Nola Cuisine

This is my latest batch of Andouille, I’m very happy with it. I used my recipe for Andouille but I changed my smoking technique a bit. I recently bought a Bradley Smoker, which now gives me the option of cold smoking which I did here. I smoked this batch at 90-100 degrees F for 10 hours with Pecan wood smoke, then I let it hang in the refrigerator for 3 days, to continue to cure and dry out a bit.

I cut into one link so that you could see the coarse texture. I hand chopped half of the meat from a 5 pound Boston Butt into small cubes, and ground the other half. I also added additional fat which I cubed, as you can see in the cut link.

This is not a paid advertisement for Bradley smokers. I love this contraption. It has a mechanism that feeds the compressed woodchips, called bisquettes onto a small hotplate that makes a perfectly clean smoke for 20 minutes then dumps the spent bisquette into a bowl of water, while feeding a new one onto the plate. There is a heat element in the smoke tower, that allows you to control the temperature. You can fill the smoke generator up with bisquettes and let it run for 8 hours without even touching it. It works so well that it almost takes the fun out of it for me. I’m so used to tending the fire.

The only downside that I’ve found with this smoker so far is that you’re locked in to buying their Bisquettes“>bisquettes, but you can get them relatively cheaply on the net, about $15 dollars for 48 bisquettes. I paid around $300 for the smoker, which I thought was a steal. I first read about it in, what is in my humble opinion, the best cookbook to come out in years, Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Detroit area Chef Brian Polcyn. Their recommendation really paid off, I really love my new toy.

Check out my other Sausage and Seasoning meat recipes here.

Be sure and check out my ever growing Index of Creole & Cajun Recipes!

For more on Andouille see Jason Perlow’s All About Andouille post at Off the Broiler!