Sausage, Landjäger (Venison, Wild Game)

A Landjäger made from deer is not a novelty, it is arguably the sausage going home. Whatever the name actually means — and there are three competing stories — this is a small, hard, pressed stick built to be carried outdoors by people working in the woods, out of the cheap parts of an animal. Venison belongs in it.

I hunt, and a raw dry-cured venison stick is one of the best things you can do with a deer. Sixty percent venison, forty percent fatty pork, because deer has essentially no usable fat of its own and a raw dried sausage with no fat is a piece of jerky in a casing. The spicing here goes toward allspice and coriander with caraway underneath — allspice is a classic partner for venison and it holds up through a month of drying better than most warm spices do.

But read the safety note before you decide to make this, because it is not the same as the pork versions and I am not going to bury it in the footnotes.

Wild game carries trichinae that are freeze-resistant — unlike pork, where a proper freeze is a reliable kill. Freezing a bear or a deer does not give you the guarantee that freezing pork does. And this is a raw sausage with no cook step anywhere. So the hurdle stack — cure, fast acid, full dry — is doing all of the work, with nothing behind it.

That is a real decision, not a formality. If you are not going to hit pH 5.3, and you are not going to weigh it down to 30–40% loss, make the cooked version instead and take it to 160°F.

UNTESTED as written.

Ingredients

THE MEAT BLOCK — 2 kg (4 lb 7 oz) total

• 1200 g venison, well trimmed of silverskin (60%)
• 800 g pork belly or fatty pork shoulder (40%)

CURE AND SALT — weighed on a 0.01 g scale

• 50 g salt, non-iodized (2.5%)
• 5.0 g Cure #2 / Prague Powder #2 (2.5 g per kg = 156 ppm ingoing nitrite)
• 12 g dextrose (0.6%)
• 0.5 g Bactoferm T-SPX starter culture, in 60 ml distilled water

SPICE

• 8 g black pepper, ground
• 3 g allspice, ground
• 3 g garlic powder
• 2 g coriander seed, ground
• 2 g caraway seed, ground
• 1 g celery seed
• CASING
• Narrow hog casing 28/30 mm

Directions

Key ingredients

Black Pepper · Salt

1. Read the safety section in Notes before you start. Game changes the picture, and this sausage is never cooked.
2. Cure overnight, before grinding: cube the venison and the pork, toss them thoroughly with the salt and the Cure #2, and hold them covered in the refrigerator overnight. Curing on the cubes rather than after the grind gives the salt and nitrite time to distribute properly through a lean muscle that does not take them as readily as pork does.
3. Wake the culture the next day: T-SPX in 60 ml distilled water, 30 minutes before you need it.
4. Grind cold, in two stages: everything through 6 mm, then — only if the mix is still below 35°F — a second pass through 4.5 mm. If it has warmed past that, stop at the coarse grind and put it back in the freezer. Venison is very lean and the 40% pork fat is the only fat in the block; smear it and there is nothing to fall back on.
5. Mix in the culture and the spices below 35°F: work to a proper tacky bind. Venison gives up myosin well, so this comes together readily.
6. Stuff and pair: tight into narrow hog casing, no voids. Prick any air pockets you can see with a sterilized needle. Tie off lengths of about 32 cm, cut apart, twist at the middle. 80–125 g per stick.
7. Press and ferment, 24 to 48 hours: flat between boards under 6–7 kg at 68–75°F and 90%+ humidity. If you do not have a chamber, a plastic tent with a humidifier under it works, spritzing the casings every few hours so they do not seal before the inside has fermented.
8. Verify the ferment — and here it really matters: pH 5.3 or below. With no cook step and game meat in the block, this is the hurdle I would refuse to skip. If it hasn’t dropped, throw the batch out. That is a hard thing to write and I mean it.
9. Dry the surface: 2 days at 54–59°F, dark, airy, no direct draught.
10. Cold smoke — genuinely cold: 2 to 3 passes at below 68°F, over oak, hickory, beech or a fruitwood. If your smoker runs warm, put ice in the water tray. You are adding flavor, not applying heat; there is no temperature you can reach in a cold smoker that would make an unsafe raw sausage safe.
11. Air out at least a day after the last pass.
12. Dry to the number: 54–59°F at 75–80% RH until the tagged pair has lost 30–40% of its green weight. In 28/30 hog casing expect 3 to 5 weeks. Not one week. A raw venison stick pulled at one week has neither the water activity nor the texture, and the published recipes that stop there are the reason I put the scale in the ingredient list.
13. Storage: fully dried to 30–40% loss it is genuinely shelf-stable and I keep it cool and dry. Once cut, the cut face is a fresh surface again — vacuum-seal and refrigerate or freeze from that point.
14. If you shot the deer yourself, this is a good use for the shoulders and the neck. Save the loins for something else.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t

