How to make Deer Smokies (sticks) & smoke them on a pellet grill, by The Bearded Butchers!

Hey guys sub Perkins, this is Whitefeather meeting one of the

bearded

butchers

, today I want to show you how we

make

Smokies. You could use this practice for beef, bison, elk, venison, lamb, whatever you prefer, Smokies, aka

sticks

, we're going to grind

them

up. Stuff

them

and then we're going to take them to the

grill

and

smoke

them so go ahead today we're going to start with just over ten pounds of meat that we've trimmed taking most of the fat. There's no gristle or anything like that and we're also going to use a little over a pound of pork fat, so we'll go ahead and add the meat.

Now the meat that we use is going to be about 85/15 or 90/10 somewhere right there with a meat to fat ratio, so we want to go ahead and add pork fat to it and it'll end up giving us a nice juicy product when we're done. , so this is the same principle that we apply when we're making our sausage, so if you watch the venison sausage making video, this is pretty much the same practice that we used there. I want to go ahead and mix up the fat end a little bit. Now what we are going to do is move forward. and we're going to add our seasonings, this Scott now had a total of 12 pounds of lean mixed in and the fat trimmings and he's going to add a six shaker of our Cajun blend.

We have chosen Cajun as the flavor for this smoky ratio. for this you can obviously use 1 ounce of our mix for two pounds of meat so you want to double this recipe obviously just use two shakers so 12 pounds of meat 1 6 ounce bottle of seasoning go ahead and just mix it up. As we go along, we like to put the spices in the garnishes before we grind them and then we're actually going to do a triple grind on this just because we want it to have a finer bite when we

make

our Smokies, so we're going to turn it around to the spices before we grind them and then they will blend as we grind so we'll go to the fourth grind once and then do a finer grind twice so after adding our six ounce bottle of Butcher's Blend Seasoning to cajun beard, you also want to use a dyed cure, so this is a nitrite for £12, we're going to use half an ounce of pink dyed joy, you can get this Waltons dye, you can get it at Butcher Packer com2. usually in a one ounce package - that's 25 pounds of meat, we just split that package up, we're going to go ahead and add it to our mixture, so you want this pink auditory salt to mix well with the meat so that we don't just mix it . here, but we'll also get another mix in the grinder, we'll go ahead and add the nitrates in there, mixing them in as we go, so you'll notice I mixed about half the bag in the first round.

Go ahead and just add the rest, this will give the meat a nice pink color and will also help control the risk of botulism. The cibot and the spores could survive in low oxygen conditions, which is what happens when you

smoke

something in your environment, basically. Give it a window of time so by adding nitrite, especially with game meats, it will really help prevent botulism spores from causing problems with your Smokies, so this product is not going to be stable in the end, so let's plan. by vacuum sealing them you can freeze them you can keep them in your refrigerator but once you open them you want to eat them within a day so let's go ahead and start grinding them so we'll use the Westin number 12 we like this grinder so that we're going to go ahead and run it through our seven millimeter thick plate of soil, which is just over a quarter of an inch, first they're going to grind up the whole batch and then we'll repeat that with the four smaller ones. point five millimeters, which is a little over an eighth of an inch and we're going to plan on doing this twice, so as you can see, it's good to leave some of your trimmings in strips when you leave the meat in a strip that the grinder will actually grab.

I'll get it into the worm a little easier, so keep that in mind when you cut, it's a little easier to grind when you leave it in a little strip, so let's go ahead and get started. you want to put some inside your grinder before you turn it on that way it doesn't dry out and cause metal friction with the blades on the grinder as you can see this number 12 will go through this 12 pounds of meat in quite a hurry , one of the best things about training multiple times is that we have the mat, the ratio of levy that we are going to mix, each time we grind, we will continue to reduce its size and then it will make a much better mixture for the finished product, so we discovered You work out the spices before brining, grind with the spices, you don't have to worry too much about the fat to lean ratio in the cut.

