Like most people in the firearms space, my interests are varied and sometimes wildly unrelated. While this certainly keeps life flavorful, it occupies my time to the point that I have to decide how I spend it.
With that in mind, I only have time to truly focus on what’s important, like managing my health, relationships, and finances. Doing something like spending months to perfect the perfect venison sausage would mean I’d be forced to miss a few fishing trips, work opportunities, and time at the gym (which is always the first to go).
However, this skill has remained on my list for close to a decade, making it hard to ignore. Hi Mountain Seasoning gets it, as the folks behind their products are in the same boat.
Continually walking past their kits at places like Bass Pro Shops this year, I finally decided to pull the trigger, as I spent the months prior in a tree stand doing just that on a more literal basis.
Hi Mountain Eliminates the Guesswork
Prior to taking the plunge, I read about the sausage-making process with a fair bit of intensity. There were more than enough variables in the seasoning options alone to scare a recipe book right out of my hands.
Decisions needed to be made regarding case types, spice blends, curing vs. not, and so on. Get some of these wrong, and you’ve just wasted a significant portion of your harvest, or at the very least, turned it into high-quality dog food.
One of the benefits of taking the MHS kit route is that the most important decisions have been made for you. What you are left with is a simple set of instructions, pre-blended spice packs, the correct type and amount of casings, and even a little room to make each your own.
The instruction card specifies the ratio of ingredients based on the amount of sausage you want to end up with, and, to make things easier, every type follows a nearly identical process. Unpacking the box, you’ll find:
Ingredients You Will Need for Homemade Sausage
- Seasoning
- Cure
- Casings
- Citric Acid (for sausage types intended to be dry-aged)
Gearing Up for the Grind
Most sausage requires a mix of meats that are ground together, which means that you’ll need a food grinder. Once your recipe is ready to be packed into a casing, you’ll need a sausage stuffer as well.
Investing in this equipment can make this a non-starter, as it’s hard to buy things you’ll only use potentially once. While there’s no real way to sidestep this unfortunate fact of life, spending that money on something that’ll see more use makes it easier to swallow. If you don’t already own a KitchenAid stand mixer, you’re missing out.
Fifteen years in the restaurant industry proved these to be the epitome of buy once, cry once, and watching them work day in and day out without fail makes it an easy place to spend some money.
While they are exceptional at combining ingredients, their true value comes in their expansion system. Removing the front cap allows you to access the motor, enabling it to perform a plethora of tasks with low-cost attachments.
In short, if you have a KitchenAid mixer, you’re in good shape. Aside from that, a set of non-metallic mixing bowls is all you need to get started.
How To Make Sausage: Equipment
- KitchenAid Artisan Mixer
- KitchenAid Food Grinder Attachment
- KitchenAid Sausage Stuffer Kit
- Mixing Bowl Kit
How To Make Sausage: The Process
Making a batch of sausage takes about an entire weekend, so adjust your schedule to allot enough time. That’s not to say you’re going to be laboring for two days straight; it’s just that some of the processes require lengthy downtime.
To that end, it’s a good idea to make a few different types together, which is exactly what we did. With more than a dozen sausage kits to choose from, we went with the German Sausage, Spicy Beer Bratwurst, Summer Sausage Variety pack, and the Pepperoni, which is the newest of the bunch.
Step 1: Grind the Meat Base
Depending on what you’re making, the ratio of meats involved will change. Most regard venison as being too lean, making it dry to the palate. Adding a fatty meat, like pork shoulder or bacon, remedies this and expands the flavor profile.
For all of our sausages, I blended whitetail deer with feral hog, which I found keeps the sausage lean without making it too dry to hold its form when cut.
Weighing out what I needed from each, I chunked it and ran it through the grinder with the coarse blade.
Alternating type helps to evenly mix the two meats for a uniform sausage.
Step 2: Season the Meat
With your meat ground, it's now time to add the seasoning and the cure. The curing process is interesting, and in some cases, optional. Comprised of salt, sugar, and sodium nitrate, it is part flavoring and part preservative.
It is advised to use the cure if you plan on using a slower cooking process (like smoking) to finish the product. However, if you are immediately going to pan-fry your sausage, you don’t have to use it.
