Cold smoking sausage

[YetiDave]

Hi all, I was just wondering if anyone has tried cold smoking sausage? I've been slowly venturing into the world of cured meats and after several very successful batches of bacon I finally bought a grinder/sausage maker. I'm following a recipe from Ruhlman's 'Charcuterie' for a Hungarian paprika sausage but it recommends only smoking for 2-4 hours. I use the ProQ cold smoke generator and usually give my bacon a full burn of 11-12 hours, so 2-4 doesn't sound like it'll be sufficient. Has anyone else given sausage a go? I'll be using apple for the smoke

[KamadoSimon]

I have used the Pro Q for smoking homemade sausage, bacon, steak and salmon.

Bacon and salmon can take a lot more smoke than steak - like you I gave bacon quite a long smoke, the salmon even longer (about 36 hours from memory). Steak I found that two hours was too much - settled on one hour after a few attempts. I would say give it a try with small batches over different timelines and see which is your preference. I found that a couple of hours on the sausage gave a subtle smoke which I liked (this was with oak dust).

Cheers,

Simon

[YetiDave]

Thanks for the tip! I was thinking that the sausage casing (hog) may prevent the flavour from permeating but I'll give 2 hours a shot

By the way, a 12 hour smoke with alder for camambert is magical

[YetiDave]

My preference turned out to be at the 4 hour mark wood choice ended up being a mix of beech and apple as the apple wood was more like splinters so didn't burn well on it's own. However I put some more Camembert on at the same time and the courseness of the apple meant that it burnt for over 13 hours. The result was 2 batches of sausages and 4 nicely coloured wheels of cheese



I'm making some more sausages at the weekend and I'm not sure I'll be able to resist putting them in for a few hours of smoke