Recipe: How to Make Summer Sausage
If you’ve been deer hunting for any number of years, you’ve likely had your fair share of venison summer sausage. Usually stuffed into five pound sleeves of dark colored collagen casing and served in slices, alongside beer, cheese and crackers, this cured meat staple is an ubiquitous site in deer camps across the United States.
What is Summer Sausage?
Frequently prepared in butcher shops and small scale wild game processing plants, the roots of summer sausage as a foodway can traced back to pre-industrial Germany where it was developed—alongside a host of other charcuterie techniques—to extended the shelf life of precious protein, hence the food’s German name, Somerwurst, which translates to English as Summer sausage.
Odds are you’ve had summer sausage, either from a local butcher shop, processor or one of the big maker’s like Wisconsin-based Johnsonville, but making it at home can save you significant money and lets you to tailor the ingredient list to fit a flavor profile that aligns with you pallet.
Like any form of charcuterie, summer sausage making is a craft that requires patience and precision, but the rewarding results ensure that every second of the process is time well spent.
Ingredients
4 lbs ground Venison
3 lbs ground pork back fat, domestic or wild
Ground Mustard Seed— 1 tablespoon
Coarsely ground black pepper—1 tablespoon
Salt —1 tablespoon
Sugar—1 tablespoon
Granulated Garlic—1 tablespoon
Marjoram —1 tablespoon
Crushed Corriander—1 tablespoon
Insta Cure—1.5 teaspoons
One 12 oz bottle of ice cold amber ale
Optional: 20 large jalapeno peppers
Procedure
Mixing
Run venison and pork back fat through a grinder with a medium die.
Add spices, cure, and cold beer to the meat and mix thoroughly. If using a standard stand mixer, mix the meat-spice mixture in two batches taking care to distribute spices and beer evenly throughout each individual batch.
If mixing by hand, use a tub large enough to contain the entire meat mixture, or a batch, without becoming overly crowded. And remember, properly mixing sausage by hand is a labor intensive process, so if you’re not worn out by the time you’re finished, it probably isn’t mixed thoroughly enough.
Once the sausage is mixed, place it in mixing bowl, cover with a kitchen towel and the whole thing aside in the refrigerator to cure for 24-48 hours.
Note: Some recipes suggest pulling your sausage mix out halfway through the curing process and mixing again to ensure thorough distribution of the insta cure. This step is more important for those mixing their summer sausage by hand.
Optional: If you want to add some heat to your sausage, consider throwing some fire roasted jalapeños into the mix. Use about 20 large jalapeños for a 7 lb batch, slice them in halves down the middle, deseed, douse in olive oil and charr under your oven’s broiler until the skin begins to darken and blister. Throw the roasted peppers into a food processor and add to your sausage mixture at the same time you mix in the spices and beer. You can use just about any spicy chili pepper you’d prefer. You can also add finely diced chunks of cheese to the mix.
Stuffing the Summer Sausage
Once the meat mixture has cured in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours it’s time to stuff your summer sausage. For this step I used 1 lb sleeves of “hard collagen casings” because that’s what I was able to find at my local sporting goods big box. It’s not uncommon to see much larger sleeves that can hold up to 5 lbs of sausage. Whichever size you choose, make sure to soak the casings for at least an hour before hand. This rehydrates the collagen, making it easier to work with.
In the absence of a proper sausage stuffer and a big enough stuffing tube attachment for my grinder, I actually stuffed the casing by hand, but either of the aforementioned tools would make the process significantly more efficient.
Either way, you’ll want to have some butcher twine on hand to tie the end of the casings off once you’re done stuffing.
Smoking the Summer Sausage
Once the sausage is stuffed, it’s time to add some smoke. You can use a wood pellet grill like a Traeger, an electric smoker or a hand make smoke house in your backyard. The important thing is to hot smoke the summer sausage around 180-220 degrees F to internal temp of about 160. Go any hotter than 220 and you risk rendering your pork fat out of the sausage. When this happens the fat will tend to accumulate between the casing and the meat instead remaining evenly incorporated throughout the finished sausage.
When you’ve hit the desired internal temp—some sausage makers are content with an internal temp as low as 140 while others will not pull the sausage from the smoker until it hits and even 165— immediately submerge the sausage in a tub of ice water. This will halt the cooking process, encouraging the pork fat to set up while it’s still evenly distributed throughout the finished sausage.
After the sausage soaks in ice water for 20-30 minutes, hang it up to dry in a cool, dry place for a few hours. After this step, the sausage is finally complete and ready to serve. It can be kept in the refrigerator, or, thanks to the curing process, out at ambient temp where it will keep for several months. I can’t guarantee, however, that a batch this size will last longer than a few weeks.
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