Now that the holiday rush is past, I can get to making up some pantry provisions I've been waiting on.

I got the Big Chief smoker I asked for this Christmas (only cost me $120 via Cabelas). I've got 3 15 lb pork shoulders in the deep freeze so I plan on making 3 batches of snack stix. If time allows, I may also crank out 5 or 6 salami logs from the 1/4 beef I just bought. That should free up some freezer space.

While the sausage is busy smoking, I saw some good produce sales in the Wednesday supermarket flyers. I will try and dehydrate 10 lbs each of Zuchini, peaches, pears, carrots, celery and onions. That will probably take me the better part of a week, but should fill most of my plastic containers up. I also saw someone is selling fuji apples at $1 per lb, and blueberries and blackberries were also on sale. I will need some stay fresh (ascorbic acid) to keep most of it from discoloring during the process. I am keeping an eye out for when bananas go on sale and will buy up and dehydrate a bunch of those.

Sometimes it isn't so convenient to take the time to put up provisions like this, but you have to take advantage of the deals as they come, and it is a waste of time to buy product and not process it right away, unless you can freeze it as with the meat for later use. I try to process the fruits and vegetables the same day I get them so as to preserve their quality.

Some day I am going to get back into canning my own food again. It can be laborious, but then again so is butchering an elk.

If I can't dehydrate the fruits and veggies right away, then I will blanch them and freeze them, lacking a setup for canning right now. Dehydrated, they will go into airtight containers in the pantry for 6 months or more without much care or worry. I like to dehydrate as completely as possible. In some cases, as with the zucchinni, it greatly intensifies the flavor.

As for the Salmonella, I wash all my produce thoroughly before processing. I also try and get it from reliable sources (local markets with a solid reputation). Salmonella outbreaks happen far too often to worry me. By the time we find out, the exposure is already widespread, and any exposure I might have is likely already manifest. Even in my own garden there are risks that require precautions. Oh, if only we could irradiate our produce...

In any case, the stuff I dehydrate doesn't get eaten without being rehydrated and cooked later on, so even if it is contaminated, it should be processed enough by the time it is consumed to be safe.

I knock on wood, but in the twenty+ years I've been cooking for my family, friends, and the general public I have yet to make anyone sick that I am aware of. Good kitchen practices, even at elk camp, eliminate a lot of risk.

I just got a dehydrator for Christmas and I'm looking forward to drying some vegetables. I am thinking about making some different mixes for different soups with all the salt/pepper/herbs/spices included, then put everything into ziplocks. Ideally, I could just put it all into a pot, add water, and voila!!

Has anyone created any soup mixtures like that?

We put together some various dried beans with bullion cubes and other seasonings in mason jars as Christmas gifts a couple of years back.

Some of the folks said it was pretty good.

Works pretty good with a crockpot. Just start it in the morning with a little ham, etc and when you get home supper's ready except for fixing a pot of rice or a pan of cornbread to put the beans over.

Do you blanche produce and fruit before drying or just slice it up?

Sam When's dinner me and the family will be right over LOL

If y'all are coming in from Utah, I'll put the crock pot on sloooooow cook!

Beans and cornbread, what makes America strong!

And malodorous.


Inspires me to cook a batch this weekend, thanks samhain............

Do any of you guys deliver?

Sue

Yes, I make my own Individual serving vacuum sealed dried veggie aoup mixes (I'm on a low salt kick, and after several months of low salt eating, most pasckaged soups are way to salty for me). I also do tomato leathers for making sauces while camping and for emergency use

I'm sure we could be talked into it.

Don't blanch as a rule. I prefer to process fresh into the dehydrator. Some foods, like peaches or bananas, often require application of "Fruit Fresh", or some other ascorbic acid to preserve color. Some foods, like potatoes, must be blanched to stop the enzymatic process (usually starchy root veggies are the ones). Often I just dice the potatoes and nuke them for 4 minutes or so and the enzymes are deactivated and the starches set.

