Which Venison Cuts and Trim to Use for Sausage

Short answer:

Every deer I've cut, the sausage pile ends up being the biggest pile on the table. That's normal. What separates good venison sausage from the stuff that gets left in the freezer isn't which pile a cut lands in, it's how clean the meat is when it goes in the grinder.

Which venison cuts go to sausage and which stay steaks and roasts?

Cut	Where it usually goes	Why
Backstraps (loins)	Steaks	The most tender meat on the deer. Don't grind it.
Tenderloins	Steaks	Small, tender, gone the first night anyway.
Hindquarter (top round, bottom round, sirloin tip, eye)	Steaks, roasts, whole-muscle jerky	Big clean muscles that slice well. Grind them if you want more sausage.
Front shoulders	Sausage	Lots of small muscles and seams. Hard to steak, perfect to grind.
Neck	Sausage or a braise	Plenty of meat, lots of connective tissue between muscles.
Shanks	Braise whole, or grind if well cleaned	Full of tendon. Great slow-cooked, a lot of work to clean for the grinder.
Flank, belly and rib meat	Sausage	Thin, sinewy, and often carries deer fat to trim.
Trim from every other cut	Sausage, ground jerky, snack sticks	Every clean scrap counts.

If you're a sausage family, there's nothing wrong with grinding a hindquarter. Plenty of hunters grind everything but the backstraps and tenderloins. Want to know how much you'll end up with? See how much meat you get from a deer.

Is deer neck meat good for sausage?

Yes. The neck is one of the best grinding cuts on the deer. On a mature buck it's a lot of meat, and because it's a tangle of small muscles with connective tissue in between, it's tough as a steak and great through a grinder.

Bone it out, cut away the heavy white connective tissue and any bloodshot meat (neck shots leave plenty), and cube it for the grinder. If you'd rather, the neck also braises beautifully whole, but most of mine go to sausage.

Should I grind the shanks or braise them?

Either works. It comes down to how much knife work you want to do. Shanks are wrapped in tendon and silver skin. Slow-cooked whole, all that connective tissue melts into something really good. For the grinder, you have to strip most of it out first, and you'll lose a fair bit of meat doing it.

My take: if it's a big deer, braise the hind shanks and grind the cleaned-up meat off the fronts. If you grind them, go slow and keep the tendons out.

Do you have to remove silver skin before grinding?

Get as much off as you reasonably can. Silver skin is the thin, shiny membrane on the outside of the muscles. It doesn't break down in the grinder. It wraps around the knife, clogs the plate, and makes the grinder smear the meat instead of cutting it. Whatever gets through shows up as chewy strings in the finished sausage.

Lay the piece silver side down, get your knife under one end, and run the blade flat along the membrane while you pull it tight. You don't need to chase every speck. Sheets and tendons come off; small bits can stay. Keep the meat cold while you work, and clean the plate when the grinder starts pushing mush.

Should I remove deer fat for sausage?

Yes. Trim off all the deer fat and replace it with pork.

Deer fat is tallow. It's hard and it melts at a higher temperature than pork fat, so in a sausage you eat cold (summer sausage, snack sticks) it leaves a waxy coating on the roof of your mouth. It's also where most of the strong, gamey flavor lives, and it goes off faster in the freezer. None of that helps a sausage.

Pork fat is the fix. The DeepWoodz recipes run a 50/50 blend of venison to pork butt. Keep in mind that a cut is not fat: pork butt is only about 30% fat, so 50/50 with lean venison lands at about 17% fat, not 50%. If you want to hit a different number, the venison fat calculator does the math for butt, shoulder or pure pork fat. Getting it wrong is the number one reason venison sausage comes out dry.

How do you get rid of the gamey taste in venison?

Most "gamey" is handling, not the deer. A deer that was cooled fast and trimmed clean tastes like good red meat. Here's what actually moves the needle:

• Cool it fast. Penn State Extension says to quickly cool the carcass to 35 to 40°F. A deer hanging in a warm garage for days is where the strong flavor starts. See how long a deer can hang.
• Trim all the deer fat. That's where the strong flavor lives.
• Take off silver skin, sinew and bloodshot meat. Bruised meat tastes like liver.
• Keep hair out. Hair on the meat tastes like hair in the sausage. Pick it off or trim it off; a damp paper towel grabs loose hairs.
• Use good, fresh pork. Old pork with off flavors won't hide anything. Fresh pork butt does a lot of the work.
• Keep everything cold. Grind partially frozen meat and fat so the fat stays in clean particles instead of smearing.

Should I soak venison in milk or salt water?

It's optional, and for sausage you don't need it. Lots of families soak venison in milk, buttermilk or salt water and swear by it. I'm not going to tell your grandpa he's wrong. But soaking can't undo a deer that sat warm or was trimmed sloppy, and a clean-trimmed deer doesn't need it.

For sausage, there's a practical reason to skip it: a salt water soak puts salt into the meat that your recipe doesn't know about, and any soak adds water. If you do soak a few bloodshot pieces, keep them in the fridge, use cold water, drain them well and pat them dry before they go in the grinder.

Can I use bloodshot meat near the wound?

Trim it off. Don't try to save it by grinding it. The meat around the wound channel is bruised, jellied with blood, and often holds hair, bone chips and bullet fragments. It tastes livery and it can ruin the flavor of a whole batch.

This is a food safety call, too. Penn State Extension says to remove all visible dirt, feces, hair and bloodshot areas. Anything that touched gut contents on a gut-shot deer gets trimmed away and thrown out, not rinsed and ground. Penn State also says meat showing a greenish discharge, black blood or blood clots in the muscle should not be eaten.

Lightly bloodshot meat at the edge of the damage, the kind that's just pink-stained, can be trimmed back to clean red meat. When in doubt, cut it out. A pound of lost meat beats a batch nobody wants to eat.

Can I use venison scraps for jerky or snack sticks?

Yes. Small scraps are exactly what ground jerky and snack sticks are for. Pieces too small or too ragged for whole-muscle jerky grind up just fine.

• Snack sticks: clean scraps, ground with pork, cured with Cure #1 at 0.25% of meat weight (156 ppm). The snack stick smoke schedule covers the rest.
• Ground jerky: pressed into strips from a jerky gun. Keep it lean, with no pork fat, and use Cure #1. For strips, see how to make venison jerky.

The same trim rules apply. Scraps with fat, sinew or blood on them make worse jerky, not better.

In DeepWoodz Smokehouse you enter how much clean venison you ended up with, and every recipe adjusts to it, pork and cure included. The cure is locked so it can't be edited to an unsafe number.

Bottom line

Shoulders, neck, flank, ribs, clean shank meat and trim go to the grinder. Backstraps, tenderloins and the big hindquarter muscles stay whole. Strip the deer fat, silver skin and bloodshot meat, keep hair out, cool the deer fast, and grind 50/50 with fresh pork butt for about 17% fat.

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