The Original Dry Bag Steak | Make Artisan Dry Age Steak at Home › Forums › Dry Aging Steak › Dry Aging Steak with UMAi Dry® › Bag separating from Salami › Bag separating from Salami
Hi Mashuto,
The casing separating from the sausage is fairly common when making dry sausage, it happens because the sausage shrinks away from the casing and also because it is quite difficult to stuff the casing perfectly tight as you found out.
In our experience this separation does not cause a big problem when drying in the fridge. The sausage may take a bit longer to dry if it is just loose inside the casing, but eventually it will dry. If you have 20-30% separation at this point, it is not uncommon and you should be able to get pretty good results. The separation area will only get bigger as the meat dries, so don’t be concerned.
The suggestion to use elastic netting is also great, or you can tie with twine. It will most likely speed up the drying process.
As for grinding and stuffing, we used a hand grinder to grind and stuffed it with a hand grinder horn, as the videos show. As long as the meat was nearly frozen, the grinding went relatively smoothly. It was a different story with stuffing, the manual grinder stuffing was a bit of a challenge.
We are planning to use a jerky gun to stuff in our next video and see what happens 😉