By the way, I had some complications with getting all my sausage made up this weekend. Too late I discovered I didn't have the right nozzle for the smaller casings, so I ended up processing 12 lbs of breakfast sausage into half links and half bulk. I froze the links on teflon cookie sheets then bagged them up. That was Saturday. Yesterday I went on a quest to find the righ nozzle for my sausage stuffer to do my snack sticks. Finally found what I needed at Bass Pro Shops and beat feet back home and processed up 10 lbs of sticks. Unlike the breakfast sausage, which is fresh, I had to put the sticks in the refrigerator to cure for a day before smoking and dehydrating them. Of course, today the weather is nasty out, so I am hoping by the time I get home it will subside enough I can run a few pans of hickory in the smoker enough to get the sticks started, then load them into the dehydrator or leave them overnight in the smoker and pull them Tuesday morning. They should lose about 1/3 of their weight or more due to moisture loss. I ended up using lean ground beef (2/3) and ground pork (1/3), which seems to make an ideal dry sausage blend, much the same as my old butcher's recipe for elk snack sticks.

I'll let you know how they turn out. Now that I have the right nozzle, I can plan on cranking out more sticks. They are a real crowd pleaser.

As for the veggies, we will just have to take advantage of that next time there's deals in town.

One thing I can let y'all know, working ground meat by hand that is ice cold will give your hands an ice cream headache enough to make you howl. Until I can get me one of them big Hobart mixers, this is the only way I know to properly mix ground meat into sausage. It is miserable pain, especially with arthritis, but it is still worth it. When I was done, I had to have the wife help pry my fingers open under luke warm tap water.

And yes, Sue, for you, I would deliver.

Any of you food dehydrators ever tried drying cooked beans? Is it even possible?

I'm thinking that for camping/backpacking I could pre-cook some beans, maybe some chile w/beans and then dry it to be reconstituted later. Whattaya think?

JohnE

Yes, you can dry cooked beans. They will rehydrate again in about 10 minutes in boiling water. I've dried refrieds in my dehydrator before to make a rough mealy powder that rehydrates suitably enough to add to soups or stews (it does not rehydrate back into refrieds quite so good.

If you don't cook them to the point where they break down, they should rehydrate into a nice chili bean stew addition (what Yankees call Chili).

Rough day today, but I managed to git my snack sticks in the smoker and hit it with three pans of hickory. I'll leave them in the smoker overnight since it is freezing out and see how they look in the am. Most likely I will have to leave them till tomorrow night to get them dried out all the way.

They are smelling good!!!

Ben make sure that the wind is blowin West so we can a whiff of your sausages

Mike

6:00 am this morning I checked the smoker. I realized that I used alder instead of hickory chips, but to good effect. I unplugged the big chief and let them cool in the early morning breeze (temps at @ 27 degrees F). Had the wife pull the racks and put the links in a big ziploc. Brought a couple links in to work, they were summarily consumed by the crowd and unanimously pronounced edible (actually the exclamations indicate a much higher endorsement).

Looks like I have a winner here. Chewier than slim jims, and about twice as big in diameter. I might have overseasoned them just a tad; they are a bit saltier than I care for, but that didn't slow the crowd down any.

Looks like I will have to crank out a few more batches if I want enough to put up for myself. I may have to charge folks for the next batch. Get them hooked on the first load, then I can extort my cut from now on. No mercy, heh heh heh.

Still no word from Sue, I will only be able to hold onto these for a while.

Tomato leather? What is it, how is it made and what do you do with it? Is it like fruit leather? Sounds like interesting stuff.

I've never seen tomato leather, but I reckon it is just like any other fruit leather. Make a puree, spread it on a tray with a lining that won't let the juices leak or the puree fall through, and dehydrate it just like any other.

