Honestly, making venison breakfast sausage has allowed my family to utilize more venison that just about anything else I have made. Using the coarse grinding plate on my grinder I grind all the trim meat and carefully weigh it.
I realized in the list of equipment from the first Processing Game Yourself post I failed to include a kitchen scale, my current scale is from Harbor Freight. When utilizing the various commercial sausage or jerky kits, having the ability to precisely weigh the meat and measure seasonings is essential to a quality final product. A kitchen scale is critical, it doesn't have to be fancy but get one and use it frequently. I separate the ground meat into 5lb portions and place them in gallon freezer bags then put them in the freezer. I generally wait until after hunting season to process everything that I make from the ground meat. In the above picture on the right I have 51lbs of ground venison, 18lbs of ground pronghorn, and 18lbs of ground pork.
Venison breakfast sausage is best when mixed with pork or pork fat. The exact ratio will need to be determined through trial and error to match your tastes. I have used venison to pork ratios as low as 5:1 (pounds venison to pounds pork) and as high as 1:1. My family prefers a ratio somewhere on the higher side so I like to target a ratio of at least 2:1. I ask my wife to buy several of the “fattiest” pork roasts that she can find on “Manager’s Special” at the local grocery store and run them through the grinder using the course plate and portion the pork in the same manner as the venison in 5lb gallon freezer bags until I have time to mix the sausage. Some grocery stores will have straight pork fat available around the holidays, I haven't been able to find any at my local grocer but I haven't really looked that hard... straight pork fat can reduce the venison:pork ratio or produce an end product that isn't as lean.
I have had excellent results with the Hi Mountain Country Maple Breakfast Sausage kit… in fact I prefer the Hi Mountain brand over just about every brand out there & use their products almost exclusively. Each breakfast sausage kit yields 24 pounds of finished product so I set out the appropriate amount of ground venison and pork to thaw. This year I had a little seasoning left over from last year so I made 25 pounds of maple breakfast sausage and used 3 bags of ground venison (15lbs) and 2 bags of ground pork (10lbs). I have found that adding a little extra seasoning helps bring out that maple flavor, I had read reviews on these types of products that mixing by the manufacturer's instructions yields a mild to weak flavor so I've always gone a little heavy on seasoning for a stronger flavor.
I mix in the sausage seasoning and cure by hand, it’s a great arm and hand workout with frequent breaks to let my hands warm up enough for feeling to return to fingertips before plunging them back into the pot to continue mixing. Always, always, always mix the seasonings and cures into ground meats that are cold! Once all the dry seasonings are incorporated into the meat I dump it all out onto the counter and knead it like a big batch of bread dough, the kids enjoy getting in on this part. After several minutes of mixing the sausage is ready to be weighed out into 1 pound portions, placed in freezer bags, and put in the freezer. The kids like the breakfast sausage so much that I don’t bother packaging it any further beyond freezer bags… it’s never in the freezer long enough to worry about freezer burn.
My kids have been waiting for months for this latest batch of breakfast sausage so that Mom can finally make biscuits and gravy again... scratch made biscuits w/ venison sausage country gravy... it's just that good. When cooking the breakfast sausage my wife has found it to be very lean so she will take a generous scoop of bacon grease (the same bacon grease that she saves for me when I smoke a roast) and brown the sausage in bacon grease. Initially we would cut patties from the 1lb sausage logs but now we don’t go to that trouble and we just brown it into large-ish chunks and serve it as sausage "crumbles" with scrambled eggs and French toast/pancakes/waffles.
This year, since I ended up with 3 deer and had plenty of ground venison to experiment with some new seasonings, I decided to try the chorizo flavored breakfast sausage from Hi Mountain. I wanted to do something a little different than the 1lb bags so I purchased some LEM brand sheep casings from Amazon to make breakfast links.
I mixed up 12lbs of chorizo flavored sausage with a 7lbs ground venison and 5lbs ground pork ratio. I mixed the pork and venison ground well by hand, added the seasoning and cure, then ran it through the course grind plate again just to ensure it was well mixed. From there I put the seasoned meat into the sausage stuffer and filled the casings. I hadn’t worked with natural casings in a long time but I found them very easy to work with, in fact I would consider them easier to work with than the collagen casings I use for snack sticks.
With all the casings filled I divided them into 4 to 5 inch links, portioned them out, and vacuum sealed them before putting them in the freezer. I portioned the sausage links into several “family packs” that contained 16 links (in my family that's 2 links/person), several “regular packs” that contain 8 links that I can share with my family and friends, and couple packages of the odd length ends. The only challenge I faced with preparing the chorizo breakfast sausage links was that I overfilled a couple of the casings and it was difficult to make some of the links without bursting the casing. I’m happy with the end result visually, I’ll have to report back on how they cook up and taste. It was a fun process to stuff the casings and something new that we can try this year.
I have completely modified how I butcher deer because my family enjoys it so much. To ensure there is enough ground venison to make it I haven't cut roasts from a front quarter in years… all the trim and the entire front quarters of every deer I’ve got for the last several years has been ground to ensure I have enough for breakfast sausage. If you end up with a bunch of unused meat at the end of the year in the bottom of your freezer or tire of the standard ground venison uses… try making some breakfast sausage to utilize it.
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