Saturday’s job

My wife's family is from Serbia (my mother-in-law was 1 of 13 kids and half of them were born in Europe, half in the US). They have been making serbian sausage every year for who knows how long. We are making our batch tomorrow at my house. It will be around 130 lbs total to split up between 3 different households. We used to get together with about 30 of her relatives out in Ohio each year and make it for everyone, but it just became a logistical nightmare. Most we ever made in a day was 1200 lbs. The last few years, we've just been doing a smaller gathering at our house. It's a good tradition, a lot of fun and it tastes great.

Nope, not chevapi (very good sausage btw). Our recipe is fatty pork shoulder, both hot and sweet paprika, garlic, salt, and caraway seed in hog casings. Some people in the family add black pepper to theirs as well. We never have for ours, but are going to try some this year with black pepper. Typically, we then treat that sausage three different ways: some we just leave unsmoked, some we smoke 3 different times over about a 24 hour period (smoking for about 4 hours at a time, then 4 hours rest, then repeat), and some we smoke 9 times (same time increments, just 9 times instead of 3) and then let it dry. The dried stuff turns out kind of like a darker, dryer, and more hearty pepperoni. The dried and the unsmoked stuff are my favorite ways to do it. For smoking, I have a 4'x4'x8' smokehouse with a small firebox in the bottom (people often think its an outhouse  ). We have hung up to 280 lbs in it at once. It works great.

I'll post some pics of making it and the finished product.

Cut up some deer yesterday made 10 lbs of summer sausage with pepper cheese
Smoke was apple wood

Made 5 lbs each of different kinds of snack sticks
They are on the smoker now should be done 3 ish

We also made up some breakfast sausage with the leftovers but I forgot to take a photo of it

I’ll post some photos of the snack sticks this afternoon when they are done

If you got 10 lbs of deer meat left bring it next time you come to fish we can make it up while Luke is fishing you would have to smoke it at home or stay late takes some time on the smoker.I’ve put in the frig overnight then smoked with no issues

Not sure if this was just local but Menards had theses 1 pint 100 count bags on clearance for I think 6 35 a box I bought 4 box’s of them At six cents a bag seemed like a good deal they worked great for the slice summer sausage and I’ll be using them on the sticks.

Going back tomorrow see if they have more after getting them home and looking at them I believe I could get at least 1 eye in them maybe 2
or one northern. I bought a real cheep vacuum packer for up at the cabin sure a lot easier then trying to freeze in water I’ve only got a small gas refrigerator with even smaller freezer on it so space is a huge issue

Well, Saturday went great. We made 30 lbs of the classic Serbian recipe, 15 lbs of hot Serbian, 30 lbs of Italian, 10 lbs of venison brats, and 10 lbs of venison snack sticks.

Recipe for non-smoked serbian sausage:
For 10 lbs of meat (pork butt/shoulder)
90 grams of fine sea salt
45 grams of hungarian sweet paprika
6 grams of cayenne pepper (the original recipe uses hot paprika in a larger quantity, but we thought the mix was too grainy from dry ingredients so we tried the cayenne and it worked great. If you want to use hot paprika instead, you need to use 35-40 grams of hot paprika)
7 grams of black pepper
18 grams of fresh, minced garlic
6 grams of caraway seed

**If you are going to smoke the sausage, you need to replace 11 grams of fine sea salt with #1 cure pink salt)**

As for the smoking part:

For the freezer smoked sausage, I have a smokehouse as described in the previous post. I hang the sausage (tied with a string to hang from in a loop) at the top of the smoke house (roughly 6 feet from the top of the firebox to the bottom of the sausage. I then light a small fire in the firebox. The fire should last between 3-4 hours. Then I let the sausage rest for about 4 hours, then light another fire for 3-4 hours, then rest for 4 hours, then fire for 3-4 hours, then rest for 4. After that, it is ready to be taken down and packaged for the freezer. This gives the sausage a nice smokey flavor, a bright red color, and it tightens up the sausage and pulls some of the unnecessary liquid out of the sausage. You want to make sure that during this time, the ambient temperature around the sausge does not exceed 40 degrees F and that the sausage does not freeze (we've run into both issues before). 


For dried sausage, you do the same time frames for firing/smoking, but instead of three rounds, you do 9 rounds. Then you let the sausage dry (again between 32 and 40 degrees F) until it is firm and there is no liquid inside the casings. This typical takes from 6-8 weeks to dry. 

We did not end up smoking any of ours this year as we were tweaking the recipe and also did not have great temperatures to support smoking. It is getting down into the teens every night here which would freeze the sausage which is not good.

I hope I explained everything well enough. If you have any other questions, just let me know and I'll try to answer as best I can.