Summer sausage
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Summer sausage is the general term for any sausage that can be kept without the need of refrigeration. Summer sausage is usually a mixture of pork and other meat such as beef and/or venison. Summer sausage can be either dried or smoked, and curing ingredients can vary significantly, although some sort of curing salt is almost always used. Seasonings may include mustard seeds, black pepper, garlic salt, or sugar.
Summer sausage, like many types of sausage, makes use of leftover scrap meat and organ meat that would otherwise be wasted.
A particular kind of summer sausage is popular in North Dakota, occasionally containing cheese in addition to meat. This type of summer sausage is smoked rather than dried and is generally best kept and eaten cold, though it can be cooked.
Traditionally, summer sausage is a fermented sausage with a low pH to slow bacterial growth and give a longer shelf life and give it a tangy taste that can be copied using citric acid as a shortcut to keeping cultures to ferment the following batch.
