How to Make Venison Ring Bologna at Home

Short answer:

Ring bologna is one of the best things you can make out of a deer, and one of the most overlooked. It's a cooked, smoked sausage, so you don't need a drying chamber or a fermenting culture. If you can make summer sausage, you can make this. Here's the whole thing in the order I do it.

This page gives you the process and the numbers that matter for safety: the cure, the fat, the temperatures. For the exact seasoning amounts, use a tested recipe. The ring bologna recipes in the DeepWoodz app are free, and they scale every ingredient to the weight of meat you actually have.

What is ring bologna?

Ring bologna is a smoked, cured sausage stuffed into a curved casing and tied into a horseshoe or ring. It has a finer, smoother bite than a coarse sausage like a brat, with a snap from the casing and a mild garlic, pepper and coriander flavor. It's a staple in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and in a lot of hunting families it's the first thing that gets made out of the trim.

It's fully cooked when it comes out of the smoker. Most of it gets eaten cold, sliced with cheese and crackers, but you can heat it up too.

How long does venison ring bologna take?

Step	What you do	About how long
Prep	Trim, weigh, chill, grind, mix	2 to 4 hours for a 10 to 25 lb batch
Stuff	Stuff beef rounds and tie rings	30 minutes to 1 hour
Bloom	Hang at room temperature	1 to 2 hours
Smoke	130°F dry, then step up to 170°F until 152°F inside	Roughly 3 to 5 hours
Cool	Ice bath, hang, fridge	About 1 to 2 hours

Smoke time moves with the casing size, your smoker, the weather and how cold the meat went in. Go by the probe, not the clock. You can do the whole thing in one long day.

What you need

• A grinder with a 1/4" plate
• A sausage stuffer (a vertical stuffer is easiest)
• A gram scale (cure gets weighed, never scooped)
• Cure #1, seasoning and ice cold water
• 38 to 42 mm natural beef rounds or fibrous casings, and butcher's twine
• A smoker that can hold 130°F to 170°F, or see how to do it without a smoker
• Two probe thermometers: one in the meat, one at the grate

Step 1: Trim and chill the venison

Trim off the hard white deer fat, silver skin, bloodshot meat and anything near the wound channel. Deer fat tastes waxy and doesn't belong in a ring. What to keep and what to toss is in venison trim for sausage. Keep the meat below 40°F from here until it goes in the smoker. If your area tests for CWD, read CWD and venison sausage before you grind a mixed batch.

Step 2: Blend 50/50 with pork butt and weigh the cure

The DeepWoodz ring bologna recipes run 50% lean meat to 50% pork butt by weight. Lean venison or lean beef both work for the lean side. A cut is not the same thing as fat: pork butt is about 30% fat, so a 50/50 blend with lean venison comes out around 17% fat. That's what keeps a ring juicy instead of crumbly. If your trim or pork is different, the venison fat calculator shows where you'll land.

Weigh the total meat after blending. Cure #1 goes in at 0.25% of the total meat weight, which works out to 156 ppm nitrite.

Total meat	Venison	Pork butt	Cure #1 (0.25%)
5 lb	2.5 lb	2.5 lb	5.7 g
10 lb	5 lb	5 lb	11.3 g
25 lb	12.5 lb	12.5 lb	28.35 g

Cure isn't optional here. Ring bologna spends hours in a warm smoker, and Cure #1 is what protects it while it's in there. More in do you need cure for sausage and how much Cure #1 per pound. Use Cure #1, not Cure #2 (the difference).

Step 3: Grind it cold through a 1/4" plate

Cube the meat, spread it on sheet pans and freeze it until the edges are stiff but it isn't frozen solid. Chill the grinder head and plate too. The DeepWoodz ring bologna recipes use a single grind through a 1/4" plate. Cold meat cuts clean. Warm meat smears, and smeared fat is how you end up with a greasy ring (why sausage fats out). More on setup in grinding venison for sausage.

Step 4: Mix it to a tacky paste

This is the step that makes it ring bologna and not crumbly ground meat. The fine, smooth bite comes from the mix, not from a special machine.

1. Mix all the dry seasoning together first so it spreads evenly.
2. Add the seasoning, the weighed cure and the ice cold water to the ground meat.
3. Mix until the meat turns very tacky and paste-like. A ball of it should stick to your upturned palm. That stickiness is the protein doing its job, and it's what holds the ring together when you slice it.

Keep it cold the whole time. If the mix starts feeling warm or greasy, put it back in the fridge for 20 minutes before you keep going. If you have trouble getting a good bind, sausage texture problems walks through the causes.

What casing do you use for ring bologna?

Natural beef rounds or fibrous casings, 38 to 42 mm. Beef rounds are the traditional ring bologna casing. They come curved, so they form a ring on their own and give that classic snap. Fibrous casings in the same size work fine and peel off clean.

Salted beef rounds need to be rinsed and soaked before you use them. Run water through the inside of each one to flush the salt out. Soak fibrous casings in warm water before stuffing, as the package directs. Comparing your options? See sausage casing types, and the casing calculator tells you how much to buy.

