Making Homemade Jerky, Brats, Summer Sausage, Pepper Sticks & More

Jerky, Brats, Sausage, Sticks, And Hamburg

Making your own Jerky, Brats, Summer Sausage, Pepper Sticks & Hamburg is easy and will save you a lot of money. You can do all these with just a grinder so invest in a good commercial grinder and go bigger than a 1/2 hp if you are doing more than one deer.

When making hamburg, brats, sausage & pepper sticks use our recipe as a baseline and start varying the amount of pork you use until you get the desired taste you are looking for.  However, we do recommend using the one pound of bacon for every 10 pounds of meat as a main ingredient. Bacon can be varied with smoked flavors such as apple, maple & hickory.

Casings

Using pig intestines is easy to use and recommend for your brats. Once you have your brats stuffed let them set in the refrigerator for 24 hours then vacuum seal them before freezing. When cooking I like to boil them for 2 minutes first then put them on the grill or fry them in a pan until brown.

When making the pepper sticks use the Edible Collagen Castings. Once you have these stuffed you want to let them dry at 90 degrees for 2 hours before smoking and cooking. By drying first you allow the casting to absorb your smoke easier, which will give you a much better tasting pepper stick.  This year we plan on trying summer sausage in Collagen casings instead of Fibrous castings to help cut down on the cost.

Jerky

Jerky can be made by ground meat or whole meat slices. I prefer the ground meat, but my family likes the whole meat and its a little faster to make. The real secret for making good whole meat jerky is putting your dry seasonings and salt on the meat first and letting this cure for 12 hours, after this add your wet seasonings and allow this to set for 12 hours. The wet seasoning we make here is also good for a steak sauce and better then many of those purchased in the store.