Venison Summer Sausage Recipe - Old School Style Summer Sausage (2024)

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Venison summer sausage comes in many forms, from the faux fermented versions you see from many butchers, to this real-deal, old school version that hails from Holland.

This venison summer sausage is called boerenmetworst, literally “farmer’s dry sausage,” and it is a proper summer sausage from the Old Country. You make the links, let them ferment for a few days, then smoke them very gently—you don’t want them to cook. Then you hang them to dry for a few weeks before eating.

Note that this summer sausage is fully cured, like salami. If you want to make it more like the modern versions, let the links hang for only two or three weeks, so they are still a little soft.

There is a distinctive flavor to Dutch (and Afrikaner) sausages that comes from the liberal use of coriander, ginger, cloves and black pepper. Allspice is another common addition, and if you want to add some, you can mix in a ½ teaspoon.

These are the main flavors you will get in most venison summer sausage you would get from the processor, too, which is why I use them.

Getting Started

No matter what summer sausage recipe you use, you will need some equipment. First and foremost, a smoker. Summer sausage is smoked, period. If you don’t have a smoker, and you really, really want to make summer sausage, you can cheat by using smoked salt. It’s not the same, but it will get you close. Ish.

You will obviously also need a meat grinder and a sausage stuffer, plus casings. My go-to source for all of these are my friends at The Sausage Maker, a family owned outfit out of Buffalo, New York. Great products at a good price.

Typical Midwestern venison summer sausage is stuffed into quasi-edible collagen casings, which I don’t like. Feel free to use them if you do. I prefer natural casings, either beef middles or really wide hog casings. The Sausage Maker sells 38-42 mm wide hog casings that work very well.

You will also need a set up to ferment and to dry your summer sausage. This can be as simple as a plastic sheet draped over a clothes drying rack, which I use often, and then a cool garage or basem*nt. I’ll get into the details of both steps in a bit. But know that you need these to make a proper venison summer sausage… or any dry cured sausage, for that matter.

Starters and Cures

You will need both. Cures are various formulations of salt mixed with sodium nitrite or sodium nitrate. These are there for a variety of reasons, but mostly for food safety. Nitrite prevents botulism and other bacterial nasties. It is vital to use it.

And all those stupid “uncured” products you see in the market are lying to you: They are plenty cured, using celery extract, which is… sodium nitrite. This is not the place to debate their use, but suffice to say you need it. If that’s a stopper for you, this is not the recipe for you.

You need Instacure no. 2 for this recipe, which is salt + sodium nitrate. This allows you to hang dry your venison summer sausage for weeks. The no. 1 cure is for smoked products that are not hung to dry for more than a week or so, if at all.

The starter is an insurance policy against bacterial disaster. Basically all dry cured sausage, including summer sausage, is fermented. That’s the tang you taste. Various cultures prefer different levels of tang, and in this case we do want some acidity, so we use either the F-LC or FRM-52 starter culture, which gives you a more Northern European style sausage.

You will notice that I use more than what is called for on the package. That is intentional, and it’s for your safety. When making dry cured sausages at home, unless you are an expert, you will want to overdo it a little on the cure to ensure that every bit of your summer sausage gets some.

The starters introduce good bacteria into your links that help them ferment correctly. I have done batches without starters, and they have worked, but not all of them. You’ll know if they don’t, because the sausages will stink. Use the starter.

Summer Sausage Tips

These apply to most dry cured sausages, not just venison summer sausage.

Cut your meat and fat — it has to be either pork fat or fat trimmed off beef roasts or steaks — into chunks that fit into your grinder, add the salt, and the curing salt, toss well, and let this sit, covered, in your fridge for up to 2 days. One day is ideal, and even 6 hours will do.This helps develop myosin, which will give you a tighter bind when you stuff the links later.

Cold is key. Everything you work with needs to be cold as you make the sausages. Once made, they can handle warmer temperatures.

