The Secret to Beef Sausage | Chuds BBQ

Oh what's going on everybody welcome back to Trud's Barbecue my name is Bradley Robinson and today I'm going to show you how I made these beautiful plump smokey red all beef sausage. Coming up! Down here in Texas we're in the land of beef where brisket is king on every barbecue menu but where there's brisket there's always brisket trim. There's many things you can do with the extra brisket trimmings you can make burgers you can make chili or the most popular thing to do is to make beef sausage and that's what we're going to do today and it is going to be delicious. Believe it or not I actually don't have any brisket trim on hand right now so instead I went to the store and I bought this. This is half of a brisket and it just so happens to be the point half which is the fattiest part of the brisket so it should work out to a perfect meat to fat ratio but I'm going to stick this in the freezer for a little bit to get chilled down so it grinds up a little bit easier. While we wait for our meat to chill down a little bit let's get our seasoning mix together. To my five pounds of brisket I'm going to add two percent of that weight in kosher salt. In my previous sausage making video I used pink salt in my spice mix and that's because pork is a little bit less safe at lower temperatures also we cured the meat overnight to help the texture and add a nice cure flavor to it but taking three days to make sausage is kind of a pain in the butt and sausage making is already pretty tricky so today we're going to make this recipe all in one sitting so it's going to be a lot easier for all you sausage making newbies out there. Next up got to go with some black pepper of course we are in Texas after all. At this point you can go in pretty much any direction you want to go in I'm going to go with my go to sausage ingredients I always do a little bit of garlic powder and some mustard powder I feel like those flavors work well in pretty much any sausage and have always worked well for me. Next up I'm going to add some paprika that's going to help with the color because I'm trying to go for a little bit of an homage to the Texas hot link or the hot gut sausage so we're going to add a good amount of cayenne as well we're going to make this pretty spicy not too bad and we're also going to add in a little bit of turmeric that's just going to help the color because I kind of like the way the orange grease looks coming out of the sausage and that's it salt pepper spices this is going to be a super tasty sausage. One last thing we're going to add to this spice mix is a sausage binder very common in sausage making basically what a binder does is add extra protein to your sausage the protein is going to create a protein structure that's going to help emulsify the meats waters and fats all together and give you that really nice firm snappy texture that you're looking for as well as greatly helping in water retention so if your links are getting kind of crumbly and drying out on you maybe leaching out a lot of fat I highly recommend giving a sausage binder a try. There's a few different types of sausage binders out there there's soy based binders dairy based binders there's some that are made from carrot proteins I think but the most common one you're going to run into is milk powder very easy you drop this right off the shelf it's just instant dry milk and that's got enough protein in it to really help this sausage along so general rule of thumb is three or four percent of the weight of your total batch going in so we're going to do that today I'm going with four percent of the total weight today of this milk powder woohoo windy this is another great tip for anyone that's new to making sausage the binder is going to really help make this sausage a little more bulletproof and harder to mess up another great thing about adding a binder is that it adds weight this five pound batch we're going to add ten percent water four percent binder plus all the spices so it's also going to help increase our yield always keep your sausage grinding stuff cold we are simply going to cut this brisket up into strips that are the size of this hole so we can get this thing ground up again I'm using the fatty portion of a brisket if you were going to do this with other meats trying to aim for a ratio of 70 30 kind of rolling the dice with this one but this cuts pretty fatty and it's got a good fat cap on it so should work out just fine man I hope there's not as many flies this time last sausage video they were rampant yeah there's a good amount of fat in there now we're simply going to send it through the grinder I'm using the coarse die on the grinder today and as always I will have exact recipes in the description for the spices of this sausage as well as links for this grinder that knife this table everything well not this table but this cutting board yep that is looking nice and fatty perfect looks good to me now we are going to add our salt our seasoning our binders and our liquid mix all of this in really quick and then it's time to add our liquid typically I like to use ice but today I wanted to do something with a little bit more flavor so I'm adding some sodium free beef stock actually I think this is beef broth I wish I made it myself I didn't but we're just gonna add that in I did 10% of the total weight get a little extra beefy flavor mmm all right now that everything's incorporated I'm gonna send this back through the grinder one more time I thought about it ahead of time I probably would have frozen the beef stock into little beef ice cubes but again we're trying to make a quick and easy recipe here what a beautiful day loving this fall weather right now oh it was a hot summer last time I made sausage out here it was a squatcha and I'm going through the coarse die again if you wanted a tighter texture you could go through the smaller die the second time or both times if you wanted to get it closer to one of those store-bought links but double grind through the big die works great for me here we go now I'm gonna go through and just mix this up make sure it's nice and tacky but the double grind usually takes care of that pretty well because the mixing process also releases protein structures and enzymes and whatnot that help bond your sausage together if you're gonna do this mechanically with a big mixing machine or a stand mixer or something you could really mix the hell out of it and get some quality protein bonds but if you're going by hand adding the binder will take care of most of your problems but that's looking pretty good if you can pick up a clump and it doesn't