Question about Kabanosy cooking

checkerfred · Post by **checkerfred** » Sat Feb 15, 2014 05:02

Thanks Carpster! Nice looking sausages! I started to go through the B2 thread but was making some sausage this week at the time and didn't have much spare time to do so. I will definitely be working my way through it though. This hobby takes a lot of time! haha. I enjoy it though

Post by **redzed** » Sat Feb 15, 2014 17:54

checkerfred wrote:
redzed wrote:Why do you guys want to make a simple process more complicated? Follow the traditional recipe and you will have a great product! Follow Marianski's instructions and forget about "bumping the temp up by 10 degrees every hour" and smoking the dang things for six or ten hours. Kabanosy are meant smoked lightly and then the the temp is raised to 180 or even 190 for a short period of time to give them that crusty baked appearance. You don't dunk them into cold water! They are supposed to be wrinkly looking! And just leave them hanging at room temp for 3 to 5 days. Keep the flies off them and they will be great! If there are still any left after that, put them into a paper sack and into the fridge, vaccuum pack and freeze or throw them into your back pack and take a hike!
Well this didn't seem too friendly. I believe your referring to me. If so why didn't you respond to my thread? I believe I read chuckwagon say on here that there are no silly questions.

So first of I didn't smoke mine for 6 hours but I did have them in the smoker cooking. Else they wouldn't have got to internal temp. And I had them cooking at 170-175. So should I have pulled them and ate them under cooked? Regarding the bump in temp every few min I've seen some recipes for snack sticks say this to keep the fat from melting out. Further more when you read to keep temps 170 and below it's confusing to see a recipe suggest baking at 190. I've had problems with fat rendering out. As for the 3-5 days at room temp, that confuses me also. I thought to be shelf stable and left out, they would need to have a pH of less than 5 and a water activity of .85 or less. And dunking them in water, I thought you were supposed to do to stop the cooking process.

So as you can see, even tho I've been on this forum a while I'm still new at sausage making and still learning. I joined this forum to get help from more experienced people and to learn more about a hobby I enjoy. Sorry if I struck a nerve.

Fred and Greygoat, my comments in no way were intended to belittle or demean your posts and questions. Neither were they personal in any way. My post was about sausage and not you. And in retrospect, it might have come off as as being somewhat discordant. So if I offended you in any way, I apologize. That certainly was not my intent. Furthermore, Greygoat's question about using a dehydrator to finish Kabanosy is quite relevant, and should have been answered properly. There is nothing wrong with doing that, especially if you want eat them sooner than 3 or 5 days. In my opinion, letting them mature for a few days will result in a more flavourful sausage, but in the end the difference will probably be minimal.

As to the process of "bumping up the temperature every few minutes," I surmise that it is not the be-all and end-all methodology when it comes to smoking sausage. There is more than one way to skin a cat. To begin with, different sausages require different approaches. Some are smoked lightly, some heavily, they are cold smoked, warm smoked, hot smoked, finished by "baking" or poaching. How long you smoke the sausage and the type of wood you use also defines the sausage and makes one different from the other. There simply does not exist one method. And we all have different types of smokers so that has to be taken into consideration. The guy using a traditional barrel smoker will smoke his sausage in a totally different manner than the guy using his digital Bradley smoker. So the key here is to get get to know your smoker and that will come only through many sessions and experience. Like with wine and food, everyone has different likes and dislikes so we end up applying the amount and type of smoke that suits our palate.

Now to the question of "what's in a name?" Every language has evolved in that we use different words for different objects, people and places so that we can communicate and understand each other. Different foods have different names and so do sausages. One sausage differs from the other by the type of meat used, how it's comminuted, spiced, size and type of casing, and how it's smoked and cooked, etc. So why not call something by its proper name? And if if you come up with a variation that you like, give it a unique name! I would be concerned if my wife told me that she drives a bus, when in fact she has a VW Jetta. The ingredients and process of making bologna and frankfurters are similar, but the latter is stuffed into large bungs and the former into thin casings. So if I was munching on a bologna sandwich and told my wife that I was eating a hot dog, she in turn would wonder about me. And when I open up a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup, I expect it to be made with tomatoes and not potatoes. Our friend SawhorseRay would be thrown out of his favourite casino pretty darned quick if he insisted that the Queen of Spades in his hand was a Queen of Hearts. So yes, I think it's obfuscate to call large diameter sausages seasoned with mustard "Kabanosy". But then, who am I to judge? After all, Yankee Doodle determined that a feather was macaroni.

sawhorseray · Post by **sawhorseray** » Sat Feb 15, 2014 20:02

Our friend SawhorseRay would be thrown out of his favourite casino pretty darned quick if he insisted that the Queen of Spades in his hand was a Queen of Hearts.

A few years back if the jack of spades had been a club I´d have picked up about $135K on the progressive at the Let-it-Ride table. Oh well, easy come easy go.

I´m going to order some sheep casings when I get home (waiting to go to the airport right now) and do a batch of Kabanosy when they arrive at my house. I´ll follow the guidelines set down by CW, Crusty, Red, and Cabonia (your pics look great Cab, beautiful stuff!) I do notice a contradiction between about cooling the Kabanosy after it´s fully cooked. In Marianski´s recipe that CW quotes there´s a call for a ice water bath. Is that so or not? I´d post the link but this Mexican computer would erase everything I´ve written, again. JUNK! RAY

checkerfred · Post by **checkerfred** » Sun Feb 16, 2014 04:34

Thanks red for clearing that up... Sometimes Internet posts can sound different than intended. I definitely wanna get my cook time down to 20 min for snack stick sized sausage that was the reason for my post. Does the 3-5 days hold time matter if it's at room temp or in just the fridge?

Cabonaia · Post by **Cabonaia** » Sun Feb 16, 2014 07:46

sawhorseray wrote:In Marianski´s recipe that CW quotes there´s a call for a ice water bath. Is that so or not?

Hi Ray - Thanks for the compliment! If you use collagen casings, no water bath. I've used sheep casings only once, and didn't shower them, and they came out well. But since you are using sheep casings, and Marianski says to shower them...why not?

Cheers,
Jeff

sawhorseray · Post by **sawhorseray** » Sun Feb 16, 2014 17:51

I'm kind of torn different ways in regard to the casings. I have a ton of free shopping coming my way from Cabelas gift cards and I know they get their casings from PS Seasonings, which is where I also order a lot of my stuff. The single pack stuff seems expensive and has bad reviews, complaints about being too small and very hard to work with. I guess I can order a entire hank of the 24-26mm sheep casings, cost me $51. I'm assuming sheep casings will keep salted in the fridge as well as hog casings, forever. I might just wait for the next time I drive over the hill to see what kind of collagen casings Cabelas has on hand, tho I've no idea what they're like to work with and understand that links can't be twisted. This will take a bit more thought and investigation. RAY