Brian's winter projects

The ham is still curing and is only a few days away from entering the aging process. In the meantime, Brian has made his first batch of summer sausage, another batch of home brew, and some delicious mozzarella cheese.

We've been making sausage from our venison for many years, fresh varieties for breakfast sausage, Italian links, or bratwurst. These are pretty straightforward and require little more than adding fat and seasoning to ground meat, then packaging the finished product. Lately, Brian has been getting more and more interested in cured and smoked meats. He made some delicious summer sausage over the weekend, and it really wasn't that difficult.

Summer sausage drying before being smoked.

Clever use of dowel rods to hang the sausages. We used the same technique after smoking to let them bloom, only that time the sausages hung from the laundry room shelf. No photo for that step because it happened at about 2 a.m., and the only time I get up at 2 a.m. is when there are ewes close to lambing.

The sausage maker and his loyal assistant. The stuffer in the foreground was worth buying! It was so much easier to get the casings filled to our satisfaction with this than with a stuffer attachment on the grinder.

Pictures of the cheese will have to wait until the next batch. All of the milk is pasteurized and ready to go, so hopefully there will be more mozzarella later this week. Yum!