Level sending, in other words, when you send it through the grinder, simply because we're going to mix by hand. I'm a sports field, so there you have it, just a little over two and a half minute face that we found on the field. our dish plate we will now change to our client plate and grind it two more times. At this point, you'll just want to take and mix everything with your hands once again, with a really good smell that will evenly distribute a spice. and then also, as I mentioned, the fat to lean ratio, so we like to just knead it, fold everything again, this is after the coarse grind and before we start the fine grind, so we switch to a smaller plate and let's start . grind number two, so if you notice that in the first round we didn't have to use the plunger because the way the strip was cut, you're going to want to have it ready for this second round just because it's not, it's not really going to be like that. . feed yourself, what that's going to do here is just make some kind of shots, they all have golf sized balls and drop them on the alder course at your own pace while you cry, second grind and then of course , you are using a thinner plate, it takes a little more time. you're breaking this muscle even more, it's not going to go as fast so you're just going to want to work on this process, whatever Reiner's campaign is stuck on, I don't want to overdo it, okay, grind number three a second time through the Good, we call it fine, but seven and a half, excuse me, four point five millimeters translates to about an eighth of an inch.

You can see that you still have some of the fat pieces that are a little bit big, so we want to go ahead and grind a little bit more just to break down those pieces a little bit more that way and the finished product becomes a little bit more palatable a little bit more. easy to choose, let's go and start now, keep in mind that you can, you probably can do it. even one more grind of this eventually what's going to happen is this is going to get so hot that the proteins are going to start to stick together and you almost don't put it through the grinder.

There are tricks to the trade, you could add ice, certainly don't stop there. If you feel like you have the time and energy to keep going, you'll get a softer bite, but we found that for all reckless purposes you need it, we looked at it pretty well, of course, Brian and two good football drills understand this. choked start stuffing well the third grind is complete now at this point we're going to add a little bit of water because it's going to get sticky as you grind it and there's no way to get this through the stuffer without wetting it. up, so how much water do you have there?

Seth, I have two cups of water. Now you can feel as you mix this the consistency and if you feel like you know a lot, it depends on the species you're working with, whether it's venison, bison, beef or, you know, lamb or whatever it is with. Whatever you are working with, it will react differently to the moisture you put in it, so use your own judgment and you can feel when it starts to loosen, you may not need it. two cups full so I would say I have this at a point where you can see it's very flexible but it's still not too soft because if you make it too soft what will happen is your Smokies in the end don't wrinkle much, they just don't they're going to be so desirable so go ahead and get this consistency here and then at this point we're going to go ahead and add a little over a pound of high heat pepper jack. cheese to our Cajun Smokies, so this is like Seth Mezack mentioned a high milk cheese, it comes in these nice little diced cubes and the reason it melts a lot is because when we put it in our smoker it actually It will not melt, it will remain.

It practically looks like this now we get this cheese for our store in large quantities. We live near Amish country, one of the largest cheese suppliers in the world. You can find it online, just search for high or high temperature. Mount cheese, you can use any flavor you find, we like to use a ratio of about 10%, so the things mentioned are still 1.2 pounds here and add them to the mixture and then at this point we can make it into our filling and start doing a little. It

sticks

well, so the mixture goes to the stuffer. Now all of these are not the same, but a similar hand crank stuffer.

This turns out to be a little more commercial model just because that's what we have here in the store, it has a 25 pound capacity. obviously 12 pounds is going to kill half so start with 4 loaded and we're going to go ahead and start producing some Smokies so we like a 17 millimeter mahogany collagen shell. Now in this case, it doesn't actually fit in our stuffing horn, otherwise you could just slide the whole thing in there, but it's too tight, so if you have this problem, you can manually transfer it if you want directly to your hot something, so it's just a small tip, you can make a smaller diameter and smoke. with a filler that's a little bit G based just transferring the casing like this, so for emphasis we normally just stack everything on there if we have a smaller filler horn, but in this case we transfer it manually so it's tied up. small knot and he's going to start pulling out some Smokies, so at this point you want to try to avoid air spaces.

This stuffer has a feature where there is a little valve on the top of the plunger that you just press and it will shoot all the air out of the top of the plunger, if you had air, maybe when you start at the end you could just make a little hole, but there's our first thread, so we're going to go ahead and cut this twelve pounds off here. size them up and put them in our smoker, so the result is 12 pounds. Now what we've done is go ahead and join or roll them together instead of 24 inches long since we know that's what will fit in our smoker pan. so we'll just leave it there, you can link them individually at this point, you can twist them, yeah, that's up to you.

