Carne Asada Pronghorn

Carne Asada Pronghorn. When translated directly to English, carne asada means "grilled meat." However, the term in Spanish can mean several things. Carne refers to meat and asada refers to barbeque techniques as well as idea of social gatherings that occur when a barbeque is held. So the term can not only refer to the actual grilling of meats, but also to the idea of a social gathering to share and enjoy a family meal.

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"My favorite memories growing up in North Carolina were hunting and fishing with my father and brothers. There, I developed a deep appreciation for protecting land and waterways. There, I learned outdoorsmanship." ~ Louis BaconCarn

I found this second definition particularly thought-provoking. Gathering to share a meal with good company is a universal language and a tradition important to many cultures. In the United States, we have holidays dedicated to just this tradition. At Thanksgiving, families and friends gather to share recipes, stories, and traditions around a table stuffed with turkey, mashed potatoes, and whatever casserole has been passed through the family for generations. In Mexico, families gather to show respect for the departed during Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) by constructing altars in their homes. The altars are adorned with the deceased's favorite foods, drinks, and treats. In Italy, the Feast of Seven Fishes is celebrated on Christmas Eve. This dining event, which dates back to Medieval times, hosts a seven course meal centered entirely around fish. The list is endless and includes all cultures.

Barbeques are just simpler versions of these usually oversized traditions. I know for myself, if I am going to fire up the grill I suddenly start inviting the entire neighborhood. It doesn't matter how last minute the plans are, or how simple the meal is going to be. If I am just throwing a couple of burgers on, I still feel the need to invite my parents over. If I am preparing some grilled kabobs, I am also calling my friends over to share in the event. Barbeque just begs for you to call up friends, share some stories, and enjoy an evening out in the backyard.

I had never made carne asada before. I have tried it several times in different restaurants, and it is always good. When I started looking for some different recipes on how to prepare the meat, I came across the origin and definition of the word carne asada. That translation of "social gathering" made the meal seem even more special. And in true barbequing fashion, I called my family and invited everyone over for an evening of carne asada, story sharing, and a break in the backyard from the rest of the world. Ahhhh, nothing like a backyard barbeque!

A little trick I learned awhile ago is when mincing garlic you can also just grate it with a plane file. This is a bit faster than mincing and you don't have to dirty an entire cutting board just for garlic.

Traditionally, carne asada is prepared from beef steak. The cuts used are usually the more tender steaks, such as skirt, flank, or flap steak. The meat marinades for at least 24 hours, but sometimes for a couple of days. It is grilled over an open flame at a high temperature in order to char the flavors of the marinade and seal in the juices. After searing the meat, it is cooked to well-done. It is typically served on a tortilla with salsa, guacamole, beans, and onions.

Putting the steaks in a Ziploc bag make for easy storage in the fridge. It also creates an easy way to really massage the marinade into the meat.

To create a twist on the traditional carne asada, I decided to make it using pronghorn! Pronghorn is an amazing meat to use for carne asada. It is extremely tender, and takes the marinade really well. For this recipe, I used two cuts of some backstrap and then also a flank steak. It was about two pounds worth of meat, perfect for sharing with a group of six.

The key to a great carne asada is allowing the meat plenty of time to marinade. I set my marinating meat in the fridge 24 hours before I was planning on grilling it. If you are pressed for time, or just decide you want to make this the morning before your barbeque, I think 12 hours would be fine. You could also go longer than 24 hours too.

There is no strict way to marinade carne asada. Different recipes call for different ingredients, and as with most marinades, you could also add things as you go along. I like to taste my marinades and then add to them as the flavors start to develop. Some marinades call for lemon and lime juice, Worcestershire sauce, and a variety of spice rubs. I like my carne asada to have a little heat to it, but also a subtle hint of sweetness.

For my marinade, I juiced two oranges, a lemon, and two limes. To the juice, I added half of cup of coconut aminos, which is where the little bit of sweetness comes from, four cloves of garlic, three tablespoons of chipotle sauce, chili powder, cumin, oregano, black pepper, and sweet paprika. I chopped up a handful of cilantro and then whisked in a half a cup of extra virgin olive oil. Set aside a cup of the marinade for serving alongside the meat. I placed the cuts of meat in a large freezer bag, poured the marinade in, gave everything a nice massage, and placed it in the fridge for the next day.

