Last year, some homesteader friends of mine who live out in the coast range gifted me with many pounds of frozen bear meat. It was so delicious, that it was very hard for me to ration it out. There were bear steaks, the bear ribs that went into a mouth watering Ethiopian dish at Thanksgiving, bear lard for pie crusts, and then there were some 20 pounds of random bits of bear meat. I had big plans to make sausages, and life kept getting away from me. Thank goodness for chest freezers. Over the spring, my friend John helped me experiment with recipes using ground pork, and we had many hit and miss sausage tasting sessions. Finally, we got the recipe just right, got our casings and pork fat from the butcher, and decided to give it a grind.
Let me tell you that chopping up 20 pounds of bear meat took a good long while. Then it was on to chopping the pork fat. Meanwhile, John and Logan were running the bear meat through the meat grinder. Bear is pretty muscly, so it had to be run through several times.
Then the fat was added in and it was run through all together.
What we ended up with were many large bowls of bear.
The spice mixture was all measured out and blended together from the day before, so without further ado, we each took a bowl and started hand mixing a third of the spices in. It’s quite a sensation to stick your hands into a bowl of ground meat. Then we did one final sausage taste test by frying up a little ball from each bowl, and the consensus was that we had some mighty fine sausage ready to be stuffed. 27 pounds of it!
I was glad that John had previous experience working with the sausage casings and his stuffer, because it looked a little tricky to me. The first batch of casings (cleaned pig intestine) came from a local meat market all nice and ready on a plastic stick, but we ran out in the middle and had to get some from a grocery store meat department that had yet to be worked with. All three of us worked together filling the stuffer, pressing the handle, feeding the sausage through into the casings and twisting them off. It’s imporant to remember to twist the opposite direction on each end so it doesn’t undo the other. By the end of the day, we had stuffed 79 bear bratwursts. Not bad for a Sunday afternoon’s work. Now I just need to find some time to make sauerkraut again.
For those folks who just happen to have a bear sitting around in their freezer or are inclined to go wrestle one down in the woods, here is the recipe we came up with. We multiplied it accordingly for the 20 pounds of bear meat.
Bear Bratwurst
3.5 Lb bear meat
1.5 Lb pork fat
5 tsp salt
1 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp mustard
2 tsp pepper
1 tsp marjoram
3 tsp ginger
2 tsp sage
1/2 tsp coriander
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp dried onion flakes
1/2 tsp celery seed
1 tsp corn starch
1 Tbsp milk powder
1/4 cup ale
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