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 Step One - The Materials

For making sausage you will need a grinder, a sausage stuffing tube, two cutting plates (large and medium), a tub, meat, casings and seasoning.

Step Two - Prepare the casings

Whether you use hog casings (shown here) or collagen casings you need to first figure out how much you will need and then soak the casings for about an hour. This will ensure that the casings are pliable yet strong enough to withstand the stretching caused by stuffing.

Step Three - Prepare the meat

While your casings are soaking in water, you have time to prepare the meat. Take out your venison, or in this case mountain lion, and cut the meat into chunks suitable for your grinder. If you are using a cuisinart you will likely want your chunks much smaller than shown here. Since game meat has little fat and suasage requires a bunch, we added some pork fat back to the mixture. We wanted a 25% fat to meat ratio and weighed the meat accodingly.

Step Four - The first grind

I prefer to double grind the meat to help break up any sinew or stringyness found with game meat. It also helps to mix the fat in uniformly. Here we have ground the meat and fat together into a meat tub using our Thunderbird 600 3/4 hp electric grinder.

Step Five - Season the meat

Seasoning is about as much an art as shooting the critter in the first place. There are many wonderful recipes out there but I always take the lazy way out and simply mix in a pre-mixed sausage making packet by backwoods seasonings. For their hot sausage (not hot by my standards) I augment the mixture with a sprinkle on spice called 'death rain' that is sure to liven up any party.

Note: I use 150% of the recommended mixture rate on backwoods seasoning.

Step Six - Wash the casings

By now about an hour has passed and your casings are sufficiently rehydrated. It is strongly advised that you thoroughly wash the casings before using them. Washing them is easy, you just thread one end over the faucet spout and turn on the water. You will see the water fill up the casing and flush out the opposite end. Do this for about a minute per casing with warm water and your casing will be ready to eat.

Step Seven - Thread the casings

Be sure to take off your retaining ring on the grinder and insert the sausage stuffing tube. Once that is on firmly, simply thread the casings all the way onto your tube.

Step Eight - Fill up the tube

To eliminate air pockets, turn on your grinder and push the meat to the end of the tube. Once it reaches the end, turn it off.

 Step Ten - Stuff the casings.

Turn on your grinder and slowly let the casings feed out on their own. The amount of pressure you hold will determine how dense your sausage will be stuffed, I prefer a well packed sausage and let it bulge a bit before allowing it to feed out. Once your casings and meat are gone, you are done. I usually make several different batches including hot, sweet

Click here to see a 600k video clip of the feeding process