This is where the sausage stops being a mixture and becomes food that keeps. The cure that suppresses botulism, the ferment that outruns Staphylococcus, the dry that takes the water away, the smoke that adds flavor and — despite what you have read — very little else. It opens with the food-safety chapter because every other page in this program defers to it, and because writing it turned up something USDA states plainly and almost no home source repeats. Read that one first, even if you read nothing else here.
The rest of the program. This is the last of the seven sections of the sausage program — after history, equipment, ingredients and making. The general smoking craft, beyond sausage, is over at Smoking; the worked example of a raw cured sausage from grind to 35% weight loss is the Landjäger dive.
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