Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Adventures in sausage-making

 A week ago, or so, my hubby said to me something along the lines of "Hey, you wanna try making our own venison sticks?" 

"Sure!" I said, "That could be fun!" And we have all the equipment for making venison sticks.  

Venison sticks ... the whole family loves them.  

And, if we make them ourselves we get to control the amount of seasoning and heat in them.  

See, my boys like the venison sticks with more heat in them than I do.  I have a delicate palate and stomach.  So, not as much jalapeno's and peppers in a batch for me. 

Well, we got everything ready for making venison sticks.  The venison was mixed up with seasoning and jalapeños and peppers from our own garden. 

We made a trip up to Fleet Farm to get some casings and we were set. 

Until we discovered our meat grinder didn't have the proper plate for running meat through that doesn't need to be ground. 

Ugh! 

We made calls to all the stores we could think of that might have these plates.  No luck. 

My hubby did some research and we ordered a sausage maker off of Amazon.  Surprise, surprise, it showed up in record time and we made some sausages!  It was a smaller batch, just to get the hang of it.  

Then it was decided we needed a bigger smoker so we could smoke a larger amount of sausages at a time. 

Back to the drawing board. Sort of. 

It was decided to try a propane smoker.  

Someone has been having fun seeing all that the smoker can do. 

The results have been delicious! 

This is a portion of what we have craft (created?) so far. Yum! Gallon-sized bags with pounds and pounds of delicious venison sticks in each one. 




2 comments:

Angelfire212 said...

"Give a hunter a venison stick, and they're going to want to make their own. When they start to grind the meat, they will need another grinder..." Hahaha! So glad the results are delicious! I wish we had a hunter in the family again to get some fresh meat, but my FIL has retired from most things these days. 😁He deserves it after so many years of working so hard. Hopefully it will last until next year.

Becky G said...

They look delicious! I miss having venison, but there aren't any hunters left in my family these days. I'd hunt, if I had a place, but can't really afford to lease any hunting land right now.