Best use for Venison roundsteak, for sausage?

[Dave in AZ]

I've got 15 lbs or so of venison round and shank. Loin is separate. I'm trying to decide something good to do with it, the "best" use. Looking for suggestions. Here is what I normally do, and why I'm not feeling them just now:
1. Snack sticks. Normally 50% venison, 50% pork. Most often Willie's seasoning. But my family is tired of snacksticks or spicy sticks. Other main is kabanosy.
2. Jerky. Same as above.
3. Venison summer sausage. I like Marianski's basic spice version much better than cheese/jalapeno/whatever versions. But it turns out, I'm not a huge fan of SS flavor anyways.

Here's what I'm leaning towards, and hoping you folks have tried one of these and can talk to how good they are:
1. Hotdogs, probably 50% pork. Unsure which recipes are best with venison-- franks, weiner, hotdog? But I have 70 or so left and family tired of hotdogs.
2. Bologna, some kind of 1.5" diameter or so.
3. Some kind of TX hotlink or Czech style, but venison instead of beef?

What do you folks suggest?

 

[Gonna Smoke]

For the round or hind quarter, if you haven't done so, break it down into the different muscles, trim well of all silver skin/connective tissue and slice for whole muscle jerky or cubed steak. The rest would end up in summer sausage with pork and/or beef fat in the 30% range. I have several deer loins that I need to do something with myself right now. Haven't made Tx Hotlinks yet, but they sound good and I would think venison would work as well as beef, just need more fat...

Edit to add that there's always burger...

 

[indaswamp]

Venison shanks are really not a good candidate for sausage due to the extensive connective tissue and tendons in them. Best use IMO is either braised whole like Osso Bucco or sliced into chunks and used as stew meat.

 

[Brokenhandle]

The round can be cubed and made into chislic. Any shank meat is best for a long ride in crock pot as indaswamp mentioned.

Ryan

 

[Fueling Around]

The round haunch makes wonderful dried venison. Hopefully the yuck packet was removed.
Braise the shank.

 

[Gonna Smoke]

Best use IMO is either braised whole like Osso Bucco

Osso Bucco is on my short list, but like tri-tip, beef shank is hard to find around here...

 

[Timber II]

X2 ossobucco for the shank.

 

[tallbm]

I've got 15 lbs or so of venison round and shank. Loin is separate. I'm trying to decide something good to do with it, the "best" use. Looking for suggestions. Here is what I normally do, and why I'm not feeling them just now:
1. Snack sticks. Normally 50% venison, 50% pork. Most often Willie's seasoning. But my family is tired of snacksticks or spicy sticks. Other main is kabanosy.
2. Jerky. Same as above.
3. Venison summer sausage. I like Marianski's basic spice version much better than cheese/jalapeno/whatever versions. But it turns out, I'm not a huge fan of SS flavor anyways.

Here's what I'm leaning towards, and hoping you folks have tried one of these and can talk to how good they are:
1. Hotdogs, probably 50% pork. Unsure which recipes are best with venison-- franks, weiner, hotdog? But I have 70 or so left and family tired of hotdogs.
2. Bologna, some kind of 1.5" diameter or so.
3. Some kind of TX hotlink or Czech style, but venison instead of beef?

What do you folks suggest?

From your list I lean towards the TX or Czech style sausage. Though your family may not be into too hot of a hot link. Also good luck finding a decent Czech kolbasy recipe. I grew up in a town founded by Czech folks and not a single one of the sausage makers would ever share jack crap about the klobasy seasoning recipes hahahaha.

If you want a non sausage alternative, the venison top round and bottom round make for really good marinated fajita cuts. Especially the bottom round!
A rock solid simple seasoning is season them a little heavily with black pepper, granulated garlic, dehydrated onion, chili powder. Add a few light shakes of ground cumin to each side of them. No salt at this point.
Make sure you have about 3-4 pounds of meat and throw in a bag or bowl and add 2 cups of REAL pineapple juice (NOT from concentrate, Dole in the can is real) and 1 cup of Soy sauce (this is your salt).
Marinate 12-24 hours.
Grill hot to medium rare like fajitas and heavily mop that same sauce on them that last 1/2 or 1/3 of the cook and before they come off.

I LOVE doing this with my venison bottom and top round roasts. The bottom round is better but often way smaller than the top round. Both will work well.


Finally, I'm also 110% in on braising the venison shanks. Once I started doing this, the shanks pretty much became my favorite part of the deer... yep I said it lol.
You can cut the shank and heal meat off the bone or if you have a good easy sawing mechanism then just saw to where the bones are manageable size. These days I just remove the meat from the bone so I can easily vac seal it. Just know with the bone the braise is even better!

