Pepperoni

My name is Chris, I am a pepperette junkie. A pepperette is a small snack sized pepperoni which is either dry cured or cured and then smoked and dried. I recently got into sausage making and tried my hand at a simple pepperoni recipe I found at Tammy's Recipes.

This was for a full sized pepperoni that was oven baked, but, I will easily be able to adapt it to fill a small collagen casing and then smoke it naturally. I had never used liquid smoke and was worried how potent it would be as it seemed to overwhelm the raw meat. In the end the finished pepperoni was wonderful and comparable to commercially available sliced pepperoni here in Canada. The best part is that 2 pounds of pepperoni cost a little over $4 to make..... Cha ching!

I made a couple of minor changes to Tammy's recipe in that I used 75% lean ground beef and 25% lean ground pork and cooked it at 170°F until the meat temperature reached 152°F internal (about 7 hours).

I must send a huge thank you to Tammy, this pepperoni is excellent.