Hi Mountain Summer Sausage Fail

[Budge]

Hello. This is my first post. I'm having some trouble with making summer sausage. Last year, I made venison summer sausage twice using the Hi Mountain Summer Sausage Kit and mixing in 20 percent by weight uncured bacon. I tried to follow the directions in the kit to the letter. The only problem was that neither my Cookshack electric smoker nor my oven will go down to 140 or 160 degrees, and my smoker won't make smoke below 170 degrees. So I modified the recipe to cook at 180 degrees until I reached 156 internal. The finished product tasted excellent, but was shrunken inside the casing. The second time I tried it, I added an ice water bath at the end (to get the internal temp to below 90 degrees). And I got the exact same result.

This time, I didn't have any venison to work with. But I had 12 pounds of very lean wild boar. It was easily as lean as the venison. But instead of adding bacon, I decided to try some Fat Replacer (about half the recommended amount). This time, the flavor was great but the product was dry and crumbly. A ton of liquid was produced in the smoker and more was produced while hanging to dry after the ice bath.

So I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I do know that the smoking process is taking over 14 hours to get the internal temperatures to 156 degrees. Maybe that's drying out the sausage and causing it to shrink/dehydrate? If so, how do I cook it faster so it doesn't do that? Hot water bath? HIgher temps in the smoker?

Thanks.