And by cold I mean so cold your hands hurt when working with the mixture, which is around 30°F or so. You want all your liquids to be cold, too. Yes, even the vinegar. Side note: Don’t overdo it on the vinegar here, because its acidity can break your bind in your sausage and turn it crumbly.

Chill your equipment and bowls and meat in the freezer for an hour or so. And when I say equipment, I just mean the business end, so blades, auger and meat tray. Not the motor.

Grind is up to you. I prefer my venison summer sausage finely ground, through a 4.5 mm die. But you can get away with a 6 mm die, too. Grind twice, first through a very coarse die, then a finer one. This helps you strip away any stray silverskin that might get stick in the gears.

(Here are all my dry cured sausage and salami recipes.)

The mixing stage needs to be cold, too. This is where you mix the ground meat and spices with the liquids and the starter. This is important because if your mix is warm here, you can get what is called smear, where the fat partially melts and coats the meat bits, shortening the myosin strands within — this is exactly the process in making shortbread, where the fat shortens the gluten in those cookies.

Stuffing Venison Summer Sausage

You never want to use your grinder as a sausage stuffer. I know, the manufacturers say it’s OK. It’s not. Running meat through the auger after it’s been mixed can and does damage or even destroy the bind you just made. You need a sausage stuffer.

Stuff links loosely at first.For a venison summer sausage, you want long links —you’ll tie the ends together eventually. Cut out lengths of casing about 2 feet long, Stuff a little more than 1 foot’s worth, with plenty of extra casing on either side. Do this with all the sausage before moving on.

When you’re ready, gently compress the long links to fill the casing. Keep an eye out for air pockets. Use a sterile needle or sausage pricker (set it aglow in your stovetop flame) to puncture the casing over all the air pockets. Gently compress the links together to squeeze out the air pockets; this takes practice. Tie the ends of the casing together in a double or triple knot.

Fermenting Summer Sausage

Hang the links from a clothes rack or somesuch. I use “S” rings you buy from the hardware store to hang them from the clothes rack rods. Now you need to ferment your links, keeping them warm and moist.

I do this by putting a humidifier under the hanging sausages and then tenting the whole shebang with big garbage bags that I’ve sliced open on one end. I also use a watersprayer to spritz my sausages a couple times a day. Doing this prevents the casings from hardening. Keep your sausages hanging at room temperature (65 to 80°F) at about 85 percent humidity for three days.

Yes, three days at room temperature. This is why you need the curing salts and the starter culture. It will be fine. You can go up to five days here, or as little as two. Three is best in my opinion.

Smoking and Drying

Move your venison summer sausage to your smoker and smoke them over very low heat for up to 4 hours of continuous smoke. It is vitally important that you do not cook your links here, so put ice in the water tray of the smoker and smoke on a cold day or in the early morning. Don’t let the smoker rise above 100°F at all. If it gets too hot, open the door of the smoker or just take the links out.

If you can cold smoke, do that for up to a day.

(Note that typical Midwestern style venison summer sausage is hot smoked to cook. If you want that — it makes a sausage that goes bad quickly, but it might be closer to what you are familiar with — use Instacure no. 1 and smoke until cooked to an internal temperature of 155°F.)

Now you need to dry your sausages and turn them into summer sausage. Hang them in a place that is about 50°F to 60°F with about 80 to 90 percent humidity. In most cases you will need to put a humidifier under your links. I also spritz them with water once a day for the first 2 weeks.

After the first week of hanging, drop the humidity to 70 to 80 percent.

OK, for a typical Midwestern style venison summer sausage, you can stop here. Your links will still be kinda soft, but definitely tangy and half-dried. But if you want to go old school, and you can with this recipe, and make real boerenmetworst,keep going.

On the third week drop your humidity again to 65 to 70 percent and hold it there until a total of 4 to 8 weeks has elapsed since the sausage went into the chamber.

You now have boerenmetworst. To store long-term, vacuum seal them individually and keep in the fridge. They will last indefinitely this way, and the vacuum sealing will keep them from becoming rock hard. You can also freeze them until the Second Coming.