Making Your Own Venison Brats

Making your own Venison Brats is not hard, but does take a few trials to find the ultimate taste you prefer. I recommend you visit a local butcher shop for purchasing your mixed spices as they have already perfected the seasoning. You will also find that the spices will cost much less then purchasing them in a store. The butcher shop should also have other mixed spices like Summer Sausage and Pepper Sticks.

Purchasing Brat Spices, Casings, And Your Pork

Purchase your spices from a local butcher store. The butcher shop will mix them for you and let you know how much water to add (Make sure to add your water to your spices and mix well before adding it to your meat). When I buy mine, I purchase enough for 20 pounds of brats at a time, which is approximately 1.3 pounds of spice mix at a cost of $5 -$7. Purchase your pork at a local grocery store and look for specials, you should be able to get pork shoulder or butt roasts for $1.86 to $2.18 a pound. For your brat casings you will want to use Hog casings, they are easy to use and tough, so they will not break easily. A package of casting for 25 lbs of brats will typically make much more. So don’t soak all the casings at once until you know how many you really need.

How Much Venison And Pork To Use

Here is the recipe I use, but you will need to do a few trials to get the right percentages for your taste. Grind your venison, pork, and bacon separate on coarse grind, then mix then by hand and grind them together on fine grind. This Venison to Pork ratio mix is 40% Venison, 50% Pork with 10% Bacon added to it. A Butcher shop will use as much as a 4 (pork) to 1 (venison) ratio, but I have found this to be too much and it will be too fatty. You may want to start with a 2 (Pork) to 1 (Venison) and try 5 pounds of total sausage before doing large batches.

50% – 10 lbs of Pork
40% – 8 lbs of Venison
10% – 2 lbs of Hickory Smoked Bacon.
Spice mix for 20 lbs of Brats, mixed well with water before mixing with your meat.

How To Prepare Your Brats Before Freezing

The first thing I have found is, NOT to twist your brats as you’re stuffing them. This takes time and they have the tendency to un-twist as you are making them. You will also want to put your stuffed Brats into the refrigerator for 12 hours to allow the seasonings to work before cooking or storing. Now that they have sit in the refrigerator overnight take them out, twist them to the desired lengths, place them in vacuum seal bags, and freeze or cook a few. See how to make Summer Sausage!