Homemade Venison Sausage | How To

You may remember me talking about the farm, or our adventures in turkey hunting and fishing, or how could you forget that time we made squirrel stew? Well, over the Christmas holidays, the Elliott men did what they do best and went deer hunting and were able to get a lot of good meat. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before we eat a lot of fresh meat in our family – venison, elk, fish, etc. that have been killed & processed locally rather than being store bought. Another thing we eat a great deal of in our family is sausage. So we wanted to make some of our very own with this abundance of meat we had! 

 

This isn’t a recipe per se, but more of a run through of the process. The husband and father in law cut the meat and trimmed the fat, and then the three of us did the casing together. My mother in law helped with the casing process as well so it was really a family affair! Then we smoked the sausages, and froze to be used later. And let me tell you, it was pretty darn fun, and extremely gratifying to have such an intimate part in the process of preparing the food that we put into our bodies. 

 

Here’s how it all began:

Once the fat was trimmed and the meat was cubed:

At this point – here’s what you’ll need for the actual sausage making process 

(you need about 1/2 as much fat (we used pork fat & bacon) as you do meat):

The next step is to grind the meat & fat together (you may need to run through the grinder more than once), and then season the mixture however you’d like (we did a cajun and a regular “spicy” blend that we made ourselves from spices and then made a wet blend as well with garlic):

Then you are reading to fill the casings (and yes those tiny little tubes will hold the meat!), twisting off for each sausage (about 6 ins): 

Continue making your links until you use all of the casing (left pic) and fill bowl as you finish (right pic):

Then we smoked the sausage, labeled packages by the spices we used, and froze to have available whenever we chose! The first batch we had the husband grilled and it was delicious!