If you hot smoke the sausage and keep it refrigerated you do not need to add cure. Hot smoking is normally done at 200-250 for 1-2 hrs or until the internal temp reaches 165+. Hot smoked sausage is "cooked" sausage, the fat has been rendered. We add cure to allow us to cold smoke (low temperature cook) the sausage slowly and at lower temperatures giving us more smoke flavor and rendering very little fat (like store bought smoked sausage but way better, it's safe to eat but you still COOK it when you get home to render the fat). It takes my sausage 6-9 hrs to get to the "safe to eat" temperature of 150-152. I go longer than the 4 hr "safe zone" so I use a cure. I HATE food poisoning, so I don't chance it though there are people that do. Mine have gone as long as 10-12 hrs in the smoke house before hitting an internal temp of 150, (depends on weather and load). You can cold smoke at various temperatures depending on what you're doing, (cheese, fish, sausages, bacon etc). The general understanding among most sausage makers out there (and your deer processors that make smoked sausage), is that you are cold smoking until you start rendering fat. Once you start rendering fat you are now hot smoking AKA "cooking". There are a few folks that call cold smoking cooking, call it whatever makes you happy I guess. There are some that call smoked sausage fresh sausage too, as most understand fresh sausage as sausage that is ground, stuffed, and frozen - no smoke/cure any of that. Anyway, since I cold smoke my smoked sausages at lower temps for longer periods of time I use a Sodium Nitrite cure. There is some good material to read out there if you're just getting started. People do things differently and for different reasons, it's all good as long as nobody starts to vomit.

gasman777 I didn't look at your recipe until just now. Sorry I was in a hurry last night and didn't get to that. Your recipe looks to be a bit short of cure if you are making 100 pounds. You should bump that up to 4 ounces if you intend to cure the sausage as well as cook it.

Something else too. You should make a 2 to 5 pound batch before diving in at a full 100 lbs. Nothing worse then fining out you hate it and still have 99 pounds to go.

gasman777, did you make the recipe? If so, how did it turn out?

I've been meaning to update but it's been hectic. In short, some went very well and some not so much. Overall I learned a lot of what to do and what not to do.....so from that perspective, complete success. The whole family completely enjoyed it and we're very anxious to do it again next year. I'll break down the good and bad below but keep in mind, we made a lot of different recipes so we can figure out what we like and don't like....thinking next year we can focus our efforts on a couple recipes and that's it.

Jerky: disappointed, the recipe I found online wasn't very good for our taste. It had too much soy sauce, it's edible and we only made a couple of pounds so I'll be searching for another one next year.

Hamburger/Venison: very happy with this, luckily we made a lot of it. We've made burgers with it and some chilli and they have tasted great.

Pan Sausage: made 2 recipes. Both came out good, we'll keep both recipes as one is more of a hot and the other one mild.

Raw Deer Sausage: made 4 recipes here and applied zero smoke. 2 came out good, the other 2 were just ok. We will probably pick a fav out of the 2 we liked and focus on that next year.

Smoked Deer Sausage: made the same 4 recipes as above but applied the cure and smoke. Overall we're disappointed with all the smoked sausage and it's my fault...not the recipes. Unfortunately we made a lot of it which sucks....looking back, I should have varied my levels of smoke so we could see what we like...but honestly this was the part I was least worried about (and boy was I wrong). Good news I've learned, bad news is I've got a lot of sausage to eat that isn't exactly the most pleasant. What went wrong is they all taste way too smoky for our taste. Everything went as planned, I smoked it for just under 4 hours keeping the heat at about 125-150 and pulled the sausage when internal temp was around 150 ish. I wasn't all that concerned about this because I had read a lot about how some people smoke for a few hours and others cold smoke for much longer than that. Either way our batch came out way too smoky for our taste. I'm still stumped on how this happened but I can tell you next year I will probably only smoke it for an hour or less...Granted I know it's different meat but I've smoked brisket, pork, etc. on the pit countless times for a much longer period and never had the problem of being sensitive to the smoke flavor...but this sausage is completely different. I've never bitten a burnt piece of charcoal but I have a pretty good idea of what that might taste like now....Oh well, live and learn.

Dried Sausage: haven't tried it, but considering we smoked it for much much longer I'm worried it won't be good.

Overall, I'd call it success. Good learning experience and everyone enjoyed the heck out of it.