An Introduction on Venison and Its Application in Sausage
While the original definition of the word “venison” alluded to any sort of game meat, the term has evolved to a designation of anything edible taken from the carcass of a deer or, for those who live or grew up in South Africa, antelope. To clarify on the “anything edible” part, organ meats, roasts, sirloins and ribs, if taken from either of these two animals, can be considered venison.
Now that we have covered enough on “what” vension is, let us discuss “why” you should try it. Venison is quite similar to beef, if you had a richer, leaner, gamier cut of beef. Venison is usually so lean that some fort of fat should be added before you even think of cooking it into something like a hamburger without issue. Thanks to the usual diet of the source animal, wild greens, venison is also a relatively healthy type of meat to consume. One of the best approaches to cooking with venison is to serve it in the form of sausages; due to how lean venison is, sausages are the perfect way of pairing it with another, fattier, meat to preserve the venison. You also get the benefits of two proteins in each casing, yielding far more flavor than any one meat could offer.
A Step-By-Step Guide to Making Venison Sausage From Home
In order to better illustrate the flexibility of venison as an edible protein in cookery, provided below are a trio of different approaches to the venison sausage recipe.
Recipe #1: Venison and Pork Sausage Recipe
Ingredients
- Venison, 4.4 lbs.
- Belly, pork, 4.4 lbs.
- Milk, powdered, 180 grams
- Wine, red, chilled, 3/4 cup
- Sugar, brown, soft, 3 tbsp
- Salt, 2 tbsp
- Powder, onion, 1.5 tbsp
- Paprika, 1 tbsp
- Pepper, black, 1 tbsp
- Powder, Prague #1, 1.5 tsp
- Pepper, cayenne, 1.5 tsp
- Sage, dried, 1.5 tsp
- Thyme, dried, 1.5 tsp
- Powder, garlic, 3/4 tsp
- Mace, 3/4 tsp
- Allspice, 3/4 tsp
Directions
- Dice meat into 1″ cubes, running through a grinder with a 4mm plate. Return ground meat to fridge.
- Combine all spices together into a large bowl, ensuring that salt fully dissolves.
- Evenly mix the seasonings with the ground meat by hand. This should take 5 minutes if done by hand.
- Run your spiced sausage through the meat grinder on the 4mm plate, then transfer the grounded blend to a sausage stuffer.
- Make traditional sausage links and store the finished pile overnight in the fridge, wrapped in paper toweling. Hanging the meat allows the meat to better absorb the spices as it dries out while the papers contribute to the process by slowly drawing out moisture through the casings.
- When you wish to cook, prep your grill with some oak or walnut wood chips and configure things for cooking with indirect heat. Place sausages in a lightly oiled tray and cook at 320°F for half an hour, shaking the tray every 10 minutes.
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Homemade Venison Sausage Recipe
Ingredients
- Venison, 4.4 lbs
- Belly, pork, 4.4 lbs
- Milk, powdered, 180 grams
- Wine, red, chilled, 3/4 cup
- Sugar, brown, soft, 3 tbsp
- Salt, 2 tbsp
- Powder, onion, 1.5 tbsp
- Paprika, 1 tbsp
- Pepper, black, 1 tbsp
- Powder, Prague #1, 1.5 tsp
- Pepper, cayenne, 1.5 tsp
- Sage, dried, 1.5 tsp
- Thyme, dried, 1.5 tsp
- Powder, garlic, 3/4 tsp
- Mace, 3/4 tsp
- Allspice, 3/4 tsp
Instructions
- Dice meat into 1″ cubes, running through a grinder with a 4 mm plate.
- Return ground meat to fridge.
- Combine all spices together into a large bowl, ensuring that salt fully dissolves.
- Evenly mix the seasonings with the ground meat by hand.
- This should take 5 minutes if done by hand.
- Run your spiced sausage through the meat grinder on the 4mm plate, then transfer the grounded blend to a sausage stuffer.
- Make traditional sausage links and store the finished pile overnight in the fridge, wrapped in paper toweling.
- Hanging the meat allows the meat to better absorb the spices as it dries out while the papers contribute to the process by slowly drawing out moisture through the casings.
- When you wish to cook, prep your grill with some oak or walnut wood chips and configure things for cooking with indirect heat.
- Place sausages in a lightly oiled tray and cook at 320°F for half an hour, shaking the tray every 10 minutes.
Nutrition
Recipe #2: Venison Breakfast Bratwurst Recipe
Ingredients
- Venison, cubed, 6 lbs.
- Butt, pork, cubed, 3 lbs.
- Bacon, chopped, 1 lb.
- Syrup, maple, 100% pure, 1 cup (alternately you can use a quarter cup of brown sugar)
- Water, ice cold, 1 cup
- Your preferred 19-21 mm sausage casing
- Salt, kosher, 3 tbsp
- Pepper, black, ground, 3 tbsp
- Sage, ground, 3 tbsp
- Paprika, 3 tbsp
- Pepper, cayenne, at least 2 tsp (add more if you really like your sausage to be on the spicy side)
- Rosemary, fresh, 1 tsp
- Coriander, ground, 1 tsp
Directions
- Run your pork and venison through a meat grinder equipped with its medium plate.
