Today, we are going to talk about the 5 most common mistakes that people make when they are making homemade snack sticks. Snack sticks are a great treat and a fun way to try some great seasonings, as long as you make them correctly! No one wants to put in all the time and effort into creating a batch of snack sticks just to have an easily avoidable error ruin your batch. These are the top 5 mistakes you want to avoid when making snack sticks.

Today, we are going to talk about the 5 most common mistakes that people make when they are making homemade snack sticks. Snack sticks are a great treat and a fun way to try some great seasonings, as long as you make them correctly! No one wants to put in all the time and effort into creating a batch of snack sticks just to have an easily avoidable error ruin your batch. These are the top 5 mistakes you want to avoid when making snack sticks.

Today, we are going to talk about the 5 most common mistakes that people make when they are making homemade snack sticks. Snack sticks are a great treat and a fun way to try some great seasonings, as long as you make them correctly! No one wants to put in all the time and effort into creating a batch of snack sticks just to have an easily avoidable error ruin your batch. These are the top 5 mistakes you want to avoid when making snack sticks.

#1 Use a Binder

A binders main function is to help the product bind together, but it does much more than that. For example, how long you mix and grind your meat are extremely important when making snack sticks, because you need the correct amount of protein extraction. If you miss it by a little bit, then your texture and taste are going to be off. You can extend that margin of error by adding a binder like Sure Gel! Have you ever had your casing separate from your meat during the cooking process? That is probably because you did not get enough protein extraction during the mixing phase, and a binder can help with that.

#2 Use a Smoke Stabilizer w/ Wild Game

Snack sticks can be made out of almost any meat block, but you can’t treat an all-beef or pork snack stick the same as the one you are making out of a deer you got last weekend! If you are using any type of wild game like venison, elk, moose, etc., you should consider using smoked meat stabilizer. Smoked Meat Stabilizer is a cure accelerator that helps kill many common bacteria found in meat processing, but especially in wild game! This makes your product safer and helps to preserve the smokey flavor after packaging. Do not use Smoked Meat Stabilizer in conjunction with Encapsulated Citric Acid or Sodium Erythorbate.

#3 Your meat block is to lean

If you are making homemade snack sticks, you want a fat percentage of 20% or more.Fat gives the snack stick a more pleasing texture, helps vehicle the seasoning, coats the meat for better tastes, and prevents it from drying up.Fat is essential to keeping our bodies running properly and it is going to give you a better all-around product.

#4 You are cooking your snack sticks to quickly

If you start cooking at a higher temperature, you risk creating a tough and dry exterior and casing, sometimes known as case hardening. Case hardening makes it hard to fully cook the product up to a safe temp, and it does not allow moisture to escape as easily; and in a semi-dried product like snack sticks, part of our goal is to dry the product out to an extent. A slow and incremental increase in your smoker temps will help the meat temp rise at a rate that will help prevent case hardening, while still creating a safe and consumable product when finished. Within 2 hours we are getting the smokehouse temp high enough to get the meat up into a temperature range that will begin killing bacteria, and that should be within a sufficient enough time to not be a concern. For more information on this, check out our Snack Stick Tutorial which will walk you through the process step by step!

#5 You are over or under-stuffing your casings

  If you have ever had your casings pop or burst during the cooking process, there is a good chance you are overstuffing your casings. If you normally end up with an extremely wrinkly product, then there is a good chance you are under-stuffing your casings. With anything you are going to link like sausages, it is better to under-stuff than to over-stuff, as you can always twist them a few more times to tighten them up, but you can not do that with a snack stick. It will take some practice, but finding the correct stuffing proportions will help you with the appearance of your product and the ease of cooking.