Making Homemade Venison Sausage

Jamie was able to get his first buck a few weeks back and saved some of the meat for sausage making. Jamie & Hailey love venison steaks.  Drew & I don't usually eat venison but I really like it when we turn it into sausage.

Chorizo flavored venison sausage links

Venison sausage is very easy to make and tastes delicious.  It doesn't have any gamey taste either.

First Jamie cuts all the venison meat into cubes.

Cut up venison meat

Then Jamie cut up a large pork roast into small pieces.  You need to add some type of fattier meat to the sausage since venison is so lean.  It has basically no fat in it.

Cut up pork to add a little fat to the sausage.

Next Jamie added all of the cut up meat into the meat grinder. First it is ground from chunks into a thick grind and then its run through the grinder again for a finer grind of meat.

1st grinding of meat

Meat almost all ground

2nd grinding of meat

We now need to season the meat.  I bought a sausage making seasoning kit from Cabela's.  I chose Chorizo flavor.  It includes all the seasonings and the natural hog casings to make the sausage.  You need to soak the casings in cold water to help get rid of the salt they preserve the casings in and to rehydrate them.

Hog casings in water

Chorizo seasonings

Now that all the meat is ground up and mixed together.  All the seasonings are added and mixed well.  We then stuff the natural casings with the meat mixture.  Jamie's meat grinder has a sausage stuffer attachment that makes it very easy.  Unfortunately we didn't take any pictures of the actual stuffing process since you need both hands.  We actually do this together.  Jamie stuffs the ground meat into the machine and also operates the on/off switch.  I put the casings on the stuffer and actually hold the casings while the machine is stuffing them.  Once they are stuffed to the length you want you need to twist the casing to make it into a link all the while its stuffing the next section of casing.  Once you get the hang of it, its not too hard, just time consuming.

We got all the sausage made and then bagged up for the freezer.

Chorizo venison sausage.

We ended up making 5 packages of large sausage links,  these ones will fit into sub rolls.  We also got 12 packages of regular size links and 5 packages of loose or bulk sausage.

Of course we set some aside to try right away for dinner and it was delicious.  It has a very sweet taste at first but then some serious heat at the end of the bite.  

We are hoping for another deer as we have another seasoning kit to make Italian sausage since this type is a little spicy for Hailey and I.