Coffee Breakfast

I get more questions about venison sausage than any other single sausage topic I can think of. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

Every ethical hunter wants to make good use of any game that he is fortunate enough to bring home.

Turning his (or her) hard earned harvest into sausage is one of the best ways to make sure that gets done.

It isn't any harder to make sausage from venison (or other game meat) than it is to make it from more common ingredients. You just have to keep a couple of things in mind.

1. Venison and most other game meat is much leaner than meat from domesticated, farm raised animals. You are going to have to compensate for that by adding fat (or high fat content meat) to your mixture.

   Lean steaks and roasts are great. Lean deer sausage just tastes dry and unappetizing.

   Most sausage makers increase the fat content of their game sausage by adding enough pork shoulder and pork or beef fat to bring the fat content of the sausage mix up to around 20 percent.

2. Venison and other game meats are more strongly and distinctly flavored than their domestic counterparts.

   That isn't a bad thing, but it does mean that you'll usually need to use more of your spices in deer sausage if you don't want them drowned out by the natural flavor of the meat.

Any sausage that you normally make from pork or beef (or other domestic meat) can be made with venison. I make fresh and smoked varieties of venison sausage every year.

Semi-dry and dry recipes are also easily adapted for venison and other game. As a matter of fact, some of the best salami I ever made was from a mixture of elk and deer meat.

Don't let the idea of making sausage from venison scare you. As long as you watch the fat content and spice mixtures as shown in the recipes here, you shouldn't have any difficulty.