Chorizo is one of the first sausages I made when I first started hunting. Every season since, I've made a batch or two, and every year the recipe gets tweaked a bit. I'm sure next season this recipe will change some more, but so far this one has been the most crowd pleasing. 

I’ve dialed back the heat to make it more versatile and replaced a half dozen different dried peppers with canned chipotles (a highly underrated ingredient). This sausage still has some heat to it, but it won’t hurt you like one of my previous versions, laden with smoked fatali and ghost peppers.

I also started using a medium/coarse die to grind instead of a fine. We usually end up crumbing the chorizo over eggs, or in tacos and we found that the chunkier texture is better.

We love this stuff with eggs and tortillas. It's also perfect over rice, in chili, or over pasta with fresh tomatoes and peppers.

Fresh Venison Chorizo Recipe

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. 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% venison, trimmed, cubed

30% pork fat, cubed

2% salt

1% sugar

1% fresh garlic, minced

0.5% mexican oregano, dried

0.5% cumin

0.5% dried chipotles, ground

0.25% cayenne pepper

4% dry red wine

4.8% canned chipotle peppers (pureed)

Method:

Mix all ingredients except wine, and grind through coarse/medium die of your meat grinder. Add wine to the ground meat and spice mixture, then mix well with paddle attachment or wooden spoon. 

Stuff into hog casings (optional)