One of the best things about deer hunting is making some great sausage in February after the season. The temperature is still cool/cold & we "drip" the sausage over night then smoke it in our homemade smoke house for a day or two. After that, some becomes cooking sausage & some gets hung for a few weeks to dry. Good Stuff!

Well it looks like I'll have access to some Axis hunting as well as a bunch of nilgai meat to make sausage with soon. My question is, how do I hang & smoke it in the Texas Spring & Summer without worrying about spoiling? Part of my seasoning recipe calls for the pink curing salt, but we have always keep the temperatures as low as possible during the Feb smoking process. All you sausage makers out there, do you worry about this & how do you handle cooled-down smoking?

TIA...

First of all . I smoke sausage in the Spring & Summer too. For smoked sausage, I always use the pink salt (sodium nitrite). Some folks don't, but I do for two reasons...safety & added color. Just be careful that your seasoning mix combined with the pink salt won't end up being too salty in the end. I recommend a test batch first & adjust if need be. What I do in the Texas heat, is grind/mix/stuff casings/and let chill over night in the fridge for the seasonings to marry & the curing salt to set. In the morning I get up & fire the smokehouse with low heat only (no smoke). My smokehouse is electric & I put a small circulation fan in it. I hang my sausage, low heat, and turn the fan on until the casings are dry. Dry casings absorb the smoke better (you probly know that). Once the casings are dry, I turn the fan off & start with the smoke and gradually turn up the temp. I can do up to 120 lbs of sausage in one batch, usually takes 6-8 hrs to reach the target temp and get the amount of smoke in the meat that I am looking for. Then each rack of sausage goes into an ice bath in a big cooler & then is carried into the house where I set them up hanging from chairs under a ceiling fan on high to blossom/cool down/dry. Then package. When I put the raw sausage into my smokehouse to dry, it normally takes from 1-2 hrs for the casings to be tacky/dry to the touch. No worries about spoilage.

I'm fortunate to have a place to shoot axis as well. If I wanted to make sausage I normally vacuum pack the meat and make it later in the year when the weather cools down again. Mainly I use my summer meat to grind hamburger.

Thanks guys for the good advice. When it comes to making sausage I find that everyone does it a little different. I think I'll try a small batch to be careful & see how it comes out. Now to go out & get that axis....

Thanks again!

sounds good.

We use the pink salt. Smoking while the casing is wet should help the smoke absorb faster/better.

We have a window unit that will suck the temp in our smoke house down to about 60 degrees or so. When I think of smoking sausage it is a cold smoke, as in no heat(cooking) involved it is for flavor only.