I then cut up some roma tomatoes, whatever onion is on sale, get some garlic or use granulated garlic, and a cheap wine (Carlos Rossi Burgandy gallon has been holding up for years hahaha).
Braise that at like 300-325F in the oven tightly covered with all of that in pan and you will have heaven once it all renders down and falls apart at the touch of a fork.
When done and fall apart tender, remove the meat and add all the liquid and veggies to a blender and blend. That will make the braise gravy.
Return sauce and meat to the pan and then serve over rice, noodles, or mash potatoes. My favorite is rice.
You will now start kicking yourself for every shank you throw out or used in a way other than this :P

 

[Dave in AZ]

From your list I lean towards the TX or Czech style sausage. Though your family may not be into too hot of a hot link. Also good luck finding a decent Czech kolbasy recipe. I grew up in a town founded by Czech folks and not a single one of the sausage makers would ever share jack crap about the klobasy seasoning recipes hahahaha.

If you want a non sausage alternative, the venison top round and bottom round make for really good marinated fajita cuts. Especially the bottom round!
A rock solid simple seasoning is season them a little heavily with black pepper, granulated garlic, dehydrated onion, chili powder. Add a few light shakes of ground cumin to each side of them. No salt at this point.
Make sure you have about 3-4 pounds of meat and throw in a bag or bowl and add 2 cups of REAL pineapple juice (NOT from concentrate, Dole in the can is real) and 1 cup of Soy sauce (this is your salt).
Marinate 12-24 hours.
Grill hot to medium rare like fajitas and heavily mop that same sauce on them that last 1/2 or 1/3 of the cook and before they come off.

I LOVE doing this with my venison bottom and top round roasts. The bottom round is better but often way smaller than the top round. Both will work well.


Finally, I'm also 110% in on braising the venison shanks. Once I started doing this, the shanks pretty much became my favorite part of the deer... yep I said it lol.
You can cut the shank and heal meat off the bone or if you have a good easy sawing mechanism then just saw to where the bones are manageable size. These days I just remove the meat from the bone so I can easily vac seal it. Just know with the bone the braise is even better!

I then cut up some roma tomatoes, whatever onion is on sale, get some garlic or use granulated garlic, and a cheap wine (Carlos Rossi Burgandy gallon has been holding up for years hahaha).
Braise that at like 300-325F in the oven tightly covered with all of that in pan and you will have heaven once it all renders down and falls apart at the touch of a fork.
When done and fall apart tender, remove the meat and add all the liquid and veggies to a blender and blend. That will make the braise gravy.
Return sauce and meat to the pan and then serve over rice, noodles, or mash potatoes. My favorite is rice.
You will now start kicking yourself for every shank you throw out or used in a way other than this :P

Great info, thanks much!

 

[chef k-dude]

Nobody mentioned grinding other than sausage I think. I use ground deer for my chili. So much so that any chili without deer seems to be missing something to me. In fact I've been a little disappointed in the last two deer my dad got (he's the hunter, I'm the butcher, I dont have the patience to just sit in a deer stand for hours and hate getting up early!), they were fed so well their taste is too mild!

Still, the texture is there. Different than ground beef. I got tired of messing with roasts, crock pot, etc. for some reason and too lazy to do jerky anymore. My jerky was so good everyone else would eat it before I got my fair share! I had to put so much heat on the surface seasoning and marinade that you would pay a price for eating MY deer jerky...just to slow them down

 

[indaswamp]

Nobody mentioned grinding other than sausage I think.

We grind deer meat with beef... 50/50 venison to beef lean, then we add about 15% beef fat. I save brisket trim fat and we can buy ribeye trim fat at our local grocer butcher counter. End up with about 100# per year. We use it for everything...makes a great smash burger too!

*edit:

But we are VERY meticulous about how the deer meat is cleaned and trimmed. Absolutely no fat, tendons or tough connective tissue. We do it ourselves because we don't trust a butcher shop to take the time to clean it like we do. About 4 hours per deer just trimming....and that is with 3 people doing the knife work. A butcher just can't afford to spend that much time on one deer....they either go fast and trim way too much meat off with the fat, or do not trim it well enough and leave too much fat on the meat.

 

[tallbm]

Nobody mentioned grinding other than sausage I think. I use ground deer for my chili. So much so that any chili without deer seems to be missing something to me. In fact I've been a little disappointed in the last two deer my dad got (he's the hunter, I'm the butcher, I dont have the patience to just sit in a deer stand for hours and hate getting up early!), they were fed so well their taste is too mild!

Still, the texture is there. Different than ground beef. I got tired of messing with roasts, crock pot, etc. for some reason and too lazy to do jerky anymore. My jerky was so good everyone else would eat it before I got my fair share! I had to put so much heat on the surface seasoning and marinade that you would pay a price for eating MY deer jerky...just to slow them down

I grind most of my deer. I may keep 2-5 select cuts that would make good fajita grilling and things like shanks + heels for braising. The rest gets ground as is. Like indaswamp we would take very good care to do meticulous cleaning of the meat so the 100% grind was amazing.
At that point I can make jerky out of the ground meat, its so much softer on the teeth. I don't mind makin taco meat from 100% venison and I can always add fat and go for burger, make more/different sausgaes, or whatever I want.

It's like a blank canvas when you have it all mostly ground at 100% AND you have ground fat stored up ready to go any route you like :D

 

[chef k-dude]

I've seen where people do mix it with beef and add fat. When I handed a buddy a pound of 100% ground deer he looked at me and said, "does it have anything in it"? Like he had never heard of someone just grinding deer and leaving it at that! I said, you just need some cooking oil or fat and then do what you want.

