Making Wild Turkey (or Venison) Sausage

Anyone who's ever been turkey hunting knows that trying to make the meat edible is almost impossible. My grandpa (Pap) tried everything: roasting, marinating, crockpot, and nothing changed. He decided one day on a whim to grind it with pork to make sausage, and we've eaten it this way ever since. The pork adds fat that the wild game lacks and it adds flavor. Since I got a nice gobbler this year, I'll go through what we do to make it. (Side note: we do the exact same thing for venison meat but will be featuring turkey)

1) Combine a 1:1 turkey to pork ratio. We estimated about 10 pounds of wild meat, so Pap went to the butcher for pork shoulder and will use about 10 pounds of that. You can use pork loin as well, but it's important to note that wild turkey needs the fat pork has in it.

2) Cut all meat into 2-3" chunks and run it through a meat grinder twice (once through the large plate and once through the small one). We process all wild game ourselves, but I'm sure you can ask a local butcher. Pap was a butcher for many years and grew up working on a farm. He uses a grinder like this one: Cabela's Deluxe Meat Grinder | Cabela's (cabelas.com) but if you have a stand mixer for baking, there is a meat grinder attachment available. Once it's all done, it should look like this:

3) Now that the work is over, you have to make sure it tastes good of course! With all your meat in a plastic tub/bin, add any seasonings you want. We keep it simple with salt, black pepper, brown sugar (the meat browns really well this way) for mild sausage, and we add ground red pepper and crushed red pepper flakes for spicy sausage. Mix it thoroughly then form small patties to sample, adjust your seasoning as you like. There's no measuring here, there's a lot of room for flexibility depending on your tastes

4) And you're done! Label and store the meat in bags (for turkey we got 10 pounds of mild sausage and 10 pounds of spicy) and store in the freezer. The uses for venison and turkey sausage are endless: in spaghetti sauce, on pizza, in chili, burgers. If you're ambitious you can also make sausage links for breakfast. Happy hunting!