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I add the fat I want just before cooking.

Yesterday, it was 4 pats of butter to 1lb grind for taco meat.
Day prior was a heavy drizzle of evoo for chili.

I use pork butt for sausage products.
75/25 can be a little lean for a grilled sausage but is perfect for sliced sausages.

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[Linked Image from ] This becomes a pastrami.
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if you have had enough of English bangers, bratwurst and smokes then you need to look beyond. Try 15% pork shoulder, 35% sheep/lamb shoulder and 50% your lean venison. Then take a look at some of the middle eastern receipts on this link: http://lpoli.50webs.com/Sausage%20recipes.htm.

Last edited by Tamid; 01/21/22 10:14 PM.

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I think most, all?, of the elk burgers that I have eaten are a hundred percent elk. I dont't know, they hold together fine, but it's probably not the best idea to over cook them. A good tip I've picked up is to hand form the burgers donut style without the hole in the middle. I think it's the connective tissue that makes it contract when it cooks, so a regular flat raw burger looks like it balls up in the middle after it's cooked.

To me, elk's quite a bit different than venison, it knows how to turn plain old grass into some good eating, where deer taste better when they're eating farmed crops. The last big old elk I helped a buddy winch out of a drainage hung almost fourteen feet when the helper kid hooked its tied front legs to an overhead rail and pushed it in the shop. A good game processor can not be underestimated.

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If I have a certain amount of sausage I'm making from either elk or venison, I don't add anything to the ground meat. I'll add beef fat at the time I process the ground meat into sausage. Mix in the seasonings and run it through the grinder again and then add the beef fat up to 30% depending on what I'm making. For burger, I'll usually mix it 85-90% game meat to 10-15% beef fat. I've also mixed, just before I cook a burger, some powdered dextrose or powdered milk into the burger meat...a tablespoon or so for a lb of burger. The dextrose really helps turn out a juicy burger and increases the bind as well.

I have a commercial sized grinder my dad picked up years ago that will make short work of a pile of deer or elk meat and grind for friends and add whatever they want into the venison or elk meat, they usually go with some beef fat.

If I shoot both a deer and elk, I usually make the majority of the deer into sausage and cut and grind the elk into burger, roasts and steaks. I can always circle back around, with the elk roasts and grind, either with or without the beef fat, if I choose to make some of that into some type of sausage or burger.

My wife doesn't eat pork, so over the years, with my sausage making, I've substituted beef fat for the pork butt, pork fat, etc and really, the end product IMO turns out as good or better then if I had used pork butt, fat, bacon or what have you!


Cameron Hughes
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Is beef suet even available these days?
Powdered milk is a nice binder.

But I’m not going to grind $10.00/lb suet into venison burger.

All cervids are venison.
I do believe alfalfa fed wapiti (elk) are far superior in flavor and texture to whitetail.

So like a couple weeks ago, 48lbs went into 3/8 grind. Finer, and it turns to crumbles when cooked.
It’s ready for use in anything you might want. Limited handling makes for good cleanliness.

I package our ground venison into serving sized packages for ease of use. 1, 1.5, and 2lb packages.
Stack them end on in an Amazon box, Freeze them. Very freezer efficient.

Large muscles are weighed, labeled, and vac bagged in appropriate sizes.

I do not cross cut hind quarters. I disassemble them. Top round, bottom round, sirloin, etc. Each for it’s own purpose.
Occasionally, I’ll cross cut the hindshanks for osso bucco .
Lots of effort, limited appeal.

I cut the ribs with a sawzall and freeze them for smoking.
Cook them in steam until all the tallow runs out, then smoke them some more.
You get 4 racks off an animal.

Every body knows what to do with the prime cuts.

I get a very high yield off my animals.


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Excellent suggestions all, thank you! CZ is right, everyone knows what to do with the prime cuts. More to grind today and I now have some food for thought, eh?

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We don't have Elk, we have Whitetail. I find it easier to grind Boston Butt with the Whitetail, instead of trying other things, also it makes a biger pile of meat from a small deer. I don't usually make burgers with deer, preferring beef. I use it for chili, soup, etc. I vacuum-pack it to avoid freezer burn.

RyanF- I live in Alabama and put the meat ( except the liver) in a clean trash plastic trash can (used only for meat) covered with salted water ( I know, "Horror Horror"). This helps take the blood out and is cool enough in the winter to keep the meat a few days if the water is changed every day. I have been married to the same woman over 55 years, partly because I took her clean looking, sweet, smelling meat, without a lot of blood. When it starts to smell or taste "gamey" the cause is usually blood. I know this is counter to accepted practice, but it works for us.
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Sounds similar to what I do CZ with how I cut up elk and deer.

