When I think of BBQ, I picture ribs, brisket, pulled pork, maybe the oddball turkey breast. If you asked me "what defines Texas BBQ", I would probably have said beef ribs. But apparently there's a kind of smoked sausage there that I have been missing out on for my whole life, called a Texas Hot Link. It's a beef sausage, cured and smoked, a bit like a NY style "half smoke" but I think a bit more spicy and probably quite a bit more heavy on the smoke. Twice as smoked, if you go by just the name. I had the good fortune to try this recently while enjoying a combo plate we know as a "hog bucket" at our local BBQ restaurant, and was instantly a fan. So of course I had to try making this at home, because all rational people decide to make forcemeat dishes when they find ones that taste good, right?
Searching for a recipe pulled up more colorful names for this - hot links, hot guts, and also just "guts". Not the best name, hopefully that's not how you would have to order a sausage platter in, say, Austin, though that probably wouldn't be the strangest part of your day even if that's what it came to. But the general premise seemed easy enough - grind up fatty beef with spices and a curing salt, stuff, rest overnight, smoke, feast, food coma. Done. Sounds easy, right?
Well, not so much. This turned out to be an exercise in not having the right equipment at the right location. I was looking forward to using my sausage stuffer, but discovered that the tubes weren't in the box, and after tearing the house apart concluded that they were donated along with an old meat grinder. So getting the meat into the casings required two people wrangling equipment, shoving with full force down the throat of a KitchenAid meat grinder, which was woefully inadequate and kept getting gummed up. I also had no good way to hang the sausages in the smoker, and the makeshift rack caused the links to slip down and knock into each other, slowing things down and causing uneven smoke coverage. Finally, the probes to my thermometer weren't the thin kind that I could leave in one of the sausages, so I kept opening the smoker every hour or so to poke at them as I became increasingly starving, annoyed, and frankly, hostile towards the unsuspecting links. They didn't cause this.
In the end, the two day experiment put dinner on the table at a reasonable 10:30 at night. But all of the frustration melted away into greasy, spicy, smoky bliss after trying just one bite. I would say this was a huge success, and plan to make a much larger batch for a party, since this should scale pretty well in the right smoker. And the smells in the house even the day after carried happy memories of sausages past, which was a nice bonus to wake up to. I will say that for adults, the flavor is great, but for kids, I'd knock down the amount of cayenne, which was pretty intense.
Last time we bought these from the restaurant, any survivors from the initial dinner ended up in a sausage, kale, and potato soup, which we will make soon and post with stragglers from the current batch.
Here's the list of crazy tools I used (or should have) to make this work:
- Stand mixer
- Meat grinder
- 5- to 10-pound sausage stuffer
- Vertical smoker with offset smoke chamber
- Needle tip probe thermometer
- Very precise kitchen scale
- Spice grinder
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| After 4 hours in a 200 F smoker |
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| The finished product. I think the color is about right, but I'm no expert |
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| 5-pound vertical sausage stuffer. Not helpful when you LOSE THE STUFFER TUBES!!! Ugh. |
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| The setup - heavy on the spices and equipment on this one |
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| Be careful with the curing salt (the pink-colored salt at about 11 o'clock in this photo)! |
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| Mixing the meat and spices with water will unravel the proteins and make a good paste for stuffing. Not the best for getting through the grinder chute, but good once it's in the casing. If only I had a sausage stuffer.... |
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| Thread the casings onto the stuffer tubes, tie a knot, and go wild. Oh, and good luck finding casings this century - had to go to many grocery stores before I found them. Check with a butcher if you have one nearby, or order online if you don't. |
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| I twisted these as they came off the tube, but you could do one long rope and then twist. Spin in alternate directions or they will unravel. Keep pressure on the casings still on the tube to control the fill speed, and poke holes in the filled sausages with a toothpick to pop air bubbles, as needed. |
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| Ready to be rested overnight in the fridge to cure |
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| 24 hours after stuffing, into a 200 F smoker for 2-4 hours |
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| Towards the end of smoking. The color doesn't reflect the finished product in the first photo. |
Texas Hot Links
- 3 lb lean beef eye of round is perfect. Or use 80/20 ground beef.
- 1 lb beef fat not rendered, such as brisket trimmings. I used very fatty pork belly, since I don't have a good butcher at the moment
- 6 g paprika (NOT smoked!!)
- 8 g cayenne pepper (maybe less if you want a more family-friendly flavor)
- 5 g mustard powder (ground fresh in the spice grinder)
- 7 g garlic powder
- 5 g onion powder
- 25 g ground black pepper (ground fresh in the spice grinder, though I've read to maybe do some fine and some coarse)
- 90 g dry milk powder, used as a binder
- 40 g salt
- 5 g Prague powder #1 AKA Instacure #1 curing salt. My packet's instructions quote this as just under 1 teaspoon, which is what I use for a 5 pound batch of meat.
- 1 ½ cup cold water
- Hog casings
Mix the meat with the paddle attachment, adding the water as you go, until it forms a sticky, fibrous mass that clings to the walls of the mixer and the paddle.
Stuff the meat into casings (not too tight or they will burst!) and twist it into links. Pop any bubbles in the casings with a toothpick as needed.
Allow the links to sit, uncovered, in the refrigerator overnight to cure and dry out just a little.
If saving the sausages for later, plunge them into an ice bath to chill and stop cooking. Otherwise, slice and eat fresh off the smoker.