Homemade Sausage Making

I've got a abundance of porkbutt in my freezer and am thinking about brining and smoking a nice chunk for ham sandwich meat. I know it'll be a bit fatty but by removing the top cap of fat and any large deposits of fat I run into when deboning I think this could turn out nice. I'll string-tie the butt after deboning, geeze up with brine and then let it sit brining in the fridge for 5-7 days. Can the fat I remove from the butt be re-frozen for use later on? I've got a opportunity to whack a wild pig in the near future and any domestic hog fat would come in handy. RAY

Yes I do that often.

Same here. Be sure to label it and it would also help to jot down the weight of the fat on the package. Of course your memory may be better than mine.

I always also place the date on the package.

I date everything that I put in the freezer AND I label it with what it is! I the past I had to let my nose try and tell me what I had defrosted... Lots of pot luck suppers in those days!

Charlie

Thanks for the rock-solid advice, I feel a lot more comfortable re-freezing the stuff. I'll start dating my packages tho I haven't needed to up till this point, nothing ever lasts a year. Oh, I've got no memory left. I saw Hendrix at the Fillmore in my junior year of high school, life was never really the same after that. RAY

Ray, Marianski writes that you can actually refreeze meat but you have to take into account that once it has thawed chemical changes take place and if you refreeze that same meat you have to that into account. In other words, the shelf life or the number of days that you have to use the meat does not change if you refreeze, or use fresh. That was something new to me, because I had always been taught that meat should never be refrozen, but no one ever explained why. What M. writes makes sense. Amazing the things we learn in old age!

Fat is a bit different because it does not have high water content that meat has, but can get freezer burn and that stale flavour, so don't leave it in the freezer too long.

Thanks for that Red! I'm thinking if I keep my eye on things I can remove the top fat while still partially frozen, shrink-wrap it and pop it right back into the freezer. Seems things that are shrink-wrapped don't suffer freezer burn like all the good stuff that got ruined in the past. I figure if I have some pure domestic top-fat to cut the wild pig meat with I won't have to use up as much of my whole porkbutt. While I'd most likely have to use 35-40% straight porkbutt to cut the wild meat with I think about a 7% pure fat cut would be sufficient to achieve proper moisture and flavor. A lot will depend of how much natural fat the wild pig has on it, and I won't know that till I take it's skin off. I won't fool around with a bunch of cuts either, smoked hams and backstrap steaks, everything else into sausage. RAY