Ground hog makes a great sausage. Bone the meat and run through a grinder. If it is too lean to stick together, ( Make a small ball with your hands to test ), add some pork fat you can get at the local IGA or meat market. Beef suet will do, but Its nice if you keep the flavors in the same family.
Season the meat to your taste. For each pound of meat, add:
1 tablespoon of Morton's Curing salt
3/4 Teaspoon of Liquid Smoke.
1/4 cup water.
Spices can be as you like, but a good mild summer sausage will use garlic powder, coarse pepper, 1/2 teaspoon each per pound, mustard seed-1/2 tsp. per pound, Again, adjust the spices to your taste. You can add anything in any amounts you like.
Mix The meat and spices thoroughly, then roll in Saran Wrap or any plastic wrap, to make a tubular sausage. Again, you pick how big the sausage is going to be. Refrigerate for at least 24 hours, rotating the meat every 12 hours, so you don't get a flat side. This rotation is also crucial so that the curing salt " cooks" the sausage evenly. The roll will develope a crust that will hold it together after 24 hours, a good indicator that the chemical cooking process is done. Remove the sausages from the plastic wrap, and re-wrap in alum foil. Put on a cookie sheet, and bake at 300 degrees F. for 1 1/2 hours, rotating the sausages again at 45 minutes. Salts will work to the surface during the baking, and fat will melt and drip out, either escaping the foil, or congealing on the outside of the sausage.
When you remove the sausage from the oven, let cool, and then remove from the foil and wash and scrub the fat and salts off the outside of the sausage. The sausages will be a red color. Pat the sausages dry with paper towels, and then re-wrap with foil, and plastic wrap, for storage, in the freezer, or in your refrigerator. This sausage is so good that its next to impossible to keep it very long in your refrigerator for all the people including yourself who will be nibbling on it. You can fry slices in gravy or in butter to go with morning eggs, or what have you. The sausage makes a great sandwich. Gound hog gets its name mainly because its flesh is so pink its almost white, like pork, and the flavor is sweet, like pork. For those of you living near the tree line in the Western US, Marmots are of the same family, and also make a fine sausage. Woodchuck, ground hog, whistle pig, etc. all get those names because of the taste of their flesh. A friend used this recipe to do 5 ground hogs, he shot in June, one year, and could not thank me enough for the recipe.
The same recipe can be used to make sausage from ground beef, pork, or a combination of the two. I use it with ground venison, and I am sure any wild game could make a fine sausage. The benefit of this sausage recipe is that you don't need a sausage press, nor do you need fetal pig intestines, or casings, which are really expensive, to make sausage. Plastic wrap works fine. Its the liquid smoke, and curing salts that cook the sausage to shape.
Bon Appetit !
