Wild Turkey Italian Sausage

A wild turkey is nothing like the butterball in the store — the breast is dense, dark-edged, and almost totally lean, and if you roast it you get shoe leather. Ground into an Italian sausage with plenty of pork fat, that same lean breast becomes something excellent: fennel-forward, coarse, exactly what you want crumbled into a red sauce or a pot of greens. The legs are all tendon and best saved for stock, so this is a breast-meat sausage. Lean bird, so the fat and a light hand at the stove are everything.

Ingredients

MEAT BLOCK (2,270 g / 5 lb)

• 1,470 g (3.25 lb) wild turkey breast, skinned and trimmed — ~65%
• 800 g (1.75 lb) pork back fat or fatty pork shoulder — ~35% (wild turkey is almost pure lean; go generous on the fat)

SEASONING (sweet Italian)

• 41 g salt (1.8%)
• 9 g fennel seed, lightly cracked
• 6 g coarse black pepper
• 8 g fresh garlic, minced
• 4 g paprika
• 2 g dried oregano
• 120 ml (½ cup) dry red wine, cold (or ice water)
• For hot: add 6 g crushed red pepper
• NO cure — fresh sausage
• Bulk, or 32 mm hog casing

Directions

1. Grind cold: turkey and pork fat near-frozen, through a 1/4” (6 mm) plate for a coarse Italian texture.
2. Mix: seasoning and the cold wine to a tacky bind — cold the whole time.
3. Bulk or link: leave it loose for red sauce and pizza, or stuff 32 mm hog casing.
4. Rest overnight so the fennel and garlic bloom.
5. Cook gently — this is the part that saves a wild bird: lean turkey overcooks in seconds and turns dry and grainy. Brown it in a little olive oil, pull it the moment it’s cooked through, and let the residual heat finish it. A fatty pork Italian forgives overcooking; this does not.

Notes

Domestic turkey works too — and if you’re using store turkey, use thigh, not breast, for more forgiveness and flavor. But wild turkey breast, with the fat carried in, actually beats the domestic bird here: the meat is denser and more flavorful, and the sausage format hides the leanness that ruins a roast.

The fat is the whole recipe, again. At 35% pork fat this is on the fatty end of my game sausages, on purpose — wild turkey is drier than venison, and the extra fat is the only thing keeping it juicy.

Pheasant, grouse, and other upland birds take this same treatment. Any lean game bird plus a third pork fat plus a coarse Italian seasoning lands somewhere good.