Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation I have a bear hanging out in the garage....

For bulk sausage (I haven't produced links) I believe the fat carries the flavor in sausage and it should be 35% to 50% fat; FWIW.

But damn it 2W, lets get some pie pics here!!

I had always used about 25% Boston butt with sausage..... Had never heard about using pork jowls before.... Way more fat vs meat in those trimmings..... Also WAY less expensive to purchase..... (The difference in pork costs will likely fully pay for Eileen's book somewhere between 75 to 100 pounds of game sausage)....

The bad news is that if we discover that we like these recipes WAY better than what we have been making for years...... I'll be needing to start on cholesterol medication......

I was surprised by amount of cracklings left over..... After straining we ended up with 2 pint jars of rendered fat..... Left them loosely covered on the counter over night and stuck them in the refrigerator this AM.....

I had some sort of fatal error trying to set up a Photo Bucket account years ago.... Someone got a link to the equivalent of "An Idiots Guide To Posting Pictures On The Internet"?

This one?

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbth...96239/How_to_post_your_photos#Post696239

A local grocery has bags of pork fat for sale. That's what I get when making sausage and then calculate % based on final weight of product. FWIW.

I've used the cracklings to add to ground antelope meatloaf. It was delicious. It is also good on salads, just don't tell your cardiologist! Also heated up with lime, salt, and hot sauce as a snack.

Made the first batch of Bear Italian sasuage..... Was real hard to stop frying up test patties so there would be some left to age/blend flavors.... Eileen's book reminds me of some of the "How to bake a truly great loaf of bread" cook books.... There are some extra steps..... But the out come is so worth it.....

Pressure cooked another bear roast..... This time with beef broth, cabbage and apples.... Good stuff.... We had thawed more bear than we ended up using for the sasuage..... Thinking we can now freeze some of these left overs...... Have to save room to eat the properly aged sasuage tomorrow.....

Jayne has come down with a cold so the pie tests may take a few more days......

you need atleast 20-25% fat to make good sausage. you are right that the fat carries the flavor but 35-50% is a bit much. a patty will shrink to half it sze when fried with that much fat. cut your meat into 1in chunks and season before grinding to really even out the flavor.

50% is on the high side, but is certainly not "excessive", IMO.

Our target is usually ~35%, but it depends on how much pork fat we are able to get. It's just how we like it.

As a wise man once said, nobody has ever said it sucks.

The "best" amount of fat depends on several things, including whether the sausage is cased or not, the other meat involved, and cooking method. Anybody who says X amount of fat for EVERY kind of sausage hasn't experimented much.

What do they get for pork fat? I can buy a whole shoulder at Costco for less than $2 a pound and a 15# shoulder makes a decent batch size when mixed with about 25# of ground moose or 'bou. And the fat cut is way lower than your numbers...

Sent a little moose sausage to a certain sports optics guy and told him there was pork in the breakfast sausage (bulk) and he said, "Hey you're cheating!"

Don't remember what I paid, but I buy pork fat for sausage and beef fat for burger. When I make game sausage, I only add fat to the ground critter, never any other meat. I feel I have better control over the final product that way. I've made sausage that didn't have 'enough' fat and it didn't seem like sausage to me.

Maybe that's wrong but that's how it's done at Casa Ironbender.

We don't have a stuffer, so we only make bulk or 'country' sausage. We have a target, but every batch is different.

Agree that you do should NOT age bear (or pig). Bear meat is very similar to pork, so any recipe for pork works well with bear. Crock pot chili verde is mucho deliciouso!

I just love the title of this thread...

This is decent if you like pozole http://wp.me/p3bCKM-4s