- Add the spices, water and syrup (or brown sugar) to the ground meat mixture.
- Mix everything together until the entire mixture seems thoroughly meshed together.
- Load meat into casings, remember to leave them just a tad loose to prevent breaks.
- Remember that sausages are easier to tie if kept between three and four feet long. Try to keep links a uniform length. Pinch the center and roll each one in the opposite direction of its predecessor to get the casing to properly cling around the venison-pork mix.
- Repeat the sausage-linking process until you run out of casings, then use knots to tie their ends.
- Cook with olive oil on medium-high for 15-20 minutes, just until brown and completely cooked.
- Allow them to rest five minutes after cooking.
- Serve. The inclusion of the maple syrup (or brown sugar) means that these sausages are well suited for breakfast fare like biscuits, grits, oatmeal and waffles.
Venison Sausage Recipe #3
Ingredients
- Venison, 3 lbs.
- Pork, shoulder or belly, 2 lbs.
- Salt, roughly 2 round tbsp
Optional:
- Optional: Instacure No. 1, 4 grams
- Leaves, bay, 10, ground to powder
- Cloves, garlic, minced, 6-8 (roughly 2 tbsp)
- Pepper, black, roughly 2 tsp
- Seed, celery, 1/2 tsp
- Wine, red, 1/4 cup
- Water, ice cold, 1/4 cup
Optional
- Optional Powder, milk, dry, 20 grams
- Casings, hog, 12-15 feet
Directions
- Chop up the pork and the venison and the fat into chunks suitable for your meat grinder. You can go the extra mile by incorporating a mix of salt and curing salt with the meat on a coarse grind, using a 10-12 mm plate. Refrigerate overnight. If you lack such a large plate, just cut the meat to a finer degree. The end result is a tighter bind on the final sausages.
- Let your casings rest in a bowl of warm water.
- Once you can grind, mix the meat and fat with the herbs, spices and the dry milk powder if you choose to use it. Keep the meat and fat at 37°F or cooler by placing the mi in the freezer for at least an hour. Refrigerate your wine.
- Grind through the meat grinder, or even a food processor if you cannot yield a good texture, with a coarse 6-7 mm die.
- Make sure that the sausage is at, or below, freezing cold temperature, ideally between 28°F and 32°F. Add the wine and water to the ground meat and thoroughly mix them together with either your hands for 2 minutes or using a hand blender for 60-90 seconds. This step is crucial in getting the sausage’s components to properly bind.
- Stuff the sausage into your casings, making sure to twist the links off by pinching downward and then twisting each link in alternating directions-this greatly reduces the risk of the sausage unwinding. Alternately, you can tie the links off with butcher’s string. Remember to pierce through any sports where air pockets seem to form, running a flame-sterilized needle through those spots. Give each link a tender squeeze to purge any and all air pockets.
- Hang the sausages in a cool area for up to a solid day, ideally from within your fridge. Once the sausages have properly dried out, keep them in the fridge until you are ready to cook them up. If you choose to freeze the sausage for long-term storage, wait at least one day after drying them out before placing them into such cold storage. A single day’s wait will tighten things up and help the sausages retain their shape.
- Cook your venison-pork sausages just like how you would handle any other sausage.
In Conclusion
While there are many culinary applications available to you when it comes to venison: chili, burgers, stew, etc; making sausage with venison is a whole other level of brilliance in the kitchen. By stuffing your links with a delicious and lean cut of meat like venison and pairing it with another, fattier type of meat, like pork, you are creating portion-controlled vessels of flavor that offers you all of the flavor from both meats plus the many seasonings you have full control over. When one considers all of the advantages offered by making venison into sausage, it makes the “disadvantage” of needing the proper equipment like a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer a negligible one. If you happen to live in an area where venison is commonly available, you owe it to your taste buds to pounce on the opportunity and buy some sausage-making equipment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most people describe the flavor of venison as “gamey,” but we prefer using words like rich and earthy. It is leaner than beef or pork, so it’s not as juicy unless you add beef fat (also called suet) or pork to your venison sausage. It’s also best to pair herbs like sage and rosemary with venison to bring out its rich flavor.
Most people mix pork into their venison sausage to add some much needed fat. Because venison is so lean, the sausage can taste dry without this addition. You can go as much as equal parts venison and pork, or you can keep it as low as 25 percent. We have a few recipes in the article above, so experiment and have some fun with it.
As we suggested above, you can mix venison with pork to add some much needed fat to your sausage. You can use pork belly, bacon, or pork roast. If you prefer, you can definitely use beef fat (also called suet) or chuck roast if you don’t want to add pork to your sausage.
Venison sausage cooks very similar to pork sausage, although it is often stuffed into thinner casings. If that’s the case, it will cook faster (in about 15 minutes). Otherwise, it should take about 30 minutes to fully cook. Be careful not to overcook deer sausage, as it can become very dry.
You can use the same sausage stuffer you use to stuff pork sausage. Some people prefer the vertical stuffers, while others use attachments for the KitchenAid stand mixer.
