Making your own sausage — instead of dropping your deer off at the processor — extends your hunting experience. Plus, you save some money and enjoy good eating for the rest of the year.
To be an official “sausage maker” means your family has been making sausage for generations. To reach this level of expertise is a lifelong quest. We’re going to short-circuit the system and use Hi Mountain Seasoning. Your old sausage-making granddad will turn over in his grave, but don’t worry — you can hit that level later.
The real sausage makers will do a cold smoke, somewhere around 87-92 degrees. The smoke will flavor the meat and the low heat will dry it out. That is the perfect temperature for incubating bacteria, which is why you must add the nitrates or nitrites that cure the product and add flavor.
Everyone always asks me, “Don’t you think that they used to make better sausage 100 years ago?” No way. In the old days, they smoked with whatever wood was in their locale and used local spices. Where do you think the name bologna came from? Frankfurters? Polish sausage? German sausage? (Answers-Bologna, Italy; Frankfurter, Germany; Poland; Germany).
Now? You can find almost any spice or wood at your local store or order it off the internet. So don’t feel like you’re a second-class sausage maker.
So lest you get intimidated to even try to make your own sausage, let’s go the simple route at first. Use a store-bought mix. Check out Hi Mountain Seasoning. I made two batches last weekend using their Polish and Original Salami mixes. Both were great.
You can make sausage out of any of your big game and even out of birds. Years ago when we were making sausage on the ranch in Sonora we’d run down to Del Rio and pick up pork fat to mix with our sausage. Now I buy a pork top butt. That way I get the fat plus some good hog meat in the blend.
We could argue forever on the lean percentage but I’d say make your sausage somewhere around 75 to 80 percent lean. You may argue that 90 percent is healthier, but let’s be honest. We aren’t eating sausage to be healthy.
Everyone cautions you to trim off all of the wildgame fat; they say that will give it an off odor. But don’t get too picky or you only end up with a handful of meat. Chill out. Do you not think that it is all left in every hamburger and steak that you eat?
Deer itself is probably around 90 percent lean. Mix so you will have a 75 to 80 percent lean finished product.
I coarse grind my pork and coarse grind my deer then sprinkle the spices into the ground pork. Then I mix it all together and grind again. Meat grinds better if it is semi crystallized (semi frozen).
For packaging you can make bulk packages or stuff into casings. There are natural casing made of pork or sheep intestines. These come salted so soak them in warm water to soften and then put the end on your faucet and flush out the salt or it will ruin your sausage.
Or they make collagen casings. I like them because they have a larger diameter and you can blow and go but I don’t think smoke permeates them as good as it does on natural casings. Before you start stuffing, though, make a small patty and fry it up. Does it need more seasoning? Once it is stuffed, it’s too late.
You can use a hand grinder to grind and stuff but it’s a major pain. I recently got a Weston Grinder and stuffer and love them. It’s 10 times easier and faster.
For smoking, you have two choices: cold smoke or hot smoke. When cold smoking, you’re depending on the nitrites to cure the meat. For beginners, I suggest a hot smoke.
Have fun and happy smoking!
Tom Claycomb lives in Idaho and has outdoors columns in newspapers in Alaska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and Louisiana. He also writes for various outdoors magazines and teaches outdoors seminars at stores like Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shop.
