??? for sausage makers

cold smoking adds, well, smoke. and as important, it doesn't change the texture of the meat substantially (if at all). for ex. my hot smoked savory bacon is COOKED. firmed uop and a little drier. when later cooking it to eat by itself , say for breakfast, you need to be a little careful of it can be dry. not a big risk, but it is already cooked.

cold-smoked it retains the 'raw' texture.

you want the cure in sausages that are to be cold smoked, because essentially you have the perfect environment in a sausage at 80-120 degrees for hours on end to incubate botulism (no oxygen inside the sausage). risk is ridiculously small, but still, there it is.

if you aren't going to cold smoke them, there are still reasons to cure them. pancetta, for example, isn't smoked. but the nitrites in the cure give it a piquancy you don't get from salt-curing alone, and they give it a cured texture and color.

the hi-mountain cures are good for starting, but you can mix your own cures more easily than you can your own rubs. for starters, there are a lot of traditional cure recipes out there. they aren't tightly held secrets.

buy a pound of pink salts and you are good to go.

Stike had a good comparison of smoked sausage verses fresh when he mentioned bacon. I suppose with the correct finish temperature you could eat smoked sausage cold, but most folks will do a second cook on it, either on the grill, by baking it with potatoes or kraut, or just frying it for a sandwich.

The cure is a safety precaution as colder smoked sausage is in the 40-140 range longer than is recommended. HM's suggestion of omitting the cure when making fresh sausage is most likely due to the fact that some feel that we should keep our nitrate intake to a minimum.

Now to interject something along the lines of what we have been talking about offline...., here is a shot of a german sausage which is a mixture of beef and pork. This does have Tenderquick in it, but it's a fresh sausage meant for grilling. The internal temperature of these links were 175°. The TQ is responsible for the pink color, the texture, and some moisture retention. In this case, the liquid added was an iced solution of pureed garlic in water. And BTW, the meat was double ground.

That is a great place.... I've owned one of the Sausage Maker's 5 pound stuffers for over 20 years. I guess you're talking about the book from the late Rytek Kutas? I'm on my second copy (the binding quality has always been bad) and have purchased many of them for the folks I've gotten into making sausage. It's one of the best reference books around. I have heard that the sausage maker now has a sausage DVD that may be just the trick for younger sausage makers.