If you’re a hunter, or you know one, chances are you have the good fortune to have access to deer meat each year. There are many ways to prepare deer, but one of my favorites is to make venison sausage. It may seem intimidating to make sausage at home, but with the right equipment and knowledge, it’s actually one of the simplest and most sustainable things you can do in your kitchen.
Sausage is simply ground meat mixed with salt, fat, and seasonings. Although you can make sausage with beef, veal, lamb, chicken, or game animals, most sausages are made with pork, or pork combined with another meat. Commercial sausage is prepared with preservatives and fillers, but by making your own, you can leave out these unhealthy additives, and also control the amount of salt and fat that goes in.
A meat grinder makes the process easier, but if you don’t have one, you can cut the meat into small, uniform pieces and grind them in a food processor or blender. This works best if you grind a small amount at a time.
More from The Complete Butchering, Smoking, Curing, and Sausage Making:
Jenny Flores is a regular contributor to Homestead.org and a blogger for multiple magazines, including Grit and Mother Earth Living.

The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking, Curing, and Sausage Making
Trust The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking, Curing, and Sausage Making to ensure you get the most out of your beef, venison, pork, lamb, poultry, and goat.
Everything you need to know about how to dress and preserve meat is right here. From slaughtering, to processing, to preserving in ways like smoking and salting, author Philip Hasheider teaches it all.
Detailed step-by-step instructions and illustrations guide you through the entire process: you’ll see how to properly secure the animal, and get right into safely and humanely transforming the meat to a feast for the family. You’ll get to know different cuts of meat and see how to process it into different products, like sausages and jerky.