Smoked Beaver Pepperoni

Similar to our venison peperone, this beaver salami has a little more character than our venison version. It has a little more heat to it, and we also cold smoked it before hanging it in the cure chamber. It’s got a lot more tangy brightness than store bought pepperoni, but still has that familiar smokiness. Plus, the portmanteau is top notch, which is a priority whenever possible with our food.

We’ve said it before- beaver meat is amazing, and it does not cease to surprise us in its range of applications. We are really loving it in all these sausage and salami projects. This beaveroni is great on anything where pepperonis are usually found, or by themself, sliced thin next to some cheese and some crackers.

Smoked Beaver Pepperoni Recipe

As always, we use metric measurements and go by percentage weight for our sausage recipes. We do this to make the recipes easy to scale and replicate exactly, batch after batch. If you’re thinking of getting into sausage making and don’t own a kitchen scale, please do yourself the favor of buying one. They’re inexpensive relative to the cash outlay of all the other equipment you’ll need to pick up, and will save you a lot of effort in terms of scaling recipes into imperial measurements. To measure your ingredients, first weigh the meat you are using, and then calculate the weight of all the other ingredients based on the weight of the meat.

Prep time: 3 hours

Ingredients:

beaver meat, trimmed of fat, silver skin, and glands

20% pork fat, cubed

3% salt

0.3% instacure #2

1.7% dextrose

0.8% cayenne

0.05% allspice

0.1% fennel, crushed

0.6% smoked ancho chilis

0.6% paprika

1.6% dry red wine

Bactoferm F-RM-52

Method:

Mix all ingredients except bactoferm and wine. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Grind meat & spice mixture through a fine die. 

Reactivate bactoferm according to directions on the package & set aside.

Using the paddle attachment on a stand mixer on a low setting (or wooden spoon), combine the ground meat and wine, then mix in the reactivated bactoferm. Mix for 1-2 minutes until the meat is tacky.

Stuff into hog casing. Twist into 10-16” links. Prick with sausage pricker.

Incubate for 18-24 hours at ~85F temp and 85%+ humidity.

Record starting weights.

Cold smoke (sub 100F) for 2-3 hours.

Hang it in a curing chamber until the sausage has lost 30-35% of its original weight, 14-24+ days.

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