Sausage, Chorizo, Wild Game

Ingredients

• 4 lbs deer, elk etc.
• 1 lb pork fat
• ½ cup vinegar

½ cup red wine

• 1 white onion, minced
• 1 cup cilantro, finely chopped
• ¼ cup minced garlic (it’s ok to use the garlic that’s packed in olive oil in a jar)
• 8 tablespoons red chile powder
• 4 tablespoons smoked paprika
• 4 tablespoons dried oregano
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon ground cloves
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon salt

Directions

1. Make sure you are working with known quantities of meat and fat. I used to eyeball my sausage recipes and the results were inconsistent. A good meat scale allows you to easily halve or double recipes and exactly repeat the results of a good recipe. While this recipe is for chorizo the basic process described below is the same for most sausage making.
2. Start out by grinding the pork fat through a coarse grinding plate into a meat tub.
3. Push the fat to the back of the tub and grind the meat through the coarse plate into the same tub.
4. Now add all the ingredients to the tub and mix thoroughly by hand. It takes time to thoroughly distribute the meat, fat and all the ingredients.
5. Once the sausage is mixed, place the second empty meat tub under the grinder. Now you need to do a second grind on the mixed sausage. I use the coarse plate for the second grind but some people prefer a finer grind, If so, switch to a medium plate.
6. If you want to make links for smoking, attach a stuffing tube and grind directly into hog casings.
7. Bulk sausage needs to be packaged and frozen. Normally, I prefer plastic wrap and butcher paper for packaging game meat, but for bulk sausage, I either use a stuffer attachment on the grinder that allows me to grind directly into plastic bags designed to hold one pound of ground meat or I weigh out one pound of sausage, and then bag and vacuum seal it.
8. Don’t forget to label and date each package of sausage.