Do any of you air dry your venison sausage?

Looking for a technique and recipe. Any information and appreciation Thanks.

Use a cure.

Yeah, I have the number one cure. I've never made cured sausage before. I was just wondering if anyone had a tried and true method and recipe.

I tried it here in east Texas and it just did not work. I think you have to be in an arid climate for it to work. I have done it on the Dehydrater and it turn out ok. More like jerky than dryed sausage.

That is the only way I do it. Smoke it a little and hang it for a couple of weeks. If it is humid it will get a mold on the casing. Wipe it with vinegar.

What do you guys do for recipes? Do you make your own or do you buy a pre-packaged seasoning?

There are several books onsausage making. I usually make mine-from scratch. Try to buy a book that specializes in game meat. If you try using recipes calling for domestic meat it will not turn out right.

The difficulty with making dried sausage is drying it slowly and evenly. A lot of the times the outside will dry too fast because the RH (relative humidity) is too low so the moisture escapes too fast and the outside dries while the inside stays moist. Its a matter of controlling humidity and keeping it cold enough to prevent too much mold growth. Some guys that are really serious about this have built cold curing chambers usually out of an old refrigerator. They basically set up a fridge with a humidifier inside and they hook everything up to a temperature/humidity controller so they can maintain absolute control while the sausages slowly cure. I've been pursuing the art of dried sausage for a while and have yet to absolutely perfect it.

Yep, that's what I've been reading. I'm thinking about try to make landjager. Do you both cold smoke and air dry yours? Or just air dry? Thanks for your input.

Rarely will you get the appropriate weather in Texas to do an air dry cure. As its been stated above, humidity is the difficulty. If you had 3 days of weather like right now (dry and cool) and suddenly your temp changed to 75* and humid, you'd have to immediately remove your sausage from outside air and finish it by other means.

You can remedy this by building a room specifically for sausage making, which in turn, becomes awesome for other things like salamis, jerky, and cold smoking cheese/fish. You'll need a well insulated room, a dehumidifier, and a source to control temperature. I'll leave that research up to you, as there are 1000's of configurations and opinions.

There is another option: I've found that you can cheat the system a bit and still yield decent results, although its not a 100% "old fashioned" method of air curing. First, you need mother nature to give you a 3 day forecast of mild temps and no humidity. Make your sausage and add your cure as you normally would. Hang your sausage in a room with indirect heat/smoke, bringing temps to 165-180 degrees (which is higher than normal) within the room. To achieve these temps in my smoke house, I had to put a fire box inside the actual smoke room. Keep this temperature for 6-7 hours OR at the 5 hour mark, start squeeze testing to feel the sausage firming on the inside. I like my sausage pretty wet on this inside. After the sausage begins firming up, throw one big log on the fire, shut the door and walk off. Let the fire go out and the sausage slowly begin cooling. As it does, it will cure. After 3 days, remove from smoke house and place on the bottom shelf of your garage fridge, on a sheet pan loosely covered with butcher paper for another 24 hrs. This will help pull some smoke biterness out and also slow the cure process more. Wrap and freeze. Done. It's not bullet proof, but its worked for me several years.

Now one more thing: Your smoke. Smoke should be translucent or light blue, NOT light grey and thick. Light grey smoke (almost like a wet log burning) will yield a sooty awful flavor.

Good luck!

+1

I built a smokehouse, put in a window ac and a dehumidifier. Works good.
I cover ac with plastic during smoking phase tho

Wow that's a nice set up. Looks like this will be a lot of work. Thanks all you guys for pointing me in the right direction.

A tool shed with an window unit it it will allow you to make dry sausage in texas, we do it every year sometimes more than once.