Sausage, it's what god created deer for.

My father was an avid hunter.  Growing up, at least half of our meals consisted of something we caught or killed.  Over the winter, we would harvest on average three or four deer, which would stock the freezer for the rest of the year.  We always had the deer professionally processed, and always had the processor make sausage.  In Laredo during the early 80's your only choices were a lightly smoked link sausage, breakfast sausage, or chorizo.  This is probably the case today, but I could be wrong.  I haven't shot a deer in over 20 years, but I am still a big fan of venison, especially venison sausage.

My brother-in-law has recently gotten into hunting.  He doesn't cook much, so for the past couple of years, he has given me all the venison I could handle.  He doesn't bother getting it processed, he just does it himself, which means the portions I get, are huge primal cuts...entire legs and such.  This weekend I decided it was high time I dealt with one of the rear legs that was taking up room in my freezer.  It was time to make some sausage.

A 12 pound leg of venison takes some time to bone out and cut up.  There is a lot of silver skin and tendon that you need to remove before grinding it, otherwise you will wind up with odd gristly bits in your sausage.  Also, since all I have is a rather puny meat grinder attachment for my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, I needed the meat in strips no more than an inch wide.  It took me a good 30 minutes of effort to get the leg above to look like this.

One of the advantages of making sausage at home, is you know exactly what is going into it.  If you are a health conscious person, you may be tempted to take advantage of the fact that venison is nearly fat free to make a very lean sausage.   You can actually get away with this if you are just making chorizo, but you will need to add a fair amount of oil when cooking it if you do.   When it comes to link sausage, let me tell you, don't skimp on the fat.  It will be dry and disappointing.  You need at least 20 percent fat in your final mix to have a nice juicy sausage.  That may sound like a lot, but many recipes push the fat content up over 30 percent, so relatively speaking, it's still pretty lean.  I purchased a quarter of a pork belly from a vendor at the farmers market to provide the fat for this round of sausage making, but in the past I have just used pork fat, which you can buy at markets such as Fiesta.  I cut that into strips as well.  I had a nice chunk left over which I roasted up for dinner but that's another story.

After boning out the leg, I ended up with nine pounds of venison.   Since pork belly is not pure fat, I used three pounds of pork belly to get me into the ball park of the 20 percent fat content I was shooting for.  The venison and belly then went through my grinder.  For this round of sausage making I was planning on making three types, chorizo, a riff on merguez, and an Italian sausage.  For the Italian sausage, I would need some pancetta, so I ground up a pound of that as well.

Once I had my three piles of ground meat portioned out, I seasoned them up.  Chorizo sausage is seasoned with a lot of ancho chile powder, some spices, and good amount of cider vinegar.  It needs three to five days of curing to develop the proper flavor, so after seasoning it, I covered it up and put it in the fridge.

The merguez and Italian sausage were both going to be stuffed into sausage casings, but they could also benefit from some curing time, so I also stashed them in my fridge over night to allow the flavor to develop before stuffing.  The next day, I attached the sausage stuffing attachment on my stand mixer and went to work.  (possibly NSFW photos below)

Typically, I place six or seven link portions in vacuum bags and freeze it.  With 12 pounds of sausage, what else are you going to do?  I have a Foodsaver vacuum sealing machine and it works very well.  You can store it in regular zip top freezer bags, but after a few months, it will start to get freezer burn.  Vacuumed, it will keep it for over six months with no problems.

A few days later, after it had cured sufficiently, I dealt with the chorizo.  Although one could stuff chorizo into casings, you always remove them before cooking it, so there isn't much of a point.  Instead, I wrap five to six ounce portions of the stuff in  plastic wrap, then store those in a large zip top bag in the freezer.  Packaged this way, it's very easy to pull out and thaw just enough for breakfast.  The plastic wrap also does an excellent job of keeping freezer burn at bay, so vacuum sealing is not necessary.

In terms of recipes, I found the merguez recipe on-line.  The Italian sausage was based on a recipe from a Mario Batali book, and the chorizo was from Diana Kennedy's The Cuisines of Mexico.  In each case, I just replaced the pork and pork fat or in the case of the merguez, lamb and lamb fat, called for with an equal amount by weight of my 80/20 ground venison mix.  If there is interest, I will type up the recipes.