Preheat the grill really hot. I got mine up to about 550 Fahrenheit. I also have one other little tip before you throw the meat on the grill. Pull the meat out of the fridge about fifteen or twenty minutes before you are going to start cooking. Allow the meat to come to room temperature. This will take the cool from the fridge off the meat and allow you to get a more even heat throughout the steaks. Place the steaks directly on the heat source and cook on each side for one to two minutes. You are looking for grill marks and even a little char on the steaks.

After searing the steaks, move them to an area on the grill with less direct heat. This may be off to the side, away from the flame, or you may have an upper rack level on your grill. My grill has this upper rack, so I moved them there. Close the lid and allow the steaks to slow cook for a few more minutes. How long you allow them to cook will depend on the steaks' thickness. My steaks were about an inch to an inch and a half thick, so I cooked them for seven to ten minutes. Once the steaks reached medium, which I tested with a meat thermometer, I pulled them. Place aluminum foil over the steaks, creating kind of a tent with the foil, and allow them to sit for five more minutes. Allowing the meat to sit for a few minutes gives them a chance to finish cooking, which brought my steaks to about medium-well, and also helps to seal in the juices. If you cut the steaks immediately after pulling them off the grill, the juices rush out of the steak and that is a very sad thing! The meat will also be easier to cut if you let it cool down a bit, and you won't tear it with the knife.

Working across the grain of the meat, slice the steak into quarter-inch thick slices.

To serve the carne asada, lightly grill up some corn tortillas. You could also use flour if you prefer them. Place a few slices of meat on the tortilla and pile on your favorite toppings. I sliced up some fresh jalapenos for extra heat. I also offered more fresh cilantro, grilled bell peppers and onions, shredded cabbage, salsa, sour cream, guacamole, and queso fresco. Oh! And don't forget to spoon on some of that marinade you set aside!  It is an amazing little pop of flavor!

Happy Hunting!

Yield 4-6

Author a 12 Gauge Girl

Prep time

10 Min

Cook time

12 Min

Inactive time

24 Hour

Total time

24 H & 22 M

Print

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Carne Asada Pronghorn

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Grilled Pronghorn steak is marinated in oranges, lemons and limes with a smoky chipotle finish. Perfect for tacos, fajitas, burritos, or salads.

Ingredients

For Marinade

• 2 pounds pronghorn steaks
• 2 oranges, juiced
• 1 lemon, juiced
• 2 limes, juiced
• 1/2 cup coconut aminos (If you can't find this, you could also use soy sauce. It just won't add the slight sweetness coconut aminos will)
• 4 cloves garlic, grated
• 3 tablespoons chipotle sauce
• 1 tablespoon chili powder
• 1 tablespoon cumin
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• 1 tablespoon sweet paprika
• 1 tablespoon black pepper
• 1 cup chopped cilantro
• 1/2 olive oil

Toppings for carne asada

• Tortillas, corn or flour
• Shredded cabbage
• Salsa
• Sour Cream
• Guacamole
• Grilled Onions
• Grilled Bell Peppers
• Queso Fresco
• Chopped Fresh Cilantro
• Sliced Jalapenos

Instructions

1. Start your meat marinating 24 hours before you plan on grilling.
2. For the marinade, add the orange juice, lemon juice, and lime juice to a medium size bowl. Add coconut aminos, grated garlic, chipotle sauce, chili powder, cumin, black pepper, paprika, and oregano to the bowl.
3. Chop and drop in the cilantro.
4. While whisking, slowly drizzle in the olive oil. Whisk until fully incorporated.
5. Set aside one cup of the marinade for serving with the meat.
6. In a large freezer bag, add the steaks and marinade. Massage gently and place in fridge for 24 hours.
7. When ready to grill, set the meat out about fifteen minutes before hand.
8. Preheat the grill to 550 degrees.
9. Place steaks directly on heat source. Sear meat for one minute per side. You are looking for grill marks and char.
10. Move the steaks to an area with less direct heat, such as the sides of the grill or an upper rack. Close the lid and allow to cook for seven to ten minutes, depending on the thickness of the meat and how well-done you desire the steaks.
11. Remove the meat from the grill and tent with aluminum foil. Allow to sit for five minutes.
12. Thinly slice steaks and serve with desired toppings on tortillas!

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Wild Game Bone Broth French Onion Soup

Wild Game Bone Broth French Onion Soup. After the sun has pulled the covers up and tucked itself in for the nigh and the cold starts to set in, does anything sound better than warm soup? I don’t think I feel happier and cozier than when I have my hands wrapped around a steaming bowl of French onion soup topped with gooey, melty gruyere cheese and homemade wild game bone broth.

