Kosher Blog

Making a Turducken, Chapter 3 – Andouille Sausage, continued

By the end of my last post, I had a tray of raw Andouille sausages, in casings, drying overnight in the refrigerator. The next step I’m going to describe is smoking the sausages. (I’d like to apologize for the limited number of photos – I didn’t think about writing this up until I was mostly finished. I’ll keep trying to be as descriptive as possible. This photo IS NOT a picture of my smoker. I just wanted to set the mood.)

DISCLAIMER: The process I’m describing is for informational purposes only. Improperly smoked/cured sausages can harbor bacteria and lead to food poisoning. I don’t want anyone to try what worked for me, get sick and sue kosherblog or myself. This was my first time smoking sausage, and if I didn’t get food poisoning this time, it might have just been dumb luck. Please follow proper food safety rules in your kitchen.

Still with me? Great. Let’s move on.

I’m an avid outdoor cook – As often as possible I’m BBQing, grilling, smoking and turkey frying. Our garage isn’t used for a car – it’s full of cooking equipment. (OK, not only cooking equipment, but lots of it.) I own 2 charcoal grills, a water smoker, a charcoal smoker and a gas grill. For this project I’m going to be using my Smokintex PRO Series Model #1300 electric smoker. It has a thermostat to control the smoking temperature for consistent results – it makes the smoking experience as hassle-free as possible. It may not be as authentic as using my charcoal smoker, but I’m sticking with it on this occasion. It was a Father’s Day present from a very kind and very patient wife.

After the sausages have been drying in the refrigerator overnight, they have shriveled up slightly, and the casings have gotten firmer. That’s important because I need to cut them apart. After the drying, I can snip the sausages apart, and the meat won’t run out of the casings. That leaves me with about 30, 5″ long sausages. I spread them out on the racks of the smoker, closed the door and set the thermostat. I put 2 or 3 chunks of hickory wood in the smoke generator – I think pecan wood is more traditional for Cajun cooking, but I only had hickory.

I need to revisit a point I made in the last article. After some research, I have determined that Morton’s Tender Quick® didn’t have as much curing-salt as was recommended in the instructions I was following, so I didn’t have enough of it in my mix. What led me to this conclusion? The recipes on Morton’s website. In all of their sausage recipes, they were using 1 ½ teaspoons of Tender Quick® for each pound of meat. My recipe had 5-pounds of meat mixture, so I needed at least 7 ½ teaspoons – that’s 2 ½ tablespoons. I had used only one teaspoon of it. Looking back on the recipe, I think that if I make this recipe again, I should probably replace some of the salt and sugar (2 Tablespoons each) with Tender Quick®. What was the difference this time? I guess that I wasn’t as protected as I could be from bacterial growth. Everything turned out fine this time, but it’s food for thought. Re-read that disclaimer, if necessary.

What temperature did I set the smoker to? The book says that sausage should be cold-smoked between 90 and 130° Fahrenheit or hot smoked between 170° and 250° Fahrenheit. I didn’t have the cold smoking kit for my smoker, so I compromised and set the thermostat at about 135°. That’s about the lowest temperature that I’ve been able to generate smoke at.

Time for a little digression. Besides for being a foodie, I’m also a huge computer/hardware geek. I mention this because this smoking session led me to come up with a great invention. I think it would be a marketable product – if there are enough cooking/computer/hardware geeks out there.

First, I need to give you some background information.

1) On the morning I was smoking my sausages, I was invited to a school assembly that my 1st grader was performing in. So I had to figure out a way to get the smoking done and attend the assembly. His school is 20 minutes away from home, so it was very doable.

2) I never smoke anything without my RemoteCheck double probe wireless thermometer. I use the first probe to measure food-doneness and the second probe to monitor chamber-temperature in the smoker. Sometimes both probes will go in the food, as in the case of a thermostat-controlled smoker. I need to know exactly what is going on during the cooking process.

3) One of my proudest geek achievements is wiring my home with X10 so I can control many of the lights and appliances in my home from my computer. My most common use of this system is to eliminate the need for lamp-timers on Shabbos – everything turns off and on when it is supposed to, controlled by a Linux server in the basement. The server knows what time Shabbos starts and varies the schedule accordingly. I also have a private website that I can use to control the lights remotely, using a web-browser.

4) The PalmOne Treo 600 is a multi-function, cell-phone and PDA with internet access. It’s the most used device I have – after my Tivo. Totally indispensable. On occasion I have used my Treo to turn off lights and appliances that were accidentally left on, using that private website I mentioned.

And now, for my product pitch to wrap all these interests into one idea: an Internet-enabled thermometer with temperature logging! What do you think? BBQing a 15-pound brisket? That easily takes more than 18 hours. Set it up before you leave for work. Go to your personal website and check the progress throughout the day! If you have to leave something cooking, use a PDA or mobile PC to see if it’s done, and plan how much time before you need to get home! Check the temperature history of your smoker and learn to control the heat better! On the day in question, I could have kept tabs on my sausages while listening to my son’s presentation. That’s a great idea, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Why are you looking at me that way? You don’t like it? What do you mean that it’s a ‘niche-market’? OK, let’s back away from my insane techno-lust, and get back to the sausages. Sorry for that outburst.

The sausages were left to do their thing for about 3 hours. I did leave to go to the assembly and by the time I had gotten back they had reached about 135°. I considered that done enough, since cold smoked sausages shouldn’t exceed 130° and I DID have curing-salts in the mixture protecting me. Re-read that disclaimer one more time.

The scent of the sausages was sublime. (I should have mentioned before now – I did get to actually taste the sausage mixture before this point. There’s usually a small amount of sausage mix that doesn’t get all the way through the stuffer – when I was finished stuffing, I collected it, made a small patty and fried it up. It was extremely good and I had no doubt that the smoking had improved on it. Useful tip: Smoking seems to cancel out salt somewhat, so the fried patty was saltier than the finished sausage.) I put them in a tray, covered them tightly, and put them in the refrigerator to cool. Having only reached 135°, these sausages were not fully cooked and couldn’t be eaten as is. They were par-cooked, and were going to be crumbled and sautéed for my purposes. Since Thanksgiving, I have taken some of these sausages from the freezer and broiled them for dinner – they are so good. This is a photo of those broiled sausages – Aren’t they pretty things? If you can’t handle a little fat in your diet, then you had best look away now.

After finishing the sausages, there was only one ingredient that still need to be cooked before I could start on the actual turducken – the cornbread for the cornbread stuffing. With apologies to jabbett, who has been searching for the perfect pareve cornbread – I just went with the recipe on the back of the package (I replaced the milk with soy-milk). I figured that since I was using the cornbread in another recipe, I could make up for average cornbread with the ingredients I used later. I made a double recipe, and when it was finished I cut ¾ of it into 1″ cubes and set them out to get stale. My wife wanted the rest of the cornbread for breakfasts.

In the next post, I’ll remind us all why being friends with your butcher is so important. See you then.