What we've done, the method we like to do is we just go ahead and smoke them and long strands like this and after we're done smoking, which we'll show you, we just go ahead and cut them into whatever portions you want, as you can see , there are no air bubbles there, your stuff is very nice and tight. and you can also see our cheese chunks and friends, these are ready to smoke, so we've got our ironwood 80-85 trigger in super smoke mode, our tray of Smokies and we're just going to go ahead and load them into the smoker, we'll go up to a temperature, we'll start at 165 for two hours, then we'll go to 185 for two hours and finish at 205 for two hours until they reach an internal temperature of 160. to 165, so we're actually using activators, a big game mix, it's white red hickory with rosemary herbs so we just filled our smoker with the left turn of an air space in between so the smoke can go through there obviously you want to try it right in the center and then mention 165 for two hours 185 for two hours and then 205 until you reach an internal 165.

Come back when it's done right, so it's been four hours, we hit internal 165 and never had to crash. to 205 we just went from an oven temperature of 165 to 185 and our internal temperature of 165 and it's time to get these beauties out of here, we're going to transfer them to a rack and there are several ways to do it. In this case, we're just going to rinse them with cold water so they cool down a little bit quicker, let's ride, we've reached that high internal temperature, we just want to lower the internal temperature and so give in and put them off with a little bit of cold water, like this that the idea here is that we'll just use cold water on the feet in the process of cooling them down at this point, it will also soften the King's song a little bit.

The steps are optional. You can do it too. put them in a cold water bath, once we have an ice bath, let's say about a minute, we'll transfer them to the refrigerator and then once it cools to 40 degrees internally, we'll go ahead and cut them up and stick them in. okay so that these Smokies have a beautiful color, they cool and we're going to go ahead and cut them so that we have 12 pounds of meat, we added the spices, the cheese and the water, so we had about 14 and a half pounds of starting weight and we have around 9.5 left.

We already ate a little, so maybe a little closer to 10 pounds to finish,wait, so let's go over here and show you a good way to measure them. You can do this multiple times, so go ahead and line them up. Typically what I do is use the palm of my hand to about the tip of your thumb. You measure them out that way and you get a nice sized stick full of that delicious cheese, we're going to start stacking them so we wanted to mention that obviously we start with the garnishes, we add the pork, it's summer and its season will be around the corner here before that we realize, so if you have a freezer with ground beef just ground venison, you could have four relatives or whatever and you feel like you're not going to consume the rest as ground venison by the end of this year or before it starts the new season, you can go ahead and take those packages of ground venison and put them in this process, obviously, they've been ground once, so you can forget about the brine, starting with the trimmings like we did, but you can, you can mix your seasonings before you grind them and basically if you're sitting there thinking, what am I going to do with my ground beef?

I haven't eaten it, take a day and use it. from a filler grinder, the seasonings and then obviously a smoker, you can absolutely convert this product like that, now the smoker in that step, if you have something you absolutely used the trigger, but if you have it, it's a

pellet

smoker if you have anything that can actually control the temperature of your house, what we call the house template, it will be the temperature of your smoker and it can start at no more than 165, it could be cooler if you wanted for a couple of hours, you just leave it. those pores are open in the meat before they close and that smoke gets in and then you can just increase the temperature to raise the internal temperature of the meat, it will be just a matter of time at that point as I mentioned.

I did this in four hours flat, just a little over four hours to get to an internal 165, so what we can do at this point is put them in a ziploc bag, we can just put them in a polythene bag with a twist tie or we can seal them vacuum and freeze them, that's what we like to do if you have so many and you're not going to check them because what we're saying is that they're not necessarily shelf stable, that's more. from a water activity and you would have to continue drying them to lower the pH of the water activity stuff, so we wouldn't consider them shelf stable, they'll be fine and you know, a day or so.

If you're packing, but what we'd like to do is, as we say, about a week in your refrigerator, obviously frozen pretty much indefinitely, then what we would do at this point is go ahead and stack them in the free space. in the freezer and put them in your lunch box, pass them to your friends, take them out one at a time, they will thaw very quickly, you can see the high temperature cheese in there and a very successful day turning some ground beef. ornaments, whatever you have for some wonderful delicious Smokies, don't forget to visit us on Facebook, Instagram and here on YouTube, and don't forget to subscribe, more videos to come, thanks guys.