I grew raising cattle and every year along with any deer or elk we shot, my dad would butcher and cut up 2 steers, with assistance from an uncle, my older brother and I. He had all the equipment to do the job and knew what he was doing. The cattle were all cut into appropriate cuts and labeled accordingly as were the deer and elk. He wasn't a butcher but had gone through a 6 month agriculture course, more than likely offered to returning WW 2 vets, for those who were entering into or continuing with ranching. Part of the course, according to him was the proper way to process hogs, cattle, sheep, etc. He certainly pounded it into my head, what each cut was and where I should make the proper cut for each piece. I don't necessarily follow his direction nowadays when cutting up a deer or elk, since he'd use the saw to crosscut the bone on the hindquarters of both beef or elk, which I don't do.


Although a sawzall would make the job much easier in removing ribs, I use a hand meat saw that he used for years..maybe not as quick and efficient, but it works. $10.00 bucks a lb for suet is a bit more than what I pay for it. The last I had a local butcher set aside for me a few months ago was $1.49/lb. Of course, it's a mix of suet and back fat, which is fine with me.

I found this article interesting.
https://www.rmef.org/elk-network/venison-or-elk/


Cameron Hughes
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Originally Posted by Cameron
$10.00 bucks a lb for suet is a bit more than what I pay for it. The last I had a local butcher set aside for me a few months ago was $1.49/lb. Of course, it's a mix of suet and back fat, which is fine with me.

I was also surprised to hear of beef suet selling for $10.00 a pound. Even in these days of Joe Biden inflated beef prices, it is still possible to find decent looking N.Y. Strip steaks for around that price when on sale. Prices under Trump were much lower, but getting away from those mean Tweets is worth the cost to some. Beef suet from local butchers is still quite available, and still very cheap. The fact that it mostly cooks down into a liquid fat makes suet very suitable to add to ground venison. Far cheaper and much better tasting than adding fatty pork, in my opinion.

I also find the taste of venison to be very dependent upon the diet of the deer, along with how they are killed and handled after the kill. I try to hunt areas that are within a mile or so of farms with good feed like corn, along with other agricultural crops, apple orchards, and goodies like White Oak acorns. Well fed deer are also naturally larger on average. After gutting, I always do a quick autopsy and slice open the stomach to see what they have been eating. My autopsy results have shown that all my deer have died from acute lead poisoning! Gut shooting a beef cow and chasing it around for an hour to finish it off is going to make for poor eating of adrenalin laced muscle. It is best to make a clean and very quick kill, not just for being humane and ethical, but to contribute to quality of the meat too. Proper cleaning, and aging if possible, also makes a big difference. Aging is often tough to do. Too warm, and the meat will spoil... too cold, and it will freeze solid. Meat processors have the luxury of aging meat at the correct temperature in large refrigeration units. Hanging neck down with the head removed or carotid arteries and jugular veins cut is better than hanging neck up and having blood pool in the steaks... unless you like venison that has a liver taste. Cameron's Dad and uncle obviously knew that there is knowledge and skill required to do a good butchering job.

One buddy told me about a guy who was doing deer processing very cheap. He later told me that when he shot a deer, he took it to this guy to cut up. He said he was allowed to stay and help. They carted the deer into his basement, and the "butcher" was extremely drunk, and still drinking while he did the job. Naturally, all that beer soon filled his bladder. He walked over to a floor drain, and proceeded to piss down the drain while handling his trouser trout with his bloody hands. Then, without washing his hands, he drunkenly went back to cutting up my buddy's deer. This story kinda explains why Winston Churchill said that the two things that should not be seen by the public are the making of laws, and the making of sausage.

I'd think beef suet at $10.00 a pound would give pause to the people who hang chunks of it in netting to feed the birds as a high calorie supplement during the cold winter months. But if Build Back Better inflation contributes to mass starvation in birds, we can always blame it on Climate Change!


A true sign of mental illness is any gun owner who would vote for an Anti-Gunner like Joe Biden.

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We had a couple of large trees close to the house that he would hang the steers from. The neighbor had an old military 6X6 with a boom and a winch attached. We'd borrow that to hoist the steers up after gutting the animals and then proceed to skin them out and hang them neck down about 8-10 feet off the ground. At that height, they were safe from any critter that wandered in. My uncle would usually sit on the gut piles the first few days and more than once, he bagged a bear coming into the gut pile. I'd hear about it when boning out a front leg or something and left a little meat on the bone!

I was actually surprised when I paid $1.49 for the last suet I bought. The previous year when I bought it, it was .99 cents/lb. Don't know why it surprised me though, with the price of most everything going up. There was only one time I had a butcher cut up an animal for me. That was when I lived in AK and had a local butcher cut a muskox up for me. I'd have done it myself, but I really didn't have a good place to hang it and I didn't want it to freeze. It was a big old bull and before I took it to the butcher, I cut some backstraps off to BBQ up. When I stuck it with a fork to turn it, the fork bounced off! When I picked up the cut up animal, the butcher confirmed it was tougher than boot leather. He said he had to change the grinder plates out 3 times when he ground some of it into burger!

Your Winston Churchill quote Keith reminds me of my grandfather, who was of the same generation as Churchill. He toured through a plant where hotdogs were made, he never ate another hotdog after that.


Cameron Hughes
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