Roasted Garlic & Sage Venison Sausage

Wade’s been in a charcuterie mood lately. Our deer season has wrapped up, and with six whitetail in the freezer, plus my sika stag, we’re absolutely flush with venison. The five-gallon bucket of lead weights has resumed its rightful place on top of the lid of the chest freezer to keep it shut. The kitchen freezer threatens to erupt into a landslide of meat every time I open the door. With all this abundance, we can afford to experiment, which is why we’ve been making a whole bunch of sausage- a batch or two a week!

We recently bought an old refrigerator and retrofit it into a curing chamber. Wade’s been tinkering with it incessantly, getting the humidity levels and temperatures just right. We’ve put in our first batch of sausage to cure, and when we have proof of concept, we’ll be posting all kinds of fermented sausages and whole-muscle cures. But until then, there’s a whole world of fresh sausage to try out. And this is definitely one you don’t want to miss out on.

This roasted garlic & sage venison sausage is delicious and versatile. The roasted garlic has a rich, deep flavor that’s complemented by the sage & wine, but none of these elements overpowers the savory venison. It’s well balanced, which makes it a great “center of the plate” kind of sausage. Served with a light sear, alongside some roasted root vegetables, it turns into a quick and elegant meal. This is one of the only fresh sausages we bother to case- the rest we usually freeze uncased and crumble into other dishes.

Roasted Garlic & Sage Venison Sausage

As always, we use metric measurements and go by 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).

Yield: approx 3 lb (12 links)

Prep time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

100% lean venison

45% pork fat

2.6% salt

0.2% dried sage

4% roasted garlic cloves (recipe below)

1% black pepper, ground

8% ice water

8% dry rose or red wine

Method:

In a large bowl, combine all ingredients except water and wine. Grind through a medium or large die. Add wine and water to the ground mixture and mix well with paddle attachment or wooden spoon. Stuff into hog casings (optional).

Roasted Garlic:

Place peeled garlic cloves into an oven-safe container and submerge with oil. Cover and roast in 300 degree oven for 1.5-2 hours, Allow garlic to cool completely before using in the sausage recipe. Retain garlic oil- you can use it in everything.

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