Andouille sausage, with its chunky pieces of fat, is a personal favorite of mine. Making it myself at home is not something I’ve tried as yet. However, the recipe below has encouraged me to try it. Now, to make smoked sausage at home, you’re obviously going to need more equipment than your pellet grill/smoker. You’re also going to need a grinder and a sausage maker. So, there is more investment with this recipe than in others.
Tap/Click above to watch the recipe or scroll below to follow the steps: Video – CampChef.com
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Step 1: The foundation of these Andouille sausages was a bone-in Boston butt. Basically, you’ll want a cut of meat with a good protein-to-fat ratio of at least 80/20, maybe even 70/30.
Step 2: After removing the bone from the Boston Butt, the meat was diced to a suitable size to go through the grinder. This diced meat was then placed in the freezer for 30 minutes to make sure the fat didn’t start to melt while going through the grinder.
Step 3: Measuring out your seasoning, especially your salt, is going to be super important for food safety reasons, and you’ll want to add 2 percent salt to the weight of the meat, some of which will need to be curing salt (check the video above).
Step 4: Besides the salt, the only other seasoning for Andouille sausage is Cayenne pepper. Again, check the video above for how to calculate the correct amount of add.
Step 5: For the grinder, you’re going to want to use a coarse screen, with up to half-inch holes if you can get one, that will give you the chunky texture in the sausage.
Step 6: Then its simply a case of getting the coarse ground pork into a large bowl and working the seasoning (Kosher salt, curing salt, and Cayenne pepper) thoroughly into the ground meat.
Step 7: There are lots of videos out there on how to use/operate sausage makers. A good tip from the recipe above is to make sure the casings are soaked to make them easier to work with.
Step 8: After making the sausages, they are not quite ready to go onto the pellet smoker they need to dry out first so the casings become tacky to take on smoke. Therefore, the sausages go in the fridge overnight to cure and dry out.
Step 9: After 12 hours in the fridge, the sausages have noticeably changed in color after curing. They are now ready to go on the pellet smoker.
Step 10: The sausages went on a Camp Chef Woodwind Pro with pecan pellets used to smoke the sausage at 160 degrees, and the will cook for around 3 and half hours.
Step 11: Instead of damaging the casing of a whole sausage, any small sausage pieces, use that for the meat probe to monitor the cook up to an internal temperature of 152 degrees.
Step 12: After just an hour and a half on the pellet smoker, you can see the deep color that the sausage had taken on.
Step 13: At an internal temperature of 152 degrees, these Andouille sausages were ready at just over 152 degrees, and as you can see, the fat has not rendered and down as its still chunky as intended.
Step 14: To stop the cooking process and to maintain the integrity of the fat chunks in the sausages, they went straight from the pellet smoker into ice water.
Step 15: Slicing through the smoked Andouille sausage, you can see that the meat/fat has retained its integrity in the sausage.
Step 16: Placing the sausage back on the pellet grill up to an internal temperature of 165 degrees you can see these are pretty much a perfect smoked Cajun Andouille sausage ready to eat. Fantastic!
Hi, I’m Chris Scott. I started PelHeat.com back in 2007 and I have a background in pellet manufacturing. PelHeat.com is an educational resource on BBQ pellets, pellet grills & smokers. Check out our Pellet Grill & Smoker Database.
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