@deplorablenc1 Do you cook the meat first?

@revid You can’t go wrong with the Willie’s, my family and I love it.

@1grinder I did the same thing, I waited until after the season was over before I started processing my deer into sausage. With as cold as it’s been here I usually will take out the venison and pork I plan on using and placing it in a meat lug (I leave it in the packaging) and set it on top of my deep freezer in my garage, which stays between 35-40 degrees and it’ll take a couple days for it to thaw out so I usually have to do that on Wednesday prior to the weekend I want to make something. Then Saturday morning I begin the process and the meat still has ice crystals in it, perfect for grinding. If it’s warmer out then I’ll thaw it out in the fridge, that’s the best way to do it.

@1grinder Whenever I make breakfast sausage I make the 1504 and the Holly Regular. My wife likes the Holly better so that’s why I make them both. Don’t get me wrong I like it too, I just prefer the pepper in the 1504 a little more. And you absolutely should partially freeze prior to vacuum sealing, not will it prevent any juice from going into the seal but it’ll also help prevent the sausage link from getting crushed by the vacuum. I have a chamber vac machine and turn the vacuum down as well as partially freeze the links prior to packaging them.

A good starting point is 50-50 mix, unless you use just Pork fat then I’d go somewhere in the 70/80-30/20 % range. My favorite breakfast seasoning we carry is the #1504.

@skipdiggidy 4 oz per 25 lbs of meat. No more difficult than without it, just make sure you add enough water.

@ttinidaho The main thing you need to worry about in my opinion is making sure you get good Protein extraction. Without that you will definitely be disappointed with the final product. I use the 20 lb meat mixer that we sell at Walton’s and mix for about 10-11 minutes changing direction about every minute or so to ensure I’m mixing the meat well. I’d recommend using a meat binder like Carrot fiber or Super Bind (kinda expensive) or Sure Gel. The only one of those I haven’t used yet is the Sure Gel but all three are great products. Also another popular product for summer sausage and snack sticks is Encapsulated Citric Acid, which is going to do a couple things for you. One is it acts as a cure accelerator and the other is it lowers the PH of the meat which will give you the “tangy” flavor associated with summer sausage. If you aren’t worried about speeding up the process and don’t want the tangy flavor then you can skip adding that and just hold the meat at least 12 hrs prior to cooking. Hope all this helps and good luck!

Absolutely you can do that, just make sure you add some fat to the mix as those are all pretty lean meats. One of the guys here made some snack sticks doing basically the same thing except his was deer, elk and I think antelope. He used the Willie’s snack stick seasoning and they turned out pretty tasty.

I’ve had the same thing happen the last time I made jerky. I trimmed all the fat and silver skin off and did whole muscle. It started about a week after to a bag I had in the fridge. It happened to both opened and unopened bags.