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Wild Game Bone Broth French Onion Soup

French onion soup is an OLD dish. Like think 8,000 years old. There are many different versions of how it first came around, but my favorite is the one where King Louis XV returns from deer hunting to bare cupboards. He rounds up some onions, butter, and champagne (which seems odd that his cupboards are bare, but champagne is around, but anyway), throws it all in a pot, and voila, French onion soup is born.

French onion soup was commonly considered the food of the poor because onions were cheap, easy to grow, and plentiful throughout Europe. The soup became popular in the 1960s in America along with the nation-wide trend of French cuisine in general.

To me, if French onion soup is the food of the poor, I don’t want to be rich. It’s one of my favorite meals. The ingredients are simple and easy to find, but the flavor developed from simply simmering caramelized onions in silky bone broth is downright amazing!

So, without wasting more time, let’s make Wild Game Bone Both French Onion Soup!

The Wild Game Bone Broth

You can make this recipe with store-bought beef broth, which is fine, but this is a wild game website, so I am going to share really quick (like the condensed, superfast version) how I make homemade wild game bone broth. I make a huge batch at one time from any of the bones I have in the freezer. Many times, the broth will be a combination of elk, deer, and pronghorn bones.

I roast the bones in a 400-degree Fahrenheit oven for one hour. I also do two or three onions, just cut in half and you don’t even have to remove the skin, and a couple of big chunks of ginger, I don’t even peel it.

After the bones are roasted, I put them, the onions, ginger, about six carrots, a bunch of celery, a couple of star anise pods, and a handful of whole cloves into a large stock pot. I cover everything with water, so this could end up being up to 24 cups of water if the pot is large like mine, and let it start simmering for hours. When I say hours, I mean like six. I reduce the liquid by about three quarters. Pour through a fine mesh sieve and scrape any fat from the top.

I don’t add salt to my bone broth. I just salt it when I use it so I can get it the way I like. Also, because it is so concentrated after hours of simmering, it doesn’t take up much room in the freezer. I freeze it in little pint-sized containers and then when I use for a recipe later, I add back in the water. So, for a pint of broth, I would add eight to twelve cups of water back in, depending on what I am doing.

Let’s Make French Onion Soup

Now that the broth is ready, it is time to start the onions. To a large skillet over medium heat, add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, enough to coat the entire base of a ceramic dutch oven, and a tablespoon of butter. Once the butter is melted, add the onions. I slice the onion into long strips for this soup.

Spread the onions out and make sure they are coated in the oil. Let them cook for ten minutes, stirring often to keep them from sticking to the pan or burning. If they are cooking too quickly, you may need to reduce the heat a little. You are looking for a slow caramelization here.

After ten minutes, sprinkle a tablespoon of salt over the onions to develop even more flavor. I also add a teaspoon of sugar. It helps with caramelizing. Cook for twenty minutes more.

Once the onions are golden, and caramel-y, and smell like heaven, they are ready. Deglaze the pan with a cup of wine, red or white will work here, and be sure to scrape all that flavorful goodness from the bottom of the pot.

Add the pint of reduce wild game bone broth and eight to twelve cups of water. Bring to a gentle boil, and we will add even more flavor to this dish! Add two tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, a tablespoon of Italian seasoning, and salt and pepper to taste.

Reduce the mixture for thirty minutes on a simmer. Add a quarter cup of sherry.

While your soup is doing its thing, toast sliced pieces of French baguette in the oven. I toast them under the broiler for five minutes. If you brush them with a little butter or olive oil first, you will get a beautiful, crunchy golden crust.

It’s time for the fun part: melting the cheese. Fill an oven safe ramekin with a cup or two of the French onion soup base. Nestle a few pieces of the toasted French bread into the soup, and then top it with shredded gruyere cheese. I do a ramekin per person.

Place the ramekins in the oven at 350 degrees for about ten minutes. The cheese should be melted and slightly browned (cue drool), and the broth slightly boiling. Aaaannnndddd…it’s time to eat!

Happy Hunting!

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Pronghorn Pumpkin Ale Chili

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Venison Stuffed Shells with Apple and Butternut Squash Sauce

I love the combination of squash and apples. The melded flavors are comforting, warm, savory, and just a little bit sweet. I think when the duo is mentioned many people think of a pie, a sweet and rich auburn pie served for Thanksgiving. But squash and apples don’t always have to be a dessert. They can create a rustic, homey dish like this Venison Stuffed Shells with Apple and Squash Sauce.

