Brisket Cheese & Bacon Sausage

Soak the corn flour in the beef stock for a few minutes before you start, so it is fully hydrated by the time it goes into the mix. That is your binder, it is what keeps these sausages from crumbling on the grill.

Cube the brisket trimmings and back fat and keep everything ice cold, straight from the fridge or a short stint in the freezer. Cold fat grinds clean instead of smearing, which is the difference between a sausage that holds together and one that turns greasy. Run it through a coarse plate.

Dice the tasty cheese and short cut bacon into pieces small enough to distribute evenly but big enough to still show as pockets in the finished slice, you are not making a paste.

Combine the ground meat and fat with the hydrated corn flour, salt, cracked pepper, mustard powder, sweet paprika, garlic powder and diced onion. Mix by hand until it turns tacky and starts to bind, that tackiness is protein extraction doing its job and it is what holds the sausage together once it is cased.

Fold in the diced cheese and bacon last, and go gentle here, you are folding them through, not mixing until the whole batch turns a uniform pink.

Stuff into 33mm hog casings, twisting off into links every 15 to 20cm. Run a sausage pricker over any visible air pockets before they go anywhere near heat.

Let the links sit uncovered in the fridge for about an hour to dry the casing surface. A dry casing takes smoke better and will not come out slimy.

Get the smoker stable at 225F before the links go on. Load them with a bit of space between each one so smoke can move around them evenly.

Smoke at 225F until the internal temp hits 152F, which usually lands right around the hour mark for links this size. Add a chunk of fruit wood once or twice through the cook, you do not need much, these already carry a lot of flavour from the cheese and bacon.

Pull the links and let them rest before cutting into one, the rest is what keeps the juices in the sausage instead of on your cutting board.

Slice and serve warm, or cool completely and store in the fridge for up to a week. These also freeze well raw if you want to smoke them in smaller batches later.