fall apart yep that's gonna make a good sausage sticking to the hand perfect all right folks you know the drill from here sausage goes into the old stuffer and we are gonna case this up going with the standard sized hog casing for this you can get these online you can get them at most grocery stores if you check like the ham or the bacon section or you can go to your local butcher shop it's probably best way to go about it but I just got some water in the casing I'm just kind of flushing it through to help make sure it's open it'll let me know if there's any holes in the casing itself tie a nice little knotty knot at the end and then we can start linking for this beef sausage I'm gonna do some good old-fashioned links there's a few different ways to go about that you can make a big loose rope and then go around and twist each one of them off but that creates a lot of air pockets then you have to prick your sausage and then it tends to leak out while you're cooking it so for me I oh man I popped one dang it so for me I like to go through in case each link individually that lets me know that it's as tight as it needs to be you can go link by link like this or leave them all connected create a link however big you like it give it a twist make another one twist in the opposite direction make a link again and so on and so forth and again there's many different techniques for casing sausage but the main goal here is just to keep pressure on the casing itself because if you were to just let it go it would fly off too quick so it's the speed at which the meat comes out that's really gonna give you the nice plump casing so I'm just holding it here and watching it fill up and if you go too tight you'll pop it for new people I always tell them to start out just pop it that way you know exactly what the tension is for how tight you can make it and then try and aim for as close to that as possible that way every link is nicely taut but take your time with it if you're only doing a five pound batch like this it's not gonna take very long to case so you can really make sure each link is perfect but there we have it some beautiful beef sausage links out of the five pound chunk of brisket I bought I got 11 links of sausage nice-looking links so in a perfect world I would now take this time to put these in the fridge uncovered ideally hanging that way the skins could dry out shrink up a little bit add a nice pellicle to the outside so smoke adheres to them a little bit better but we're not gonna do that today cuz I don't feel like it so we're gonna throw these right on the pit you ever melt plastic to your fingers that seems like a feature that needs to be fixed chud chimney starter coming soon we're gonna start off with one little log and see what temps we get for these beef links we are going to cold smoke these today and when I say cold smoke I don't mean a true cold smoke which is you know sub 90 degrees for days at a time I'm doing a relatively cold smoke we'll call it a warm smoke basically I'm gonna try and keep the temperature between a hundred and a hundred and fifty degrees but no hotter than that what that's gonna do is allow smoke to penetrate these links the skins to dry out a bit to give us a really nice flavor and color but not hot enough that the fat is gonna render that way we can cook them for a good four hours without leeching out any of the fat get that beautiful snappy texture in that wonderful red color I just threw a pretty big dense log on there just one and that's gonna smoke and smolder away on that tiny little coal bed and that should give us a beautiful temperature right around 125 130 degrees for the next three four hours two hours into this smoke and these little buddies are looking real nice got some really nice color on there the casing starting to feel really dry this is when I usually go in and flip them and while I'm at it I'm also gonna snip them into individual links now that the casings have cooked a bit these ends are sealed just gonna go through and clean these little weenies up cuz as you know everybody loves a clean wiener nice and plump nice and plump looking good boys right at our 3.5 I'm thinking that these smoky little wieners are done oh very nice color that is a good looking link of sausage to me so let's pull off always clean your wieners folks show a little damn respect very nice at this stage in the cook these are ready to go into the fridge if you are gonna vac seal them and save them or gift them to a friend now is the time to do it these vac seal up really nice nice handmade smoked beef links so to get these fully cooked and ready for consumption we're gonna bump this fire up to about 275 degrees and we're gonna cook these for another I don't know probably 20-30 minutes just until they reach an internal temperature of around 150 160 get that fat melting down and make sure everything is cooked through about I don't know 25 minutes later cooking it up near 300 degrees and these bad boys are done they are incredibly firm nice and plump come on tell me you don't want to take a snappy bite of one of these links I do tortilla time let's see how these links came out oh that's got some kick to it that is delicious nice and beefy texture is right there mm-hmm mm-hmm it's got some heat to it highly recommend this sausage recipe nice and snappy really good color to it super juicy too mm-hmm best drizzling the biz folks Leroy and Lewis beat barbecue sauce on sale now at LeroyandLewisBBQ.com the only thing better than a homemade beef sausage is a homemade beef sausage on a homemade beef fat tortilla who doesn't love a sausage wrap oh that's real good with the mustard mm-hmm that's part of the tortilla absorbs all the grease mmm alright y'all and that is it that is my version of how to make homemade beef sausage if you enjoyed this video please like and subscribe to the channel it helps me out so much but if you give this recipe a try for yourself hit me up on instagram at chuds BBQ I'd love to see what y'all are cooking also let me know in the comments down below what you want to see me cook next head over to chudsBBQ.com for all pit inquiries waitlists pricing all that good stuff the tortilla press will be on there very shortly exact amounts and ingredients and the recipe and all that good stuff will be in the description down below as well as a list of all the equipment I used in this video and all my other videos they are affiliate links so if you click on them it really helps me out supports the channel head over to laurianlouis.com and order yourself some beef barbecue sauce and until the next time I see you please go cook something outside peace