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This dish takes a little bit of time to pull together, but the end result is worth the effort. To start, cook a medium sized butternut squash in oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes. I cut the squash in half and place the squash cut side down on a large baking sheet. You can also line the sheet with aluminum for easier clean-up, as sometimes the squash weeps a little when roasting.

Remove the squash from the oven and let cool slightly before handling. I like to play Russian roulette with the squash and try to pick it up before it has properly cooled, usually resulting in burned hands, but that’s just me.

While the squash is cooling, prepare the venison sausage for stuffing the shells with. In a large skillet over medium heat, add some cooking oil, I like to use olive oil for this particular recipe but work with what you have. Once the oil is heated, add a medium diced onion and cook for five to seven minutes, or until the onion is soft. Next, add in the venison Italian sausage.

I make my own sausage. I grind the venison with bacon ends at a ratio of 80% meat to 20% bacon ends. This gives the sausage a nice fat content that isn’t overly greasy or fatty, but keeps the sausage moist when cooking. I season the sausage with salt, black pepper, crushed red pepper flake, Italian seasoning, allspice, garlic and onion powder, and plenty of fennel seed. I also add touch of brown sugar to sweeten it up a bit.

This recipe requires a pound of venison Italian sausage. Add the sausage to the onions and cook thoroughly, about five to seven minutes again. Once the sausage is cooked through, add a half cup of chopped pecans, a tablespoon of fresh minced sage, and a tablespoon of fresh minced rosemary. Stir together, turn off the heat, and set aside to cool.

While the sausage mixture is cooling, cook your pasta shells. I used jumbo pasta shells for this recipe, but you could also use manicotti. If you are really ambitious, you could make these into raviolis as well. Cook the shells to al dente, where they are soft but not falling apart.

Drain the shells and set aside to cool. As with the butternut squash, I played Russian roulette with the shells and tried to stuff them before they were cool enough for handling. It didn’t feel great.

Wow there are a lot of steps here, but bear with me, it is going to be worth it. Return to the cooled sausage mixture and mix in a container of ricotta cheese. Set that aside.

Back the squash! Scoop the squash guts into a blender and add a little salt and pepper for flavor and half cup to three quarters of a cup of stock. I used a vegetable stock. You could use chicken too if that is what you have on hand. If you were really fancy, this would also be a perfect opportunity to throw in some homemade bone broth.

Blend the butternut squash into a smooth puree. It should still hold together, so add the liquid slowly until you reach a consistency similar to the applesauce. Add the butternut squash puree to a large skillet with a cup of unsweet apple sauce. Turn the heat on medium low and stir until the sauces are combined. Slowly drizzle in a quarter cup of heavy cream and stir until a smooth, creamy, orange sauce forms. Add a cup of parmesan cheese and mix until completely melted.

Stuff the shells with the sausage mixture. Spoon a quarter of the apple and butternut squash sauce into the bottom of a 9x13 baking dish. Set the stuffed shells on top of the sauce. Once all the shells are set, pour the remaining apple and butternut squash sauce over the top and then sprinkle on a layer of mozzarella cheese. Bake in a 350 degree Fahrenheit preheated oven for 30 minutes, until the cheese is gooey and the sauce is bubbling!

And now! Time to enjoy! This dish is creamy, rich, and savory. It has hints of squash and apple layered with cheesy goodness and fresh herbs. It is one of my favorite dishes to serve for a crowd because it is easy to make large batches and is incredibly filling.

Happy Hunting!

If You Like This Dish, You Might Also Like….

Wild Turkey Tagliatelle

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Elk Reaper Summer Sausage

My favorite boating snack is definitely summer sausage, Ritz cracker, and a slice of cheddar cheese. It’s actually my favorite hiking snack. And fishing snack. And hunting snack. And sitting on the porch at the end of the day snack. And bored at home snack. It’s just the best snack. It’s even better when it’s made from your own harvested wild game too! And it’s even better than that when you add home grown Carolina Reaper peppers for Reaper Elk Summer Sausage.

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I started making my own summer sausage about a year ago. Store bought is okay. Getting it from a butcher is better than store bought. Having a butcher that processes wild game make you some from your own meat is even better than that. But the best is absolutely making it yourself. You get to control the salt level, the cuts of meat that go into it, the fat content, and the spices.

