Making Deer Sausage

The first step in the making of deer sausage is of course, obtaining the deer. Luckily for us, Kevin is quite good at that. Most every year he gets at least two, some years three. This year was especially good. He got three and the oldest son got two. So that means lots of meat for the year. We want to limit our meat to naturally grown and this is as natural as you can get.

They got two bucks and three does. Four were taken down south near Kilbuck,OH and the other one was taken from our property. We've had quite a few on the property this year, we've seen at least 15 with two being small bucks.

This is the buck that Kevin got. We always keep the antlers and hang them. We like the European style of mount below.

We also have the traditional style but it's a lot of work. I mounted a deer for a friend last year and sometime maybe I'll post pictures of that. I've also done turkey tails, a beaver skin, raccoons, muskrats, groundhogs, pheasants and a fox. My most favorite are the smaller animals.
This is a Dream Catcher that Kevin's dad had done for him. It's beautiful.

Anyway, back to the deer processing and sausage making. First, we spent quite a while trimming all the meat to pieces that would fit nicely through the grinder. Then we grinded away.

The younger daughter was a whiz. She worked all day, happily helping us and it was so much fun. She really enjoys helping with the processing chores. She rocked at the chicken processing. We thought she would be really creeped out during the killing part but she kept watching all the same. She helped with the plucker and jumped when anyone needed paper towels or a drink. Now, if only she liked cleaning out the chicken house or weeding the garden.

All in all we ground about 40 pounds of meat.

We took a trip down to the bulk food store in Sugarcreek. We decided to get our spices there since we were going to need large quantities. We got cayenne, fennel, sage, caraway, mustard seed, coriander, paprika and more. We also stopped at a local meat market to get our casings. We got natural casings for sausage and we also got some collagen casings for hot dogs. We are going to mix some turkey and venison for the hot dogs. We work outside so much that we need to have quick meal options. Hot dogs are the best but who knows what you are getting from the supermarket.

Spices all measured and ready for the mixer. We put the meat and the spices in my Kitchen Aid mixer and let it mix on slow for four minutes. It changes the consistency of the meat mixture and makes it more gooey, more like sausage than just ground up meat.

Then we put it back through the grinder and stuffed it into the casings.



We picked up a bunch of good tips from videos on youtube, everything from grinding, stuffing and recipes.


Kevin trimmed the end and formed the links.

There is a special way to do this so that the links stay uniform and twist correctly.


There you have it, sausages all in a row!

We let them sit a while to dry out the casings a little.




Then packaged them all up and into the freezer.

All in all we ended up with 20 pounds of Italian sausage, 20 pounds of burger and about 10 pounds of steaks from the back straps. The first deer was all ground and froze for burger. We have lots of Tacos and Sloppy Joes so we can never have enough burger. We are processing the last two deer today and I'll be making breakfast sausage and hot dogs. All that AND helping my sister move today too. The sausage might have to wait til Monday.

Til next time,

Beth