Sausage making is a wonderful way to spice up the wild game you are fortunate to bring home. If you don’t have experience, here is a recipe to get started. It’s easy—you don’t need grinders, mixers, and stuffers to try this recipe.

Venison is ideal for sausage, since it’s lean and takes on different spices and flavours well. Have your butcher grind your venison when you pick up your pork, and make patties instead of using a sausage press and casing. It’ll give you a taste of sausage-making, before you decide whether you want to acquire the gear to make traditional links.

Ingredients:

• 7 lbs ground venison
• 3 lbs ground pork shoulder
• 4 tbsp salt
• 1 tbsp ground black pepper
• 3 tbsp dried sage
• 1 tbsp nutmeg
• 1 tbsp thyme
• 1 cup cold water

Directions:

1. Grind meat. The better the quality of meat used, the better your final sausages will be.
2. Place ground meat in a meat mixer, or container large enough to mix by hand. A plastic tote or cooler works well.
3. Sprinkle dry ingredients evenly over the meat and add the cold water. Mix thoroughly until the pork, venison, and spices are combined well and are uniform in appearance. It often takes 4 or 5 minutes if you’re doing it by hand, so be patient.
4. You can put the sausage meat into burger bags or tubes, allowing you to partially thaw and cut the sausage meat into ½-inch patties to fry up, or thaw the meat completely and form into patties or small burgers. No burger bags? No problem! Wrap your mixture in plastic wrap and then with butcher paper, so it is airtight to freeze. Simply form into handmade patties at time of use.

Tip: Most of the fresh fry sausages turn out the best with a fine to a medium grind. With a coarse grind, the chunks are often too big and may cause your sausages to crumble when you cut them. Looking for more tips? Check out our article on Sausage Making 101.