I feared the summer sausage process to begin. It seemed daunting. I also had a really difficult time finding a solid recipe online. And smoke times and temperatures? Almost impossible to find. I got incredibly lucky that a person on Instagram reached out to me and shared smoke times and temperatures.

So, after a few practice runs and some recipe perfecting, I am ready to share my Reaper Elk Summer Sausage recipe.

Homemade summer sausage is pretty easy to pull off, but there are a few tricks that make it turn out fantastic instead of just good. First tip: keep your meat and fat very cold! This is one of the most important steps for making summer sausage. If things get to warm while you are working the fat will separate and ruin the texture of your final product. So, between each step of mixing and grinding I stick the meat into the fridge for about thirty minutes.

Okay, let’s start making some Reaper Elk Summer Sausage. Following the first tip of summer sausage making, start with cold meat and cold fat. This recipe will make four summer sausage sticks that are two and a half pounds each. I do a ratio of 20% fat to 80% meat. So, for this recipe you need eight pounds of wild game meat of your choosing and 2 pounds of fat.

For the fat, most people prefer pork fat. I have never had the opportunity to work with pork fat as it seems nearly impossible to acquire. I have asked the local supermarkets and butcher, and all that is ever available is beef fat. So, I have only used beef fat, but it works great in my opinion.

For this recipe, I used elk for the meat. I have also done deer, bear, and pronghorn. They all turned out amazing. So, use whatever is in your freezer and you won’t be disappointed.

Run your meat and fat through a grinder using a coarse plate first. I used an 8mm grind plate. I also have a very inexpensive meat grinder. I love it. It didn’t break the bank, doesn’t take up much space, and is convenient enough to use I can just pull it off the shelf and grind up fresh burger meat at a moment’s notice. The grinder I am currently using, and have for quite a few years, is just this one: Cabelas Deluxe Meat Grinder.

Give the meat a quick mix to get the fat and meat incorporated. It is also time to add the spices now! I love the spice mixture for this Reaper Elk Summer Sausage. It obviously is spicy. The Carolina Reapers add a slow building heat to sausage that definitely lights your mouth up for a bit, but if you like a little kick you will thoroughly enjoy the reapers.

The allspice and cloves add a little sweetness and a slight touch of bitter, which pairs wonderfully with the heat from the Carolina Reapers. Pair that heat, sweet, and touch of bitter with the tang from the fermenting agent for summer sausage and you have one tasty snack on your hands.

Continuing on, to your meat and fat mixture add six tablespoons of kosher salt, 4 tablespoons of dextrose, and two teaspoons of pink salt #1. The pink salt extends the shelf life of cured meats, gives everything that pretty red hue, and assists in the prevention of spoilage from bacteria. Dextrose is added to cured meats to feed the lactic acid organisms that create that wonderfully tangy fermented flavor.

Once you have your salts and dextrose mixed in add your seasoning agents: 1 tablespoon of dry yellow mustard, 3 teaspoons of garlic powder, two teaspoons of ground ginger, 2 teaspoons of coriander, one tablespoon of allspice, and two teaspoons of ground cloves.

Next add your mustard seeds. Most people put in about two tablespoons. I eyeball it because I love the texture the seeds add to the summer sausage. I do more like three tablespoons. I also add more freshly cracked black pepper for the same reason. You don’t want to completely over-do it with the pepper because it can change the flavor of the summer sausage, but I do more like a tablespoon while others recommend less.  

Finally, it’s time to add your heat! The Carolina Reapers I used for this recipe were from my home garden. I dried them in a window for two months and then ground them into a powder. This recipe used three dried Carolina Reapers, which worked out to one pepper per 3.33 pounds of meat. This is equated to a teaspoon of powder for the entire recipe.  I would recommend some gloves at this point.

This recipe is for lovers of the heat! You can adjust the level of heat to fit your personal preference. To drop the heat level, you could add less of the Carolina reapers or use a different type of pepper, such as a habanero, serrano, or jalapeno. If you aren’t a fan of heat at all you can omit the pepper completely.

Get everything mixed really well. If you use your hands, I suggest wearing gloves because of the peppers.

Alright, time for the final steps before we place our meat back in the fridge: the fermenter. There are lots of different types of fermenting agents available. One of the more popular ones is Fermento. I used pediococcus culture. I ordered it online. It is a little spendy, but you can make pounds and pounds of summer sausage from one bag.