I'm usually cooking with something like canola oil or pork fat, but I step all over the meat while its cooking with heavy texi-mexi seasoings and usually finish it with lime juice, "wash-yer-sister-sauce" and a sploosh of soy sauce and let it cook off the liquid at the end. I would do that with any ground meat for chili but the 100% deer needs the oil.

I haven't trimmed any large beef recently to have fat or make tallow, but when I do, the fat never goes to waste, for sure. The grocery stores cant sell fat here anymore for some reason, but I haven't looked for just a butcher shop, I think there may be a couple in town.

I also pretty meticulously trim the deer meat of fat and tendon and it DOES take a long time. Ever since I got my parents to build next door, I tell dad I want to butcher the deer ourselves. He always automatically took it to a butcher who always made silly thin deer steaks then ground deer. I used to use the thin deer steaks for jerky because they were useless to me for anything else. My jerky was always very chewable because I hand tenderized every strip with a spike mallet until they were nearly smashed apart, then marinated deeply.

At first I wanted the roasts the butcher never culled and usually crock-potted them, but grew tired of that for some reason (my tastes have changed as I got older)

We skin and quarter the deer over at his place under the carport barn, toss in a cooler (dedicated just for deer kills) and bring it to my garage where I have heaters and a stainless worktable...and actually sharp knives. I can tell dad would rather pay a processor but I tell him its quality "father and son time"! I do all the grinding and vac sealing for us.

He doesn't even eat a lot of the meat, mostly the tenderloins and loins and it kills me that mom throws the loin in a baking bag with cream of mushroom soup and cooks it till its fall apart tender. They are so special to me I only marinate them, and encrust them with pepper and grill them till med-rare and finish with a red wine reduction on the plate usually....and or whatever the heck I did here...they are usually flavored and tender and juicy enough to just eat with some horseradish...looks like I got freaky with some basil or something here, and some greens, might have been radish greens...I dont even remember this one but it was apparently in 2020. Kind of a fuzzy pic, my phone at the time sucked.

 

[tallbm]

I've seen where people do mix it with beef and add fat. When I handed a buddy a pound of 100% ground deer he looked at me and said, "does it have anything in it"? Like he had never heard of someone just grinding deer and leaving it at that! I said, you just need some cooking oil or fat and then do what you want.

I'm usually cooking with something like canola oil or pork fat, but I step all over the meat while its cooking with heavy texi-mexi seasoings and usually finish it with lime juice, "wash-yer-sister-sauce" and a sploosh of soy sauce and let it cook off the liquid at the end. I would do that with any ground meat for chili but the 100% deer needs the oil.

I haven't trimmed any large beef recently to have fat or make tallow, but when I do, the fat never goes to waste, for sure. The grocery stores cant sell fat here anymore for some reason, but I haven't looked for just a butcher shop, I think there may be a couple in town.

I also pretty meticulously trim the deer meat of fat and tendon and it DOES take a long time. Ever since I got my parents to build next door, I tell dad I want to butcher the deer ourselves. He always automatically took it to a butcher who always made silly thin deer steaks then ground deer. I used to use the thin deer steaks for jerky because they were useless to me for anything else. My jerky was always very chewable because I hand tenderized every strip with a spike mallet until they were nearly smashed apart, then marinated deeply.

At first I wanted the roasts the butcher never culled and usually crock-potted them, but grew tired of that for some reason (my tastes have changed as I got older)

We skin and quarter the deer over at his place under the carport barn, toss in a cooler (dedicated just for deer kills) and bring it to my garage where I have heaters and a stainless worktable...and actually sharp knives. I can tell dad would rather pay a processor but I tell him its quality "father and son time"! I do all the grinding and vac sealing for us.

He doesn't even eat a lot of the meat, mostly the tenderloins and loins and it kills me that mom throws the loin in a baking bag with cream of mushroom soup and cooks it till its fall apart tender. They are so special to me I only marinate them, and encrust them with pepper and grill them till med-rare and finish with a red wine reduction on the plate usually....and or whatever the heck I did here...they are usually flavored and tender and juicy enough to just eat with some horseradish...looks like I got freaky with some basil or something here, and some greens, might have been radish greens...I dont even remember this one but it was apparently in 2020. Kind of a fuzzy pic, my phone at the time sucked.
View attachment 700160

Ah, you know the deal :D

I prefer my backstrap breaded and fried like country fried steaks BUT I don't do much in the way of carbs these days or fried food so I end up grinding them and keeping them as my premium grind and man they are sooooo good that way! Yep I just said it. I grind em... but I hold that meat separate from the other grind.

 

[savaytse66]

I'm a little late to the thread, but I have successfully made a very good venison ham by keeping the leg mostly intact. I'll remove the sirloin tip (football) and the gland while pulling the femur. Wet brine and inject like you would a pig. Smoke and enjoy. It is very lean, so easy to dry out, especially if you forget it's on the smoker and cook it to an IT of 195 (ask me how I know). But if PROPERLY cooked (I think I did around 145), it retains enough moisture, similar to canadian bacon.