Made 600 lbs...

... of venison sausage, jerky, and snack sticks.....

This is the last batch of sticks to go through. I forgot to take pics of the whole deal. Three 14 hour days standing on your feet stuffing casings makes ya need a long winters nap.

Cool!

how many new "friends" do you have?

That's awesome! How about some pictures of the smoke house?

Very nice.

nice work , I hear yeah on legs hurting , I killed gutted and hung a beef cow , Thursday after work , skinned broke it down and hung it Friday night after work , spent saturday getting other stuff doen , and today 18 dozen Tamales , just got the last of them bagged up and in the freezer.

it's all a lot of work but you now have a lot of top quality eats

I'll have to see if I have any. But in general it's a 4' x 6' cinder block room with a stack. We build the fire in an old 15 gallon steel drum with a hinged door on the floor. Heat and smoke is controlled by how far the door is held open on the drum.

It's over 70 years old and has never been cleaned.

I posted some of the pics on Facebook.... I had 3 people call me within 20 minutes wanting sausage.

I have my costs figured out down to the link. Most people run away when I tell them I just want the cost of the ingredients. There's lots of trading that goes on too.

I wasn't happy with the casings I got from the local butcher for the snack sticks. They were a little too big for my liking.

Looks great!

WS

Cool!

Dang, that makes the eighty pounds I'll be doing this weekend seem puny.

do you use natural casing ? or man made

We were just up yr way for a ride yesterday!! Sausage made out of these?

Probly lots now that the sausages are all made.We call them folks "Blisters" around here,,cause they show up after the works all done.

For sausage we use natural. For the sticks we used collagen.

I’ve been wearing the old man socks...you know ...the ones that go ovah your calf and just below the knee....Makes the legs feel real good standing on concrete for 8-10 hours.

We started Thursday afternoon grinding it.

Friday we had one grinder stuffing, the other continuing to grind. The smoke house can hold around 200-250 lbs. We ran around 150-175 thru it at a clip just so we could control the temps a little better. We ran 2 batches a day thru.

By Friday evening everything was ground. We just kept stuffing until it was all stuffed, then it became a game of drinking, cards, and eating.

Since the meat sticks take the shortest we ran 3 batches thru a day. We finished around 7:30 pm.

My wife hates to give up control of her kitchen and it drives her nuts when it's messy. So it was a real challenge to keep her from trying to clean or do dishes while we were working. So I went and bought her 3 bottles of her favorite wine and had her watch her favorite series on Netflix. When she slowed down drinking I'd call her out under the pretext I couldn't find some kitchen gadget. She'd come out in the kitchen and you could actually see her anxiety rise. Once she found it I'd give her a kiss and send her back into the living room with her wine. Sunday evening she was so happy when we were done and had it all cleaned up, You probably could've done surgery in there.

Grousewit, there's no doubt been a few of those run through it.

Smooth moves elkaholic.

Happy wife and all that.

We only make sausage from the three or four deer I kill each year and my wife actually likes to help. I was supposed to do it this weekend but she had to work and asked me to postpone until next weekend so she could help. Now that you put it the way you did, I'm wondering if it's only to make sure I don't wreck her kitchen?

Now if I could only get her to sit outside and tend the fire under the scrapple pot all day...

LOL!!!

My wife would help if we really needed it. She's very anal about things, so taking breaks to drink a beer or eat a sausage patty would not go over well with the kitchen being a disaster. Amazingly she does pretty good with the house smelling like a butcher shop for about a week. Lots of candles will be burnt this week though.