How to Smoke Pork Sausage

The process of smoking meat imparts a flavor that is superior to simple barbecuing. While barbecuing meat requires you to simply put food on the grill and heat, smoking meat is slightly more labor intensive. When cooking pork products, making sure that the meat is thoroughly cooked is very important. There are several steps one must take to ensure that pork is properly smoked to avoid illness from trichinosis.

Put the sausage in the smokehouse and heat the house to a temperature of 100 to 110 degrees F. Leave the sausages to heat at this temperature until the sausage surface feels sticky. Leave the dampers open during this step.

Close the dampers after the sausage casing becomes tacky. Add the smoke to the house. Continue adding smoke into your smokehouse for two to six hours depending on the color you want your sausage to become.

Raise the temperature in the house to 125 degrees F after the first two hours.

Raise the house temperature to 145 degrees F after three hours.

Wait for the internal temperature of the sausage to reach 140 degrees F. The humidity in the smokehouse is ideally around 40 percent during this entire process.

Put your sausage into your smoker and turn it to a temperature of 135 degrees F with the vents open.

Wait about twenty minutes for the sausage casings to dry.

Increase the temperature of the smoker to 165 degrees F. Add the smoke on medium.

Remove the sausages from the smoker once your sausage reaches an internal temperature of 155 degrees F.