The marsh ghost has become an obsession of ours. Their eerie bugles, the unique terrain they inhabit, how we hunt them, and their deep, rich flavor have made them our favorite animal to pursue. The pursuit is a combination of elk, whitetail, rabbit and turkey hunting. It's challenging and additive.

We recently spent a few days on the shore chasing these tasty mini elk around the salt marshes. We didn’t come home with one, but we already have plans for next year’s hunt.

We started this salami about a month before our trip this season, with the idea that we would hopefully come home with more sika meat and replenish the stock. Since that didn't happen (I had two clean misses inside of 30 yards) we had some anxiety about this salami. If it wasn't good, we’d just wasted some of the best meat we have ever had. Luckily, it turned out about as good as it gets.

The ingredients for this salami are simple. The meat does all the talking, and as with all of our experiences with sika deer, it doesn't disappoint.

The only thing we want to do differently next round is to gather our own salt from the seaside and maybe add in some sumac that we saw growing on the island. Just to give it a little more personality.

Sika Sopressata

As always, we use metric measurements and go by percentage weight for our sausage recipes. We do this to make the recipes easy to scale and replicate exactly, batch after batch. If you’re thinking of getting into sausage making and don’t own a kitchen scale, please do yourself the favor of buying one. They’re inexpensive relative to the cash outlay of all the other equipment you’ll need to pick up, and will save you a lot of effort in terms of scaling recipes into imperial measurements (and potentially averting recipe failure). To measure your ingredients, first weigh the meat you are using, and then calculate the weight of all the other ingredients based on the weight of the meat.

Prep time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

100% sika meat, trimmed, cubed

25% pork fat, cubed

3% salt

0.3% instacure #2

0.6% dextrose

0.18% white pepper, ground

0.33% garlic, fresh, minced

0.15% red pepper flake

3.3% dry white wine

**bactoferm fr-52

Method:

Combine meat, salt, instacure #2, dextrose, white pepper, garlic, and red pepper flake. Cover and refrigerate for a few hours or overnight. 

Grind fat separately through a medium die, then grind the meat mixture through a fine die.

Using a stand mixer or wooden spoon, mix the fat with the meat mixture. Add in wine and mix. Add the bactoferm and water mixture. Mix until slightly tacky, about 1-2 minutes.

Stuff into beef middles, tie into 10” links, and prick with a sterile needle or sausage pricker. Weigh and record the starting weight of each set of links. Incubate for ~12-18 hours in a warm room, then hang in the cure chamber for 21-40 days, or until 30-35% weight loss is achieved.