Lean venison snack sticks (my first try)

[pmmpete]

I decided to try to make some lean venison snack sticks, using 100 percent lean venison.   I'm hoping for something more like jerky than like sausage.  After checking out various snack stick recipes on this forum, I decided to try NePaSmoKer's recipe in Reply 25 of his "Stick Project" posting in December 2011.  He said "Ya know I have used allot of pre mixed and allot of home made stick recipes, but this one is pretty dang good."  I figured that if NePaSmoKer thinks the recipe is pretty good, it's probably pretty good.

First I ground ten pounds of lean venison, using a 3/16ths plate:



Then I mixed up the spices and the cure:



I mixed them into the meat by hand:



Then I mixed the meat with the mixer which Kirby (Pikeman) made for me:



I stuffed the meat into 21mm clear collagen casings with my 12 pound Kirby Cannon, but forgot to take a picture of the stuffer in action. I was hoping for smaller diameter casings, but 21mm was all that was available locally.  I decided to smoke them on racks, rather than hanging, in hopes of being able to get more even smoking and drying by rotating the racks.  Here are four racks full of sticks:



The sticks are currently smoking.  I'm hoping that the lean venison idea will work out OK, and that NePaSmoKer's recipe will be as good as advertised.

[pikeman_95]

Looks good Pete.
I will look and see what I have for fans. the ax-man is a good source of fans. We will need to see the finished product and I will trade you samples later this week. I started working on you control system.

Kirby

[pmmpete]

In case you are wondering why Kirby is talking about fans, I was whining to him about my non-Bradley smoker, which I think would be improved by adding a circulation fan to it, in hopes of making the smoke and heat more even.

[pmmpete]

The snack sticks turned out pretty well.  Spicy but not too spicy.  I'm satisfied with how the meat tastes; the venison in the sticks had virtually no fat, and I didn't add any pork.  The clear collagen casings are easy to bite through.  I had hoped to find 17mm casings, but the finished diameter of the 21mm casings is fine.  I think 17mm casings might produce sticks which are thinner than I like.  I smoked the sticks in two batches, using different temperature schedules, and they came out looking different.  The shorter stick below is from the first batch.  I left them at 135 for a long time with about 3.5 hours of smoke, and then punched the temperature up to 170 to produce an internal temperature of 155 for 10 minutes.  The casings stayed smooth on that batch of sticks.  I decided to dry the second batch of sticks several hours less, and when I increased the temperature, the casings wrinkled.



Here's how they look inside:



Here's the first batch:



I'm happy about how these sticks come out.  I was nervous about doing something wrong and screwing up the whole batch.

[wipf9994]

i did the same thing u did. all venison no pork and the casing came out smooth. the taste was great but kinda dry