This fall, his second year of bowhunting, Adam got a small buck and a doe. We’ve been itching to try our hands at sausage-making for a long time, so we borrowed the scary-looking family heirloom equipment from Adam’s parents and got to it.

I’m not going to re-post the recipe, because we used this one verbatim for our first batches. For the second, third, and yes FOURTH batches, we varied the herbs but not the basic ratio: 4 lbs of ground venison and one lb of pork fat. The only thing we omitted was the Instacure (pink salt) after being assured by the Seward Co-op meat guys (they were very patient with me and my questions) that it was unnecessary.

Yes, that is a pound of pork fat. The same week Adam got his first deer, my family split up all the meat from two hogs which my dad had purchased for us. Nobody else wanted any of the fat so I got all the fat from both animals. Seriously, we have a ton of pork fat in our freezer, so if you live in Minneapolis and want some, I’m happy to share. We had the butcher grind up the fat for us, so it’s super easy to use.

The recipe calls for gin, so we found this locally-produced one and it was fantastic. We had no trouble finishing off that bottle in the following days.

We got quite a few packages of ground venison trimmings from the guy who cut up Adam’s deer for him, so the grinding part was done, which made the process faster. Mixing it all up took a little practice. The amount was really too much for our mixer (imagine pork fat chunks and chunks of raw venison hitting the walls of the kitchen). So we mixed it by hand. Because everything needs to be ICE COLD, mixing it with your hands kinda hurts! But Adam powered through.

Next, fry up a little patty and sample it. Delicious.

Now it was time to load Ye Olde Sausage Stuffer, with the casings (from Seward Co-op) and start making some sausage! The kids were fascinated and impressed. I was horrified and amused.

After stuffing you twist the long sausage into individual links.

Finally, you hang it to dry in a refrigerator overnight. We were lucky that our small basement refrigerator came with this wine rack built right in. We’ve never used it for wine but it works great for this!

The next day, we wrapped up packages of four links in butcher paper and froze them. We gave some to family, and have eaten plenty too. It’s delicious!

I have the book Charcuterie by Mark Ruhlman from the library right now, and it has some different venison sausage recipes that I would also like to try. Rather than pork fat, Ruhlman uses a ratio of 3 lbs ground venison to 2 lbs ground pork meat. He also hot-smokes his sausages, a process which intimidates me a little bit, honestly.

On the other hand, we’ll probably also make several more batches with this recipe, because what else are we going to do with all this pork fat? Any favorite venison sausage recipes you’d like to share?