Today I smoked the hotdogs and
Andouille sausages.
I set up the smoker, soaked the
hickory chips for a while then fired it up.
Both the sausages I'm smoking today
get hot smoked at similar temperatures but I had so many of them I couldn't do
them all at the same time. I chose to
smoke the hotdogs first and moved them from the rack inside where they had been hanging overnight to the smoke box.
The hotdogs needed to be dried a
little more so I kept the heat down to about 120F for the first 30 minutes,
then wanted to apply a heavy smudge of smoke before setting the temp to about
165 for the rest of the smoking process.
Usually I just crank the heat up to high and smoke is billowing out in a
few minutes but not this time. The box
got hot , but no smoke. The only thing I
can think of is that I hadn't drained the chips enough and they were still too
wet to start smoldering (which produces the smoke). Not wanting to cook the dogs too much before
there was any smoke I pulled them out until the smoke got going. It took about 20 minutes before the smoker
was ready and I could put the hotdogs back in.
Then had trouble getting the
temperature to settle down where I wanted it.
First it was too hot, getting near to 200F. I made some adjustments to the flame and
venting, came back a little while later and it was down to 140F. It was a little windy today which is always a
challenge and Kathryn noticed that the tank of propane I was using was pretty
low both of which may have contributed to the problem. I changed out the
propane but the temps still went back and forth a few times before I finally got it to stay
around 160-165F.
About 3 hours later, the dogs were
at about 155F internal temperature so I pulled them out and with Kathryn's help
sprayed them down with cold water. This
stops the cooking process, starts to chill them down and helps prevent the
casings from shrinking too much which would lead to wrinkled, puckery sausages.
After examining the dogs after their
shower I found that all that temperature fluctuation (probably in conjunction
with some of the strings of dogs being longer than they should have been) had
caused some problems. A few of the
lowest hanging dogs had gotten overcooked and a couple even dried and burnt a
bit on the tips. They were just too
close to the heat source, I guess. The
ranch dogs will enjoy them just fine.
Fortunately, most of the hotdogs came out fine.
Once the dogs were out, I hung the
Andouilles in the smoker and adjusted the temperature to 180. It stayed pretty well around this number for
the whole time and about 4 hours later the sausages got to 155F (internal
temperature) and were done.
I pulled them out and, again, gave
them a good spray of cold water for cooling and to tighten the casings, then
popped them into the fridge.
I hope to package and freeze both these
types of sausage tomorrow.
In
other food news…
For
lunch today we opened the second (of three) brie I’d made starting in December. I’d left this one in the 50F ripening fridge
for a couple of week longer than the first and it was much softer all the way
through but also quite a bit stronger flavored.
I liked it a lot but there's no denying, it was pretty feisty for a Brie.
I spent
a little time in the greenhouse this morning, watering a few things and picking
tomatoes. Red, ripe, sweet and juicy home-grown
tomatoes in February. The bushes, which
have all but taken over the entire growing space have been giving us a few
tomatoes every week since August and this week was no exception. Here’s today’s haul (it’s hard to tell from
the picture but the one in the upper left corner is over 3 1/2" across)...
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