In this post, we will dive into the top 5 meat hacks that help us when making cured sausage. From the basics of keeping meat extremely cold during the processing to adding automotive sponges to your smoker. Follow these hacks and we promise that once you do it this way, you will never go back to your old process.

In this post, we will dive into the top 5 meat hacks that help us when making cured sausage. From the basics of keeping meat extremely cold during the processing to adding automotive sponges to your smoker. Follow these hacks and we promise that once you do it this way, you will never go back to your old process.

In this post, we will dive into the top 5 meat hacks that help us when making cured sausage. From the basics of keeping meat extremely cold during the processing to adding automotive sponges to your smoker. Follow these hacks and we promise that once you do it this way, you will never go back to your old process.

Do not use your stomper when you're grinding your second grind through a 1/8 inch plate. What you'll want to do is have your meat set up towards the back of the hopper and put just enough meat down your throat so that once the screw has taken it and moved it out of the chamber you'll put a little bit more just enough to fill the chamber then let it go. It will keep clearing and you continue to keep pushing it down slowly. Your grind will be much faster if you do it this way than if you try to put large amounts down and force it down your stomper.

What happens when you push the meat down with your stomper is your creating more back pressure. If you look inside one of those grinders you'll see that the auger is set up as a screw system and on the inside of that your'e going to have spirals that coincide with that screw system. This helps prevent the meat from getting back up over the auger system, but it can still happen. As you push down your'e creating more pressure making it more likely for it to force its way back over and oddly enough slowing down your grind.

When smoking meat one of the hardest things to do is get past what we call "the stall". The stall is when the evaportation energy coming off your product meets and sometimes exceeds the thermal processing energy. Think about it like sweat on your skin, when it's really humid out you sweat more but you don't cool down as much. This is because there is enough humidity in the air to prevent your sweat from evaporating off your skin. The way to achieve this in a smokehouse is to increase the relative humidity, but most home smokers aren't going to have a way to do that so you would typically put in a water pan. This will work, but it will only increase the relative humidity by about 5%.

Try using an oversized pan and automotive sponges, and let the sponges stick out of the water. The sponges are full of tiny tunnels and crevices where water will sit and easily be evaporated. By doing this you have more than quadrupled your surface area.

Another great cooking hack to not finish your meat in the smoker. Once you've reached about 130 degrees of internal temperature your meat has picked up about as much smoke as it's going to and from here it's just a cooking process. So the question becomes how can you increase the relative humidity even more?

These are 5 of our favorite meat hacks for making cured sausage. None of these by themselves are going to make an amazing sausage, but when you add them all together they really will help your finished product turn out great.