A Look Ahead
If I was looking to find a new blog or resource online I would be asking myself “Why should I listen to them?” So here is when I skip ahead in the story and recount two hectic nights in the household that took place a few weeks ago!
With busy schedules during the 2017 hunting season my brother J and I took the easy route and packaged our sausage meat in 9 lb bags of rough grind. This seemed like a great idea because just the seasoning and stuffing would need to be done once we had the time.
Well, in smaller scales this could be quite manageable; however, between the two of us we had pre packaged 120 lbs of rough grind venison. 2017 was a break through year for us, we filled a combined 6 deer tags! And we had to purchase another freezer to house it all (not a bad problem to have!).
We decided that a Tuesday and Wednesday evening would work best so that we could bring some of the meat with us camping that weekend. With J having to work during the day we begun at 6 pm on Tuesday night, running all the meat through the grinder with the fine grind plate and stashing it in 30 lb bins.
In previous years, we had hand mixed all of our spices which works well enough but with one very big drawback, nearly frozen meat and ice water spices make for a painful experience for your hands.
So, hoping that we would have more meat this season we picked up a 30lb meat mixer that could run on our Cabelas grinder or be used manually. This turned out to be a saviour as we could not imagine having to hand mix 120 lbs of meat!
Next up was deciding what to make. We chose pepperoni, summer sausage (2 types) and smokies.
Being fairly new to the curing and sausage making we still find success using pre-packaged kits but substitute pig casings for our smokies.
I will do an individual write up on each of the kits we have used for reference later but here are two of them.
By 11pm Tuesday night we had 40 lbs of Farmer’s 
Sausage Smokies stuffed, linked, dried, and ready to be vacuum sealed. I packaged another 20 lbs of fine grind into 1 lb bags for burger and taco meat as I was running low. For the summer sausage, we had 20 lbs of Jalapéno and 20 lbs of Country Style stuffed and curing overnight in the fridge. 20 lbs of pepperoni in coils rounded out the night and, like the summer sausage, was curing overnight before being added to the smoker to finish off.
It was well after midnight once all the clean up was done with the processing equipment. The grinder, stuffer, mixer, multiple bins, and mixing bowls all are great tools that make the actual processing much quicker but definitely increase the cleaning time!
The next day it was time to fire up the pellet grill for the pepperoni sticks and some of the summer sausage. I used the standard convection oven to do the majority of the summer sausage.
2 hours in the smoker for each batch ( two total) and then came the fun part, tasting the two types of summer sausage and the pepperoni sticks. There was a little apprehension, as this was the first year we had tried summer sausage and we had used a different brand for the pepperoni. Spoiler alert, we were blown away and I had to hide the pepperoni from the GF (and I might have to put a lock on the freezer to keep it from disappearing too soon).
It took another hour and a half to portion out the pepperoni and summer sausage into useable packages and vacuum seal them for the freezer!
This turned out to be so successful we plan to use the same kits next year and increase the amount of pepperoni we make (by A LOT). We still need to make our jerky for our hunting/hiking snacks. Our go-to flavour is garlic pepper on the smoker.. but stay tuned for that post!
Hope this inspires you to continue to learn and try new techniques with your wild game! If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and I will answer them as best I can!
-R
