Forty-Eight Smoked Italian Sausages
smoking a pork butt, a turkey, and 48 spicy Italians
Forty-eight at once. Not because forty-eight people are coming — because the smoker is already lit, and the difference between smoking twelve and smoking forty-eight is the price of the sausage.
These are shop-bought hot Italian links and there is no shame in it. What you are doing is changing the method, not the sausage. Low heat and smoke turns an ordinary link into something with a snap and a mahogany skin that no pan can give you.
Half go on plates the same day. The other half go cold into the fridge and turn up in peppers and onions, in sauce, in eggs, all week.
- Makes
- 48 links
- Hands-on
- 15 minutes
- On the smoker
- 2 hours
- Keeps
- A week, cold
What you need
The sausage
- 48 hot Italian sausage links, raw
- No rub, no binder, nothing — they are already seasoned
The fire
- Lump charcoal
- 2 chunks of hickory, no more
- A water pan to keep the humidity up
For the week
- Peppers and onions, for Tuesday
- A pan of tomato sauce, for Thursday
- Good rolls
How it goes
1 — Do not season them
They are hot Italian sausages. They have fennel, chilli, garlic and salt in them already. Anything you add fights what is there.
2 — 225°F, water pan full
The same temperature as everything else on this page, for the same reason: above it the fat renders faster than the casing can stretch and the links split.
3 — Lay them like spokes, not in a pile
Round the grate with a finger's width between each. Forty-eight will fit on a 22-inch grate in one ring and a short second row. If you have to stack them, you are smoking in batches instead.
4 — Two chunks of hickory and no more
A sausage has a lot of surface for its size and it takes on smoke fast. Two chunks gives you the colour in the picture; four gives you an ashtray.
5 — Turn once at an hour
Otherwise the lid stays down. They darken through pink, to red, to that burnished brown, and the casings tighten visibly as they go.
6 — 160°F and off
Probe one in the middle of the link, not the end. Pull the whole batch at 160°F — they carry on a few degrees off the heat.
pro tip — A sausage that looks perfect at ninety minutes is usually still at 145°F inside. Colour runs ahead of temperature on these. Trust the probe.
7 — Onto paper, then cold for the week
Pile them on butcher paper to rest and let the steam off. What you are not eating today goes into the fridge whole once cold — they slice better cold than hot and they reheat in a pan in two minutes.
Half tonight. Half in peppers and onions on Tuesday. Nothing in this house goes to waste. LFG.