Uh...yeah. That's me..??A couple months ago I went on our annual deer hunt with some buddies. The annual deer hunt deserves an entire blog of it's own so I won't go into detail here...other than to say that I did not get a deer. In fact I didn't even see a deer, but I did see and shoot a 125 lb. ferel hog. I've eaten wild hog before and thought it was OK but never really good, so this time I decided to process the hog myself. We dressed and quartered the beast at camp and put it on ice. When I got home I spent an hour or so re-cleaning the and vacuum packing the shoulders, hind quarters, back strap and tenderloins and put 'em in the freezer. Then I began studying how to make sausage from wild hog meat.
As luck would have it, I remembered my family telling me that my grandfather made excellent tasting sausage at his farm in central Illinois. After talking with my aunt and grandma, I got his old recipe and gave it a shot. I thawed, de-boned and trimmed all the fat from one of the hind quarters, which yielded about 5 lbs. of meat. I read somewhere that removing the fat will cut down on the strong game flavor so I added 2 lbs. of domestic hog fat to make up for what I trimmed. I cut the meat into two inch cubes, added my grandfather's seasoning mix and ran it through the grinder a couple times. I fried up a little patty, just to see how I was doing. It looked like ground sausage, smelled like breakfast sausage and to my surprise, it tasted like really good breakfast sausage!! I was definitely on the right track.
Finally, it was time to make the links. I decided to use natural casing....I figured, if I'm going try to replicate and old process, I might as well go old school. I put the casing on the stuffer and began to run the ground sausage through one more time. I made the links about the length of my hand and gave each link about 3 or 4 full twists. Next thing you know, that one hind quarter produced about 25 links! Fortunately, that night was a dry 34 degrees outside. I twisted the links off in pairs and hung them outside to dry. The following morning, I packaged and refrigerated them. I've since grilled and eaten most of them and I'm happy to say that they were excellent! Next time I'll start experimenting with other types of sausage...Italian, boudin, brats, etc.
I gotta say, there something pretty damn satisfying about controlling the entire process from the field to the plate. I think my days of taking wild game to the processor are done. It's really not that difficult to do it yourself and there is something to be said for cutting out the middle man....not just because it's cheaper but because it's good to understand what goes on behind the scenes of your local butcher shop. Besides, if you put in a little effort and are willing to experiment, you can make some pretty incredible stuff!
Oh, and thanks to Grandpa for the recipe. I hope I did it justice!