Recipe for snack sticks:

6 lbs lean ground beef, buffalo, venison, or elk
4 lbs lean ground pork
5 tablespoons Morton Tender Quick or Sugar Cure mix
6 to 8 tablespoons seasoning mix (mine is a mix of white pepper, black pepper, cayenne pepper, seasoning salt [not too much or the mix will be too salty], garlic powder, onion powder, thyme, adobo, and a splash or two of chipotle tabasco sauce)
2 cups ice cold water
two hanks of 17-21mm collagen casings. (one hank will do 5 lbs of meat)

Freeze ground meat. Let it thaw until it is just soft enough to crumble with your hands. In a large bowl, break up and mix the meat together with the cure, the seasonings, and water. Mix by hand for at least 5 minutes. Immediately stuff meat into casings, as the cure will start to set up the meat and make it stiff in about 15-30 minutes. When casings are stuffed, twist off to appropriate serving lengths (30 to 45 sticks from two hanks) and refrigerate for at least 6 hours for the cure to do it's thing, but not more than about 24. Sticks can be dehydrated in the oven or you can smoke them until they become stiff and resilient. Usually I can dry them in my smoker for a day and they are firm enough. You can dehydrate them considerably and they become quite tough and chewy like good jerky, just the sort of thing to enjoy on the trail.

Dumb question time, is the meat raw or pre-cooked?

-Blast

Raw meat. The cure prevents spoilage and botulin from developing.

How was the Alder?
I usually think of Alder for smoking fish instead of sausage, but my brother used to use it for deer.

Would you be likely to use it again instead of Hickory for this same recipe?

Was that guy on the way to Ocala? Is so, I think I've seen him as well.

The alder worked well. Perhaps not as good as hickory or maybe fruit wood (I've done cherry wood to smoke sausage in the past with really good results). I used alder exclusively for smoking fish while growing up in Washington state. We typically put out perhaps 300+ lbs of smoked fish a year in my mid-late teens. I actually got burnt out on fishing.

The smell of the alder smoke in this batch does definitely remind me of my smoked salmon days. It is suitable for use on well seasoned red meat and pork.

For most birds, I prefer to smoke with Mesquite. Mesquite on chicken is one of my favorite flavor combos.

I love Pecan wood for smoking.

I haven't tried pecan yet. I hear it is a mellow smoke, a little sweet, and good with pork.

I love it with pork, beef and Poultry. A pacan wood smoked Turkey is wonderful, IMHO. Very close to a sweet hickory,m but without the bitterness.
I often add Red Oak, Apple, Cherry and/or Maple to my Peacon for long smokes

Okay, so this weekend I cranked up the meat machine and made 10 lbs of italian sausage and another 10 lbs of snack sticks, this time using a pepperoni recipe and hickory smoke.

The italian sausage was excellent. The wife had a bite of the test batch (always cook up some of the sausage before casing or packaging it up to make sure the seasoning is right) and said it was very tasty, and just the right amount of peppery heat. The dog added his approval of course. I stuffed it in collagen casings at 32 mm and made three pinwheels for the freezer.

The pepperoni sticks are good, but not quite what I expected. The seasonings seemed weak after the smoking/drying process. The hickory smoke flavor is strong, almost overpowering, indicating that next time I need to use one less pan I think. The texture and consistency is still spot on, so at least my technique is holding up well. We had a little more meat than the casings would hold, so I formed those into strips and ran them through the dehydrator, and the seasoning flavor weakened in those too. I suspect that the aromatics from the fennel and the garlic are volatizing off more than I planned on, and I will adjust my recipe some more.

My only concern now is that I may need to find a way to preserve them longer. As it is, 10 lbs of sausage just doesn't last that long. Perhaps I should consider giving less of it away. That would definitely make a difference. Of course my new found friends may revolt, smelling the sausage on my breath after I've eaten some in private.

Do you use a "Cure" in your sausage recipe?

Usually for snack sticks I use either Morton Tender Quick or Prague Powder #2 if I can find it. For cold smoking you have to use a cure containing sodium nitrite and/or sodium nitrate, as it is the only assurance you have against botulism and other spoilage. There is a precise amount you have to use per unit weight of meat as well. Even then, I recommend refrigeration for anything not consumed immediately. Best to be too careful than to risk making someone very ill. I haven't made anyone sick from my cooking yet, and I don't ever want to. One bad experience will completely ruin a reputation.