For those of you that process your own meat. I want to start this season and want to make my own ground meat and sausage among other things.

When grinding venison for chili or burgers, do you mix any pork or just venison?
For sausage, what part pork to venison and any recommended spice recipes?

Thanks,
Grant

All the kids and I eat it two ways. For chili and stews, I prefer straight venison but cube it, instead of grinding. For burgers or any ground meat dishes where I brown it, I mix pork shoulder or Boston butts 50/50. They are usually really cheap in Fall, sweeten the meat, and give enough grease for frying

I mix about 15 percent beef fat trimmings when grinding for burger. I just request whatever I need at the meat counter at HEB.

Any recommendations for the type of casing to use for sausage?

For sausage I have been using 80% venison we trim all fat off and 20% pork trimmings. For ground meat I use 10% pork trimmings. I like grilling sausage so it needs some extra fat. The ground meat I made with 20% trimmings cooked out too much fat for my taste.

I do 70% deer & 30% pork shoulder, It's still lean but we like it that way. For sausage do a 50/50 of deer and pork shoulder you need the fat for the sausage.

Casing get the collagen, much easier to work with when tubing.

Thanks, I appreciate all of the help. One last question (probably not) but can you freeze the meat and then come back to it to process? Looking forward to getting started.

I do it like that every year, I don't always have to time to do it the following week.

If you mean like freeze deboned meat then thaw and grind and re-freeze or make sausage and refresh then yes.

Perfect, thanks.

I don't add pork to my venison. When I cook a burger, I prefer medium with a little bit of pink in the middle. You can't do that with pork. I save trimmed brisket fat all year and mix it 90/10 with deer meat. If I have not saved enough beef fat to cover all of my venison, I go to the butcher shop and they sell me their fat trimmings. You may have to call the butcher shop in advance to make sure that they don't throw the trimmings away.

when grinding venison:
for hamburgers, I like to put in 10% bacon-ends-n-pieces, and about 20% chuck-roast.
for breakfast-sausage I put in 20% bacon-ends-n-pieces and 30% pork butt, and spices like sage/pepper/salt, etc.
for 'italian ground' I put in 40% pork butt and italian spices (I use this mix for spaghetti, lasagna, stuffed peppers,etc.)

I put 1# of each into labeled quart-freezer-ziplock bags, then squeeze all air out and then FLATTEN as much as possible.
I then put several quart packets into a gallon ziplock freezer bag - to keep sorted and as 'overprotection'.
The FLAT packets store easy in freezer, defrost FAST, and make cooking a breeze (breakfast-sausage can be further 'squared' in the pan with spatula)!