Making Sausage for the First Time

Reader Contribution by Caleb Regan and Managing Editor
Published on April 22, 2011
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Every February in recent years, a few months after my deer has been hung and cut up, I’m left thinking of ways to use the non-steak cuts, the portion of the deer normally ground up. My wife’s Venison Meatloaf is unstoppable, Venison Chili is a seasonal favorite, but towards the end of the winter, we’re still inevitably left with around 25 pounds of ground venison.

Evenings when I fend for myself at the dinner table, when Gwen’s away for work, I’ll slip in charcoal-grilled venison burgers, but that’s an admittedly acquired taste that I’ve come to really enjoy and look forward to but would never feed to someone I love. Doe deer burgers are usually pretty tasty to me now, but I remember well eating deer burgers as a young boy and loathing every bite; the deer I have in mind was not exactly processed in optimal conditions, from what I remember.

The desire to find new methods for consuming those extra pounds of ground meat, coupled with my father-in-law’s yearly surplus of awesome-tasting deer snack sticks, made me first get serious about jerky, snack sticks, and making sausage in general. Curing seemed like a cool process, and I wanted to take the plunge.

The three necessities I needed were, in order of importance, a grinder, sausage stuffer, and smokehouse. There are ways to get around the smoker (you could smoke in a normal smoker, or even bake in the oven). But to make 21 mm snack sticks, which I knew I wanted to do, I’d need a manual crank stuffer, and a preferably electric, high-power grinder. And a smokehouse would allow me to slow-smoke the meat like it deserved.

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