03-01-2021, 03:30 PM
I know I posted about this before, but I have been reading a lot in the other smoker thread and this is a good story.
Years ago I bought some goats to clean up a piece of property. When they were done I decided to make sausage out of one of them. My father and I killed and skinned it. I let it hang in my garage for a few days. When you make sausge from lean meat instead of pork you have to add extra fat. I went to Swaggerty's plant in Sevierville to buy fat and casings. The pure fat cost me $1.99 a pound while a pork shoulder roast would have cost $1.69.
I borrowed a commercial grinder from my cousin. That thing must have weighed 75 pounds. I almost killed myself getting it into the kitchen.
On Valentines day my fiance and I ate psychedelic mushrooms drank a bunch of wine and made the sausage. It was a crazy experience. I had never used the a sausage grinder before so we wasted a bunch of the casings. But eventually we had a sting of links. They just were not very uniform in size. Of course we did not clean anything before going to bed and the next morning we awoke to a kitchen where every square inch of surface seemed to be covered with grease and fat. Not a pleasant experience with a hangover.
But the real crazy part was my homemade smoker. I read online how to make a smoker from and old freezer. I bought one for a few bucks from a salvage yard and cleaned it out well. Drilled a small hole in the side and inserted a meat thermometer. Then I cut a hole in the roof and laid a board over it to open or close it. Hung up the strings of sausages inside and placed a pan of charcoal and water-soaked hickory chips in the bottom. It was a lot of trouble to keep the temperature in the correct range, but at the end of the day I was pleased with the results. I dried them pretty hard like a summer sausage.
But when I was through I noticed that the plastic liner of the freezer had melted all out of shape. So I assume the sausage probably had some amount of chemicals from the melted plastic. They tasted very good and I ate them all. I figured one batch would not have enough poison to hurt me too bad. But I would never do it on a regular basis.
So my homemade smoker worked, but it was a "one use" deal.
Years ago I bought some goats to clean up a piece of property. When they were done I decided to make sausage out of one of them. My father and I killed and skinned it. I let it hang in my garage for a few days. When you make sausge from lean meat instead of pork you have to add extra fat. I went to Swaggerty's plant in Sevierville to buy fat and casings. The pure fat cost me $1.99 a pound while a pork shoulder roast would have cost $1.69.
I borrowed a commercial grinder from my cousin. That thing must have weighed 75 pounds. I almost killed myself getting it into the kitchen.
On Valentines day my fiance and I ate psychedelic mushrooms drank a bunch of wine and made the sausage. It was a crazy experience. I had never used the a sausage grinder before so we wasted a bunch of the casings. But eventually we had a sting of links. They just were not very uniform in size. Of course we did not clean anything before going to bed and the next morning we awoke to a kitchen where every square inch of surface seemed to be covered with grease and fat. Not a pleasant experience with a hangover.
But the real crazy part was my homemade smoker. I read online how to make a smoker from and old freezer. I bought one for a few bucks from a salvage yard and cleaned it out well. Drilled a small hole in the side and inserted a meat thermometer. Then I cut a hole in the roof and laid a board over it to open or close it. Hung up the strings of sausages inside and placed a pan of charcoal and water-soaked hickory chips in the bottom. It was a lot of trouble to keep the temperature in the correct range, but at the end of the day I was pleased with the results. I dried them pretty hard like a summer sausage.
But when I was through I noticed that the plastic liner of the freezer had melted all out of shape. So I assume the sausage probably had some amount of chemicals from the melted plastic. They tasted very good and I ate them all. I figured one batch would not have enough poison to hurt me too bad. But I would never do it on a regular basis.
So my homemade smoker worked, but it was a "one use" deal.
