I make snack sticks from ground deer meat, I have tried ground pronghorn and elk but for some reason the ground deer has always turned out best for me. I use 100% ground deer with no added pork or fat and prefer the hickory flavored kit from Hi Mountain. The kit includes everything you will need to produce the snack sticks… seasoning, cure, and casings. In general, the kits provide far more casings than what the seasonings can make so I hang onto them and save them for future use, I’m currently on the third year of my current bag of casings. The actual seasoning and cure is no different between the jerky kits and the snack stick kits, so since I have casings I just buy the jerky kits for less than half the price.
I grind the deer meat through the course plate on my grinder and then again through the fine plate. This gives a smooth consistency and helps me get good distribution of the seasoning and cure just like when I make the jerky. There is one fundamental difference between the jerky and snack sticks… if you recall I would mix the seasoning and cure in the meat for jerky and then put the meat back in a baggie and refrigerate it overnight to allow the cure to work it’s magic, but with the snack sticks as soon as the meat starts becoming sticky when mixing in the seasoning and cure I begin stuffing the meat into the casings.
Stuffing the casings takes some planning and preparation for me. The smoker that I use is a charcoal grill with a side smoker box so I cut casing lengths specifically to fit within my smoker. I tie an overhand knot in one end of the casings and I will feed each casing onto the stuffer tube one length at a time.
The first couple years that I made the snack sticks I used the stuffer tubes with my grinder. It worked well enough but I found that as the cure began to work in the meat it got very difficult to get the meat to feed down the neck of the grinder. I made due with what I had but the process was time consuming. I decided to purchase a simple sausage stuffer that has dramatically increased my efficiency in getting the casings stuffed.
Once the casings are stuffed I place them in the fridge overnight before smoking them. I don’t have the temperature controls that many of the current smokers on the market have, so I smoke the snack sticks initially for about an hour but finish them in the oven to ensure that they are completely cooked. After about an hour on the smoker I transition the snack sticks into a 200 degree oven for two hours. The quick change from the smoker to the oven is worth it, having the smokey flavor makes the snack sticks just that much better.
Once the snack sticks have completely cooked, I remove them from the oven and place them immediately into an ice water bath. This is the most recent tip I picked up from some YouTube videos and I think that it causes the casings to shrink up quickly around the meat and stops the cooking process. The result for me was a very smooth casing on the snack sticks where in the past they may have wrinkled a bit. I don’t think that it did anything in terms of flavor, but I do think that it did improve the visual aesthetics of the finished product. I’ll probably make this step a normal part of the process.
Once the snack sticks have cooled in the ice water bath I cut the knots off the ends of the casings and cut the snack sticks into the desired lengths. This is purely personal preference and I usually cut them into 4.5 to 5” sticks then vacuum seal them using the Seal-a-Meal vacuum sealer.
The summer sausage follows almost the exact same process just on a larger scale. The instructions in the Hi Mountain summer sausage kit outlines using a 4:1 venison to pork ratio and I planned on making 15lbs of summer sausage so I used a mixture of 12lbs ground venison to 3lbs ground pork. I ground all the meat once through a course grind plate and then again through a fine plate for a good smooth consistency.
Once the seasoning and cure were mixed well into the meat I immediately began stuffing the casings. I used the larger 2” fibrous casing which actually stuffed much easier than the small snack stick casings. Each casing holds approximately 3lbsb and I was able to stuff all 15lbs of meat into five casings very quickly. I refrigerated the summer sausage overnight before cooking. The instructions are very specific on how to manipulate the smoker properly to get the best results so I had to improvise a bit because I don’t have a whole lot of control over my smoker. I started the summer sausage out in the oven on the lowest temperature it would go and kept an eye on them for about an hour until the surface of the casings was dry and a bit tacky to the touch. Once the surface of the casings were dry I moved them over to the smoker for about 4 hours. From there I moved them back to the oven and finished cooking them at 180 degrees until the internal temperature reached 156 degrees.
Like I said before, this was my first attempt at making summer sausage and it was honestly shocking just how good the end product was. On Christmas day, when my in-laws came over I had a plate of sliced summer sausage, cheese, and crackers… when they left there was a plate of cheese and crackers left of the counter. Then I took some over to my family and shared with them. My dad tried a piece and his response was, “I could eat a lot of this… like a lot of this.”
Processing my own game has allowed me to try many new things and developed into a very enjoyable hobby. I take pride in making a high quality end product that can be enjoyed by many throughout the year. I especially enjoy it when somebody tries something I have made and they tell me that they would have never guessed it was made from game meat. I hope that you have enjoyed this series on Processing Game Yourself and if you do not already process some or all of your own game meat I would encourage you to give it a try.
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