# Attempting my first venison and elk snack sticks in the smoker. Any tips?



## tander123 (Sep 21, 2007)

I've never made snack sticks before and am going to give it a try this weekend. Bought a couple of kits from Cabelas. Do you do a percentage of game and pork? Any tips from those of you who have it dialed in would be awesome. Thanks in advance.


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## muddydogs (Oct 7, 2007)

I like about 20% fat in my snack sticks so I usually just add some pork trim to my venison but I have used some pork butt a time or two. Trouble is by just adding pork butt the sticks can come out a little dry due to not enough fat unless you add enough pork that the sticks taste more like pork then venison. A typical pork butt contains about 20% fat so if you add 10 pounds of pork butt to 10 pounds of venison your only getting about 10% fat in the mix which I find isn't enough.

My smoking procedure is listed below. I kind of follow it loosely, biggest deal is the 120 degree drying stage which I sometimes stretch out if the cases still look a little wet after an hour. After the drying stage I don't get all stressed out if the smoker runs 130 to 140 degrees for the first couple hours then I bump it up to 140 to 150 for a couple before finishing the sticks.

60 minutes at 120* with no smoke to set casings to meat 
120 minutes at 130* with smoke from a pellet tray 
120 minutes at 140* with smoke until the pellets run out. 
60 minutes at 150* 
165*-175* to finish sticks at an internal temp of 152-154*. 
Cold water bath sticks to cool.


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## muddydogs (Oct 7, 2007)

What smoker are you using? If your up North you might have to do some extra insulating around your smoker with the low temps. I'm hopping to smoke some ground meat bacon Saturday but my gasser (propane smoker) has the top end to push through the cold temps. Dang smoker will push 500 degrees on high if I need it.


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## tander123 (Sep 21, 2007)

I have a masterbuilt sportsman elite


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## Dunkem (May 8, 2012)

Look at post #17 in the sausage making thread of Goobs Sausage Recipes


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