Snack Sticks and Packaging

[lscraig1968]

All:

Thanks for letting me join the group! I am a very new beginner to sausage making. I have made venison/pork sausage both loose and cased. It turned out tasty, so the family ate it.

We are taking a trip in June where we will be in the field for long periods, so I wanted to make some snack sticks. My trial runs worked out well, BUT I want to make sure they do not mold or sour without refrigeration.

I stuffed the sausage mix into 17mm and 19mm casings using a Kitchen-aid attachment with sausage stuffer. Very clumsy but it worked.

I have a Komado Joe smoker, so I smoked the sausages for 2 hours at 200F+/-. I let them cool to room temp. I cut and packaged them in zipper plastic bags. The snack sticks must have still had moisture left because the next day the inside of some of the bags had moisture and the snack sticks casings had softened. They were not spoiled because they had been cured with pink salt at 1 teaspoon per 5 LBS. The sausages had smoked through, so they did not spoil overnight in the bag.

My concern is being able to carry them for a week at room temperature in like a back pack. Do I need to smoke them then put them in a dehydrator? I don't want to continue to cook them, just dry them out for non-refrigerated storage.

Should I switch to a different bag like a brown paper bag?

Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Shawn Craig

[NCPaul]

Welcome to the forum. Here's a thread about fermentated and dried snack sticks:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12580

The key to taking them without refrigeration is to dry them to a weight loss of about 40 %. I've found that for narrow gage casings, like you are using, that drying them on racks in a refrigerator for two weeks should get them to that point. I would not use a dehydrator as most of them heat while drying which would damage the structure of the stick by rendering the fat. To take them hiking, I would vacuum pack them in small packages and keep them out of the sunlight.

[lscraig1968]

Thank you very much!