Suggestions for what to do with some gift money?

[vagreys]

I asked on another forum and wanted to get opinions from you all, too. I have a little over $200 in gift money to spend and would appreciate some suggestions, thoughts and opinions on next purchases to enhance my sausage making. I'm not a gear hound, but I will add equipment if it meets an identified need, and when I do, I try to get the best quality I can afford, at the time. I've been doing all fresh sausages for years. I haven't the room to really do cured meats any justice, nor do I have the money to invest in the base equipment necessary to do that.

Here's the sausage-specific equipment I have:
- #10 manual grinder
- #12 electric grinder
- nice variety of #10/12 grinder plates and knives
- 5 lb vertical stuffer
- stacking (cooling) racks for drying

Some stuff I've considered adding:
- Scales accurate to 0.1 g, for spices as I shift to percentage/metric based recipes. (digital or mechanical? I already have a good set of digital scales to measure up to 5 kg, accurate to 1 g.)
- 20 lb manual meat mixer (I think it is too easy to overmix in my Kitchenaid, and I think the paddle warms the mixture quickly.)
- Infrared thermometer for quickly reading meat batter temperatures while making emulsion sausages.
- What else? Or what should I consider as an alternative? My average batch size is increasing to 15-20 lbs (about two shoulders). This used to be a 'large' batch, but there is enough demand, now, that in order to spread a little around, I need to make this much now, regularly.

Books. I enjoy books and have what I think is a nice library on sausage and meat, including all of Stan's books. I have very little dedicated to charcuterie, per se - just Grigson's "French Pork Cookery" and Victoria Wise's old "American Charcuterie" - and have thought about adding a volume or two on the subject, but the reviews of just about any serious book on charcuterie are disappointingly negative.

One alternative is to add/build a portable cold smoker of some sort, but the price of good commercially-made cold smokehouses has gone through the roof. So, I'm considering building my own, and am giving some serious consideration toward building a plywood one, if I can satisfy my concerns about glues/chemical vapor/formaldehyde release at internal temperatures of 100-200°F.

What do you folk think? What would you add to a basic home setup to improve as your batch size grows from 5-10 lbs to 15-20 lbs?

[Bubba]

Hi Vagreys,

Looking at your current equipment list I would also maybe rather consider the cold smoker chamber.
At my end I'm also planning a cold smoke chamber, and have been doing some tests with my existing smoker to monitor temperature rises under certain conditions etc, then I also got some very good suggestions and ideas on this forum.
My one unresolved hurdle is how to use wood chips (as opposed to using saw dust) for low smoke generation. Most of my smoking I do with Beech wood, and it is not easily available in saw dust. But I'll figure something out, I may even end up making my own saw dust.
And then as Ross said, instrumentation will use a good part of your budget.

Another very handy device I recently invested in is a remote temperature monitor for smokers, the model I bought monitors internal smoker and meat temperature separately. It has taken a lot of guess work out of smoking, and if ever the smoker temperature rises to high you know it instantly.