I have been corrected many times on this board. That’s one reason why I hang out here….”iron sharpens iron”.
So when I was taught how to make sausage, the butcher told me that there is fresh sausage and smoked sausage. Smoked sausage always has pink salt or a cure in it. That is why it is pink when cooked. And it has to have that cure in it to prevent food poisoning while smoking. If you smoke sausage without pink salt or instacure #1, you run the risk of getting sick.
shify is spot on - traditional smoked sausage contains curing salts (nitrates) because it tends to be smoked at about 150F for a few hours. If you kept a fresh sausage at that temp for that long, you definitely could get very sick. But if you're putting them in the smoker at 250-275 for 45 mins until it's cooked through, it's just fine to use fresh. I tend to think of them as fresh or cured.
shify and Bob K - Yes, I went back and really looked over the posted comments. They were talking about smoking to cook, though it seemed in some comments that the term was used loosely. Thanks.
I like smoked kielbasa a lot. I usually get the Hillshire farms brand. When I take a chuckie or a butt off the PBC, I will put the sausage on after that. I have found that sausage likes a low temp, otherwise it wants to split. So I put it on the cooker when the coals are close to burning out. The heat and smoke that is left then works perfectly for sausage.
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