.