Hawaiian Venison Sausage

Continuing my international sausage making tour, my next creation is still American in its roots but transitions a little toward Italian. My dad, an Italian born Italian, caught a deer in Hawaii, provided some beautiful venison loin meat, and coached me through this one.

Hawaiian venison loin

The first trick to venison sausage is that 100% venison just won’t work. So dad also brought me some pork shoulder to include into the grind.

Pork shoulder

Wanting to put my own spin on it, I had a slab of guanciale in the fridge from my Adventure in Food. I used this as the fat source instead of using pork back fat.

guanciale - "face bacon" (Mario Batali's says this a lot on the twitters)

I chopped everything up for the grind.

And I ground it.

I chilled the meat while I got together my dry ingredients. Dad suggested to include the rind of a tangerine as well as red wine as the liquid to help meld the flavors. I wasn’t going to argue with that guy about that.

Did you ever hear the theory about how The Godfather was shot with an orange in the frame whenever someone was going to get killed?

So I got my dry ingredients together.

If I told you, I'd have to kill you.

After a good mix…

I made a tester patty.

Yikes. I really overdid it on the salt. I made a rookie error. I added the full amount of salt forgetting that the guanciale was salt cured. Oh well, my bad. Now I gotta eat a bunch of extra salty venison sausage. I will keep this in mind when I cook with it, as additional seasoning with salt will not be necessary.

The flavors were all excellent. After a day of melding, these were going to be incredible, albeit salty.

So I got to stuffing the sausage in natural hog casings. Even with the proper equipment, this wasn’t trivial. Cue the music.

I took a break in the middle to snap a picture of the process in progress.

Then I went back to it and finished it up.

Then I separated the sausage into smaller links by twisting the casing. It turns out that I overpacked the earlier ones, so I had a few break on me, but you don’t learn unless you make mistakes.

It is a lot of sausage, but I was giving some away, including some for dad, who made this all possible, and I was cooking with it the next day.

Hawaiian venison sausage with local mushroom ragout…coming soon!


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3 thoughts on “Hawaiian Venison Sausage

  • The Anti-Chef

    I am seriously covetting (coveting?) your meat grinder right now. I was gifted the kitchen-aid attachment and it’s “fine” for what I use it for.. but I’m looking to get more into making my own ground beef etc.. and of course, sausage.

    Yours looks very tasty.. I love the idea of the tangerine rind.


  • Dom-neck

    I tried this batch of sausage. It was salty as F, but other than that the flavor was pretty nice. I can’t wait to get that sausage maker.


  • mr.dave

    Haha, I had a few missteps of exactly this ilk when I started making sausage. The minute I saw the guanciale, I thought to myself — “this is going to end badly if he isn’t careful.” I used salted fat back once in a sausage recipe and the same thing happened.



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