There are lots of different options for pediococcus culture. All of them provide protection against listeria and such; however, they all produce different results as far as the sourness of your finished product. There are some that will make your summer sausage very sour and tangy, and others that are much less so. I used a one that created a little less sour flavor since I was adding so many other spices to this summer sausage.

The pediococcus culture needs to be kept in the freezer to survive. You also shouldn’t handle it with bare hands. For ten pounds of summer sausage, I mixed ¾ cup of water with 3 teaspoons of dextrose. I then mixed in 3/8 a teaspoon of the pediococcus culture. Stir until the dextrose is dissolved and then pour over your meat mixture. Mix everything together.

Now that the spices have been added and the fermenting agent, place the meat mixture back in the fridge for thirty minutes to cool the meat back down.

After the meat has cooled, run the entire batch through the grinder a second time on a smaller grind plate. I used a 4.5mm plate. Place the meat back in the fridge to cool once again. I let it sit another thirty minutes even though the meat hadn’t warmed up too much this time. I wanted everything to be nice and cool for packaging the summer sausage.

Switch the grinding plate out for the stuffing accessories. You also need to let your summer sausage casing soak for ten minutes in the sink. This recipe makes basically logs of summer sausage and I then cut them down into smaller blocks before vacuum packing, but the actual casings are quite large. I used the 2 and ½ by 18-inch collagen casings.

It’s time to stuff casings, which leads us to our second tip: pack the casing very tight. Like as tight as you possibly can! The tighter the better.

Once all the summer sausage is packaged, place the logs in the fridge to relax overnight. I didn’t want overly sour summer sausage, so I let mine sit for one evening. If you like sourer flavor, let them sit for two nights before smoking.

So, once you have let the summer sausage ferment and do its thing, it’s time to smoke! Finally!

Preheat the smoker to 135 to 145 Fahrenheit and add your wood of choice. I have a pellet smoker and used applewood to smoke the summer sausage. The third tip for summer sausage success is to use a meat thermometer throughout the smoking process. You want to know the internal temperature of your sausage, so you know when you increase the heat of the smoker and when to pull the meat.

This is a cool temperature smoke for a pellet smoker.   I ended up placing tin foil on the rack to direct all the smoke directly at the temperature control probe and then added a rack about an inch off of the tinfoil to create an insulating air layer to prevent the heat from the fire box directly going at the sausage.  I then used the probes to monitor the air temperature at each end of the sausage.  This ended up working perfect as the control probe is at the opposite end of the stack, so it ended up blowing the smoke across the sausage lengthwise.  I know this is confusing.  If you need help, email me and I can walk you through it.  This was also done in the winter.  I do not know that a pellet grill would work in the summer.

Keep the smoker at 140 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour. This is essentially the “drying” stage of summer sausage. The meat temperature should not raise a lot during this stage of cooking.  Keep at this until the internal sausage temp is 80 to 85 degrees.

After about an hour, kick the heat up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. This is when you will start to get a lot more of the smoke saturation. I let the sausage smoke at 160 degrees for about an hour.  The internal temperature should be 140 at the end of this cycle.

Finally, kick the heat up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit and finish cooking the summer sausage. This is where watching the internal temperature is most important. Pull the sausages from the cooker once the internal temperature reaches 154 degrees. This step can take a few hours, anywhere from two to three. A lot of factors affect the cooking time, such as how tightly packed the casing are, the type of meat used, moisture content of the meat, and I’m sure so many other things we don’t even realize. That is why it is important to pull the summer sausage by internal temperature and not cooking time.

Alright, time for the final tip! Immediately upon removing the summer sausage from the smoker, plunge the sausages into cold water. This will help set the meat, resulting in a much better final texture, and makes removing the casings easier.

You don’t have to keep the sausages in the water long, a few minutes is good enough. Before packaging the sausage for storage, let them cool completely, which takes about an hour. To store, I cut them into chunks that I would use for taking on a hike or serving at a party, which is about six-inch-long pieces. I then vacuum package the chunks for freezing. I started vacuum packing the sausage because the first time I made them I just loosely wrapped them in plastic wrap and stuck them in the freezer and they freezer burned after a month. I didn’t take into consideration that the casings are permeable, which I felt I should have thought about because I knew the sausage absorbed smoke so well during the cooking process. Anyway, they freezer burned, which I hate, so I started vacuum packing them after that experience.

Anyway, that is my recipe and process for creating this Reaper Elk Summer Sausage.

Happy Hunting!