Is the cured meat I have safe to use?

[Denny O]

bocephus OR even as a round shape and fry them as a caseless little sizzler sausage too just in a larger diameter casing.

[cdavis]

KS deer hunter welcome aboard

[KS deer hunter]

As an epilogue, since that batch of meat was my very first try at sausage making, that batch of meat was not very well mixed. Hence, after full defrost, I was able to mix it better, add some more water and I was able to stuff it in snack stick casings. It all turned out great. Yesterday we smoked it. It was not bad for my first try. Now I have to wait for the fall deer season…

[Jonathon]

KS deer hunter Awesome job! Glad you are pleased with your 1st try, it’ll get better/easier and eventually it will be like second nature.

[processhead]

KS deer hunter Good job on staying with it and finishing your first batch.
Like Jonathon says, it will just get easier from here on out.

[Fred Jensen]

Sausage maker’s, old school, has been using finished sausage temperature to be 152-155 F for years. Where did the magic number 160F come from?

[processhead]

Fred Jensen said in Is the cured meat I have safe to use?:

Sausage maker’s, old school, has been using finished sausage temperature to be 152-155 F for years. Where did the magic number 160F come from?

Safety margin for all the amature sausage makers with inaccurate thermometers and inconsistent temperatures in their smokers.
I test my thermometers and smoker, so I go with the temps you listed.

[Jonathon]

Fred Jensen It is the moment of what is called instant lethality, where the very second it hits that temperature everything we are concerned about is dead. Like posted above the time/temp (also know as appendix a) is what a lot of people use. Now, it also depends on how much moisture you want in your product, if you like a semi-dried sausage then cooking all the way up to 160 will also give you a drier product.

[Fred Jensen]

processhead Checking calibration of your probe temperature gauge. Boilng water is about 212F and freezing is about 32F. I take my gauge by putting it in boiling water and then in ice water packed with ice cubes. If your really fusy buy an ASTM thermometer. This is a universal thermometer used to check all thermometers. The high-end thermometers can be calibrated. If you can’t calibrate your thermometer and it’s out of range throw it away.

[Fred Jensen]

Jonathon thank you for your expertise. I’m looking back in time to before the German war when sausage makers choose the best temperatures for their sausage meat and their spices. Then came the war. Polish people, Jews, and others were terminated. We almost lost the sacred recipes of the past. Government agencies were in charge of what meats, spices, and temperatures were allowed. For a long time, you were only allowed pork in making kielbasa garlic sausage. Later you were allowed some beef as the story goes. If you added other ingredients it was not considered a certain sausage type. You could rename it like “Jon’s Sausage” for instance.