This yields a milder sausage, like bratwurst, and substantially cuts down on time. As I not only like my sausage bold-flavored, but also planned on smoking it, I included it in all of these sausages.
In doing so, it’s important not to use a metal container, as the cure reacts with this material, ruining both it and the meat in one fell swoop. The instructions dictate how much of each package must be mixed together before being worked into the meat with any other ingredients.
Most of the sausages called for water, but this can be substituted for other liquids, like beer. Once the final ingredients are added, the mix must be refrigerated overnight to allow the cure to work.
Step 3: Casing Prep
Each kit will include the appropriate style of casing, and let you know how much you can expect from each.
The cases for the summer sausage and pepperoni are dried, whereas the cases for the others are packed in a salty solution. Either way, they’ll need some time in a bath before they can be used.
If you plan on dry aging, this would be the time to add the citric acid to the meat mix. Filling the cases with water several times makes them easier to work with, while making them less prone to breakage when stuffing, so it’s worth the extra effort.
Step 4: Stuffing the Casing
The KitchenAid stuffer kit includes two sizes, so I went with the larger for ease. Having a second person for this step helps immensely, as one can feed the stuffer while the other works the sausage.
The goal here is to pack the meat in tightly, without being so tight that you cannot twist your finished sausage into links. It’s a delicate dance, and likely the only part of the process that takes some skill to complete.
Step 5: Cooking Your Sausage
I labeled this step “cooking” instead of “smoking” because you have a few options here. Again, if you like things mild, you can simply finish your sausages in an oven, unburdening the spices with the essence of smoke.
We live for smoked sausage around here, so that would be blasphemy in our house.
I chose a pellet smoker for the final task, but regardless of how you do it, Hi Mountain outlines the process very well. The first step is to dry them for the first hour, using the lowest heat setting possible on either your smoker or oven.
Then, in small intervals, increase the heat until you reach roughly 180 degrees. Once the sausages reach an internal temperature of 156 degrees, they are finished. There are minor differences with each type that you make, but I found that they were subtle enough that we could cook them all together.
After about four hours, we cut into them and wound up with excellent results across the board.
How To Serve Your Homemade Sausage
Although laborious, it pays to remember that sausages are the ultimate quick meal. So, time spent on the grinder is borrowed from time spent over the stove. For those “going keto,” few low-carb meals are as flavorful as fresh brats over a bed of sauerkraut.
If you have a little room in your diet for starch, substituting that for mashed potatoes only makes it better. Products like the pepperoni or summer sausages are perfect for on-the-go snacking that, thanks to the wild game, are inherently low in fat.
They also make for a charcuterie board that is anything but ordinary.
Storing Your Sausage
Tasting each variety “for science,” my wife Barbara and I were impressed with just how well each came out. The sausages remained intact during the cooking process, and the flavor was exactly what we expected with each one we tried.
This was also the first time I had eaten pepperoni that wasn’t dry-aged, and I was a big fan. I liked its less-acidic nature, coupled with the instant gratification of being able to eat it immediately.
Realizing that we were riding this success on the backs of the culinary masters at Hi Mountain Seasoning, I appreciate this product line for what it does, and more importantly, what it delivers.
Taking away the task of perfecting a sausage recipe leaves more time on the table for the things that matter; now I just need to convince myself to get to the gym.
Sausage Making Tips and Tricks
While the nature of these easy-to-use kits sounds quite pedestrian, there is still a little bit of room to build and apply some skill. Here are some tips that I learned on my very first go-around.
Don’t Be Afraid to Adjust Spices
Hi Mountain states in the literature that you’re free to adjust the amount of spice you decide to use. You can also add some of your favorite ingredients to be creative. Fresh garlic, pepper, or fennel come to mind to make each recipe your own.
Be Patient
The most frustrating part of the process was stuffing everything into cases. I found that lubricating the stuffer spout with some cooking spray made it much easier to load, as did taking my time when filling. A
ir bubbles will happen; using a safety pin to pop them has zero effect on the finished product.
Refrigerate Your Grinder Instead of Cleaning it Twice
Grinders are a bear to clean, which is why I only like to do it once. At the end of day one, instead of taking it apart, I put it in a bag and put it in the fridge.
This saved me the chore of taking it apart and picking meat out of every nook and cranny just to dirty it again a few hours later.
