Bulk Venison Breakfast Sausage
Venison is too lean to make sausage on its own, so it is cut with pork fat and seasoned heavily with sage and pepper. Mixed and frozen in bulk, it is ready to fry into patties any morning.
- Prep30 min
- Cook10 min
- Total1 h 40 min
- Serves20
AI-generated illustration
Contains:meat
Ingredients
Method
- Spread the cubed venison and pork fatback on a tray and freeze 30 minutes, until the edges are firm and crunchy but the centers are not solid. Warm meat smears in a grinder instead of cutting cleanly, and smeared fat makes greasy, crumbly sausage.
- Toss the chilled cubes with the kosher salt, rubbed sage, black pepper, dried thyme, red pepper flakes, and ground nutmeg.
- Grind everything through the coarse plate of a meat grinder into a bowl set in ice, alternating venison and fat so they distribute evenly. For a finer texture, run it through a second time.
- Add the maple syrup and ice water and mix by hand or with a paddle for 1 to 2 minutes, until the meat turns slightly sticky and holds together when squeezed.
- Fry a tablespoon of the mixture into a small test patty and taste it, then adjust the salt or sage in the rest of the batch. This is the only chance to correct the seasoning.
- Fry patties in a skillet over medium heat for 4 to 5 minutes per side, until browned and cooked to 160 degrees F (71 degrees C), the required temperature for ground meat mixed with pork.
- Pack the rest in 1-pound portions, press flat, and freeze up to 6 months, or refrigerate and use within 2 days.
Notes
- Wild game should be handled like any raw meat: keep it cold throughout, wash hands and surfaces, and never taste the raw mixture, which is why the test patty gets cooked.
- A 4-to-1 ratio of venison to fat is the lowest that still fries up juicy; pork shoulder can replace the fatback at 3 pounds venison to 2 pounds shoulder.
