How Do I Make My Own Venison Burgers?

Sonny from Baker, FL wrote:

I usually take my deer meat to get it processed, but this year I wanted to do it myself to save money. What steps do I take to just make deer burger. I usually get it 60/40.



Sonny,

Processing your own game can be fun, easy and very rewarding! To do it right, it does take a little knowledge. I would recommend our Deer and Big Game Processing Volume 1 DVD. This video will take you step by step from field dressing meat animals & trophy animals, to skinning meat animals and preparing the cape on trophy animals, aging your game animals, quartering them, de-boning each and every quarter and then defining what every primary muscle is best used for! It also covers basic grinding and packaging. This video is must have for every hunter, beginner to advanced.

To answer and explain some basic grinding questions, here is a start for you! For one thing, you'll need a Meat Grinder. I only use Weston Meat Grinders - you can rely on them to get the job done and they have a whole range of different price points and sizes. They also already come with the plate that you need for making burgers. You'll just weigh everything, cube up your deer meat, cube up the fat, and then run them through your grinder. That's all you'll need to do to get ground deer meat for burgers.

As for ratio, I really have to recommend an 80/20 blend of fat to lean ratio, or you can go slightly leaner to a 85% lean and 15% fat ratio. This is going to give you a good frying burger that will be nice and juicy and hold together on the grill.

Now, if you go to a mix of ground beef mixed with venison meat you can go to a higher ratio, however you may start to lose the fact that it's actual wild game meat. My favorite blend is 8lbs of game meat and 2lbs of 50/50 blend beef. This is just a fatty beef mix generally taken from beef ribs. It adds a lot of good fat for flavor, but also adds good lean beef as well.

Oftentimes, when you mix straight fat, you can end up with too much fat. So when I mix straight fat, I always blend 9 lbs of good lean game meat to every one pound of straight fat. Dice the fat small so when you grind it, it will blend in well.

Good luck and be sure to take a look at the DVD. It will really be a big help. Thanks for the question!

Brad Lockwood