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.

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.

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.

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.

So I got my dry ingredients together.

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!