Recipes

Bear Summer Sausage

Bear makes a genuinely great summer sausage — dark, dense, a little sweeter and richer than venison — but bear is the one game meat where the safety note comes BEFORE the recipe, not after. Bear carries Trichinella and Toxoplasma, and unlike the pork you buy, you cannot freeze a bear sausage safe. It has to be COOKED to a verified 160°F internal, every time. Read the safety note first. Then it's a tangy, sliceable, semi-dry summer sausage in a fibrous casing, the way I make it with my deer.

Sausage · Game · Summer · Smoked

Bear Summer Sausage
Prep 1 hour, plus a 24–72 h cure
Cook 6–8 hours
Serves About 6 lb / 2.7 kg — several chubs
Level Hard

Bear makes a genuinely great summer sausage — dark, dense, a little sweeter and richer than venison — but bear is the one game meat where the safety note comes BEFORE the recipe, not after. Bear carries Trichinella and Toxoplasma, and unlike the pork you buy, you cannot freeze a bear sausage safe. It has to be COOKED to a verified 160°F internal, every time. Read the safety note first. Then it’s a tangy, sliceable, semi-dry summer sausage in a fibrous casing, the way I make it with my deer.

Ingredients

MEAT BLOCK (2,720 g / 6 lb)

  • 1,810 g (4 lb) bear meat, trimmed hard — ~67%
  • 910 g (2 lb) pork back fat or fatty pork shoulder — ~33%

SEASONING

  • 48 g salt (~1.8%)
  • 6.8 g Cure #1 (156 ppm on the block — REQUIRED)
  • 6 g coarse black pepper
  • 8 g whole mustard seed
  • 6 g fresh garlic, minced
  • 5 g dextrose (feeds the ferment / tang)
  • 3 g whole coriander
  • Optional: 5 g Fermento or a T-SPX starter for a real fermented tang
  • 60 mm fibrous casing, pre-stuck, soaked 30 min in warm water

Directions

  1. Read the safety note below before anything else. Bear is not pork.
  2. Cure: mix meat, fat, salt, Cure #1 and seasoning; hold 24–72 h refrigerated so the cure penetrates (or ferment at 70°F if using a starter).
  3. Grind: cold, a 1/4” (6 mm) plate for summer-sausage texture, bear and pork fat together.
  4. Mix to a firm, tacky bind — cold throughout (Vevor mixer, parts frozen).
  5. Stuff: into 60 mm fibrous casing, soaked and pre-stuck, closed with a hog ring and pliers. Pack it firm; no air pockets.
  6. Smoke and cook low: start the smoker ~120°F for the first drying hour, dampers open, no water pan, then climb slowly over hickory — 140°F, 160°F, up to 170–180°F chamber — over 6–8 hours.
  7. 🔴 Cook to a VERIFIED 160°F internal and hold it there. This is the kill step for Trichinella, and with bear it is non-negotiable. Probe the center of the fattest chub, not the smoker air.
  8. Finish: ice-water shower 20 minutes, hang to bloom, then refrigerate. Slice cold.

Notes

🔴 THE SAFETY NOTE — read it, this is the one that matters. Bear (and wild boar) carry Trichinella and often Toxoplasma gondii. Two things follow, and both are different from pork:

  1. Freezing does NOT make bear safe. The Arctic and sylvatic Trichinella strains in bear are freeze-resistant — the freezing rules that work for commercial pork do not apply. Do not rely on your freezer.
  2. The only reliable kill step is heat: a verified 160°F / 71°C internal temperature. Cook every bear sausage to that, measured with a probe in the center, no exceptions. That’s why this summer sausage is smoked-and-cooked, not air-dried and eaten raw like a salami — a raw-eaten dry-cured bear sausage is genuinely dangerous, and I don’t make one.

Everything else. Bear fat is edible but soft and strong; trim most of it and carry hard pork back fat instead. The recipe takes wild boar identically — and the same trichinosis rules apply to boar. For a milder result, drop the mustard and coriander and treat it as a straight smoked bear sausage.