Country Style Deer Sausage
A Large Batch Recipe
Making a batch of country style deer sausage is one of my favorite ways enjoy the bounty a successful hunting season.
A good country style venison sausage recipe takes advantage of the flavor of the deer meat by enhancing it with spices, not masking it.
Country sausage is straight forward, and your deer sausage should be too. Make sure to use well trimmed, high quality venison, and supplement it with enough pork (or beef) fat to give the sausage good texture.
Recipe
- 15 lbs well trimmed venison
- 5 lbs fatty (25-30%) pork shoulder and trimmings
- 2 cups non-fat dry milk powder
- 2/3 cup pickling salt
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup onion powder or granulated onion
- 3 tablespoons fine ground black pepper
- 1 tablespoon fresh ground nutmeg
- 4 teaspoons #1 cure (prague powder or Instacure)
3 cups ice water
- Cut the venison and pork into 1 to 2 inch cubes and then grind it through the medium plate on your sausage grinder.
- Mix all the cure and spices except the milk powder with the 3 cups of ice water.
- Pour the water/spice/cure mixture into the ground meat and mix well to distribute. Then add the milk powder and continue mixing for another minute or so until it is all incorporated into the sausage.
- Stuff the sausage immediately into 35-38mm natural hog casings and prepare the links for the smoker.
I like to smoke my country sausage fairly heavily with a hickory or corn cob smudge for about 3 hours.
Make sure to bring the sausage to 152 degrees F before you remove it for showering and blooming.
Click Here for sausage smoking instuctions.
This recipe makes a fairly large batch of sausage. If you want an even
larger (or a smaller) amount, you can easily multiply the ingredients.
Just remember to be sure and use a level teaspoon of cure for every 5 lbs of sausage meat.
