Homemade Venison Bacon and Breakfast Sausage

For Christmas Jamie wanted some seasoning packages from Cabela's for gifts.  So the kids and I went ahead and got him one to try to make homemade Venison Bacon and homemade Venison Breakfast Sausage.

Jamie took most of Monday and decided to make both.

First he started out with the cut up venison and then added some cut up pork since venison is so lean you have to add some fat back into the meat so it won't dry out.

Cut up Venison & Pork

Next Jamie took the cut up venison and pork and ground it up. As usual he did two grinds to get it nice and fine in texture.

Jamie grinding the venison & pork

Jamie then took this mixture and split it in half.  Half went to the Bacon and the other half went to the Breakfast sausage.

I'll write about the sausage first since it isn't a long process.  At this point Jamie mixed in the seasoning packet from Cabela's real well until it was all combined.  He then just packaged it up for future use.  We can make sausage & gravy with biscuits which has become one of my favorites for breakfast or make it into patties.  We decided not to make links because it's quite a bit of work. Maybe next time we will try to make links too.

Breakfast Sausage ready for packaging, you can see all the seasoning

End Result was 16 Pckgs of Breakfast Sausage (bulk)

Of course we tried to Breakfast Sausage and cooked up a little.  It was delicious, tasted just like breakfast sausage and was seasoned really well.

Onto the Venison Bacon

With the other half of the meat mixture, Jamie mixed in the bacon seasoning and cure.  He then needed to press it tightly into two pans and put in the freezer for 3 hours to completely firm up.

Meat mixture ready to put in freezer to become firm

Once the mixture is firm, Jamie took it out of the pans in 1 piece and put onto wire racks that we then put onto tinfoil lined cookie sheets to catch the drippings while it cooked.

They both went into the oven at 200 degrees and cooked until a meat thermometer read an internal temperature of 142 degrees, approximately 4 hours.

Once it was finished in the oven, it was put back into the refrigerator to cool down overnight.  Thankfully our friend Jeff has a meat slicer and was nice enough to let us borrow it.

The next morning we sliced up the Venison Bacon and packaged it up.  We ended up with 7 packages with 12 thick slices in each and 3 packages with 10 thick slices each.

Of course we had to try some too. 

Cooked Venison Bacon

The Venison Bacon does not taste anything like pork bacon.  It does have the same texture as turkey bacon but I actually think it tastes exactly like pastrami.  I took some of the above cooked Venison bacon and melted some cheese on it and had it as a sandwich for lunch.  It was very tasty.  We are also going to try to dice some of it up, add in some onions, peppers and potatoes and make some hash for breakfast with it.  Either way we all tried it AND liked it so it will be eaten one way or another.