Ribs for the 4th & First Sausage (pron)

The other manager at my store closed on Memorial Day, so I volunteered to close on the 4th. We were having a pot-luck for all the employees and I signed up to bring the ribs.

I trimmed all the tips and made St. Louis cuts. These will be used to make sausage later this week:



Gave them a good coating of my Dynamite! Rib Rub(tm) and into the smoke they went:



The 6 slabs barely made it on there. After 3 hrs at 250*, I liked the color:



Time to foil:



And back on they went until they came up to 170*. I don't add anything to them while in the foil, just like to keep them from getting too dark.

Let them rest and then into the fridge until the next morning. Man, what a great sight and smell to wake up to!



I cut them into single ribs, like usual, and put into foil pans to reheat at the store later. You can kinda see the smoke ring. I used wild cherry wood for the smoke.



6 racks of ribs made just enough to fill 4 pans, plus a bowl of "burnt ends" for me to enjoy at my leisure.



Then, a dose of Sweet Baby Ray's honey BBQ sauce, wrap up the pans and off they went.



Everyone at the store loved them. Several people told me that it was the best they'd ever had and one even said that she would refuse to eat any other ribs that weren't up to this standard.

Another employee asked me if I had used liquid smoke on them. I said no, I cooked them in a real smoker for 6+ hours. He said he could really taste the difference it made and that he kept smelling his hands throughout the day because he couldn't get enough of it.

That's about as good of a compliment as I could ever get.

Check back in a couple days for Epidsode 2: my first attempt at sausage making.

Thanks for lookin!

OK, Epidose 2:

I started out out with the trimmings and tips of 6 full racks of spare ribs.



Plus a bag of frozen tips and trimings from 2 other racks I had cooked a while back. After what felt like a day and a half, I finally got all the meat seperated and cubed up.





There was quite a bit more meat than I thought there'd be, so I split it up into 3 pans and made 3 different kinds.



I made a batch of the recipe I found in another thread on this site, here, a batch without the heat and another batch without the heat & the garlic but with extra herbs.





By this point, it was starting to get late and I wasn't going to have time to grind, stuff and fire up the smoker to smoke them, so I foiled and put in the fridge to resume tomorrow.

More pics to follow.

Slept in a little and got a late start, but got my sausage set-up up and running.



Dang small kitchen! Anyway, after what seemed like hrs, I finally got the first batch done:



Look pretty good to me. These won't be smoked- they're "Italian style" for the wifey. After doing this batch, I only hade a couple inches of casing left. So I'm on my way back to the meat market to pick up some some. I'll post pics of the rest once I get them done.

Thanks for lookin!

I just got done cleaning up. This was a lot more time-consuming than I thought it would be, but the sausage is made and on the smoker. I've got the intake about 1/4 open and used some scrap plate steel to cover some of the holes in the deflector plate.

Here's the batch of hot:



By the time it came to stuffing ths batch I felt like I really had a handle on the whole process. I think I put the plate in the grinder backwards or something because it was really slow going and ground the meat into a paste. The holes clogged several times. Second and third batches were much easier going. I put everything through the large plate first, then put in the medium for stuffing. I can't wait to taste these bad boys when they come off!!!

Sausages were on the smoker for about 3 hrs at 175*. Covering the holes in the heat deflector really worked well to help keep the temp down.





I'm really happy with how they came out. I'd give them a 7 out of 10.



Things I'll do different next time:

1) Adjust the seasonings to something that goes better with the cherry wood I used or use a different wood. The flavor is a little unusual, in a good way, but the cherry smoke flavor isn't what you expect to taste on a sausage. I think people who don't know about these things might not find it as palatable.

2) Definitely going to try to do more prep work ahead of time. When I cook the ribs, I will bone out the tips and trimmings and cube them up prior to freezing. This will cut down on the time it takes to grind and stuff. I don't often get 2 days off in a row but when I do I don't want to spend both of them making sausage.

Anyway, thanks for lookin!