Step 5: Stuff and tie the rings

Pack the stuffer tight to push the air out, then stuff each casing firm. Prick any air pockets you can see. Tie the ends together with butcher's twine into rings of about 1 lb each, so 10 lb of meat gives you about 10 rings. A loosely stuffed ring comes out of the smoker wrinkled. Stuffing tips are in how to stuff sausage.

Step 6: Let them bloom

Hang the rings at room temperature for 1 to 2 hours. The casings dry and the color starts to develop. Hang them on smoke sticks or dowels so they don't touch each other, or you'll get pale spots where they did.

Step 7: Smoke on a step-up schedule

This is the schedule every ring bologna recipe in the DeepWoodz app runs:

Stage	Smoker temp	How long
Dry	130°F, dampers open, no smoke	1 hour
Smoke and step up	Close the dampers, heavy smoke, raise 10°F every 30 minutes	Until the smoker reaches 170°F
Finish	Hold at 170°F, never higher	Until 152°F inside

Never let the smoker go above 170°F. Even if it's set at or below 170°F, the real temperature can spike higher, especially on a pellet grill. Put a second probe at the grate, right next to the rings, and trust that number over the dial. A smoker running hot renders the fat out and leaves you a greasy, shrunken ring. Hickory, maple and cherry are all good woods for ring bologna.

What internal temperature is ring bologna done at?

The DeepWoodz ring bologna recipes pull at 152°F internal, with the probe in the thickest part of the ring. That's for ring bologna made with Cure #1 and brought up slowly on the schedule above.

USDA's general guidance for plain ground meat is 160°F. If you want that extra margin, keep it going to 160°F. You'll give up a little juiciness, but it's your call. Two things are not optional:

• It has to be cured. None of these low-and-slow numbers apply to uncured meat.
• Bear or wild hog goes to 165°F. They can carry trichinella. See bear and wild hog safety.

Step 8: Ice bath, hang and chill

The moment they hit 152°F, plunge the rings into an ice water bath until the inside drops below 100°F. That stops the cook, keeps the casing from wrinkling and keeps it from sticking to the meat. The ice bath is optional. Plenty of people cool them at room temperature or outside on a cold day. What matters is that they cool down promptly and don't sit warm.

Then hang them for about an hour so the casings dry and the color deepens, and put them in the fridge.

How long does homemade ring bologna last?

Treat it like a cooked sausage. University of Minnesota Extension's storage chart, based on USDA times, gives hot dogs, the closest match, 1 week once opened and 2 weeks unopened in the fridge at 40°F or below. So keep out what you'll eat in a week, vacuum seal the rest and freeze it. The full storage picture is in how long does venison sausage last, and if you find a white haze on a ring later, here's how to tell fat bloom from mold.

What are the common ring bologna problems?

Problem	Usual cause	Fix
Wrinkled casing	Slow cooling, or loosely stuffed casings	Stuff firm, cool promptly, ice bath if you can
Greasy, fat pooled under the casing	Smoker ran above 170°F, or the meat got warm during the grind or mix	Keep the meat cold, watch the grate probe, step up slowly
Crumbly, falls apart when sliced	Under-mixed, so no bind	Mix until it's a tacky paste that sticks to your palm
Dry	Too lean, or overcooked	Run 50/50 with pork butt and pull at temperature
Casing split	Overstuffed, or heat raised too fast	Stuff firm but not drum tight, follow the 10°F steps
Pale, patchy smoke color	Wet casings, or rings touching	Bloom and dry fully, hang rings apart
Air pockets	Air left in the stuffer	Pack the stuffer tight and prick pockets before smoking

Dry sausage is the most common complaint with venison. The causes are covered in why venison sausage is dry.

Can I add cheese or jalapeno to ring bologna?

Yes. Use high-temp cheese, which holds its shape through the smoke, and fold it in by hand after the meat is mixed. Regular cheese melts out. How much to use is in high-temp cheese per pound. For a tested version, Fire Jack Ring is the jalapeno pepper jack ring.

Which ring bologna recipe should I start with?

Start with Smoke Ring Classic, the traditional garlic, pepper and coriander ring. Once that's dialed, Codey's Blend brings more garlic, Pepper Ridge brings the pepper and smoke, and Fire Jack Ring adds jalapeno and cheese. All of them are free in the DeepWoodz app.

Making summer sausage from the same deer? Same idea, bigger casing, slightly different schedule: how to make venison summer sausage.

Every ring bologna recipe in DeepWoodz runs this process. Enter 7 lb or 32 lb and the seasoning, water and cure all recalculate, with the cure locked at 0.25%. The built-in smoke timer walks you through each stage.

Bottom line

Cold meat, 50/50 with pork butt, Cure #1 at 0.25% weighed on a scale, a 1/4" grind, a long mix to a sticky paste, firm-stuffed beef rounds tied into 1 lb rings, a 1 to 2 hour bloom, then a slow step-up smoke to 152°F inside with the smoker never above 170°F. Cool them fast and you'll have rings that slice clean and snap when you bite them.

Common questions