Built on a well-known American venison Landjäger from an experienced game-cooking author, with two numbers corrected and a third supplied. UNTESTED as written by me.

1. Cure dose corrected. The source calls for 6 g of Cure #2 in a 5 lb (2268 g) block. That works out to 2.65 g/kg — 165 ppm ingoing nitrite, over the 156 ppm ceiling. Not dangerous at that margin, but there is no reason to be over it. This recipe uses 2.5 g/kg = exactly 156 ppm, and shows the arithmetic: Cure #2 is 6.25% sodium nitrite, so 2.5 × 0.0625 = 0.15625 g = 156 mg per kg.
2. Drying time and target corrected. The source dries at ~55°F/80% for one to two weeks and states no weight-loss target. That is not enough for a raw stick. 30–40% loss in this casing is 3 to 5 weeks. Weight loss is the only honest home proxy for water activity, and it is the hurdle that finishes the job.
3. Weight loss added as the finish condition rather than time.

The author’s own framing is worth keeping: “This is not a beginner’s sausage.” He is right, and Cure #2 is mandatory and cannot be skipped.

The safety section — wild game is different, and this is the part to actually read

Trichinae in wild game are freeze-resistant. This is the correction that matters most here. The familiar home rule — freeze pork at a specified temperature for a specified time and trichinae are dealt with — comes from work on domestic pork. The sylvatic strains carried by bear, wild boar, and to a lesser extent other game are substantially more freeze-tolerant, and a home freezer does not give you the guarantee it gives you with pork. For bear especially, the standing advice is to cook to 160°F, and freezing is not an accepted substitute.

Now put that next to what this recipe is: a raw sausage with no cook step at any point. There is no 160°F anywhere in it.

So what protects you is the hurdle stack, complete and correctly executed, and nothing else:

• Cure #2 at 156 ppm — suppresses Clostridium botulinum in the low-oxygen interior, with a nitrate reservoir that keeps working through weeks of drying.
• pH to 5.3 or below, fast — this is the Staphylococcus aureus hurdle. Staph tolerates salt, thrives in a warm humid ferment, and makes a heat-stable enterotoxin; even a cook step would not undo it. Speed is the defense.
• 30–40% weight loss — the water-activity hurdle, and the one that makes the finished stick shelf-stable.
• Cold smoke is flavor only. Below 68°F it contributes a little surface effect and nothing more.

⚠ And the hurdle the stack does NOT include — added after reading the USDA primary source, 2026-07-24. Everything above is a genuine, validated control: nitrite for botulism, the fast acid drop for Staph aureus, the long dry for shelf-stability and for trichinae in pork. But look at what each is validated for. None of it is validated to kill Salmonella or STEC. USDA FSIS recommends a 5-log reduction for a ready-to-eat shelf-stable product and says plainly that the typical hurdles “may not be as effective as cooking” — and asked directly whether meeting degree-hours plus the trichinae drying method plus a water activity below 0.85 is enough, their published answer is “No.” In 2021 two outbreaks sickened more than 70 people at establishments that met every one of those controls. A commercial producer closes that gap by validating their own process; at home you cannot validate anything. What you can do is start with better meat than the process assumes, ferment lower and dry longer than the minimum, consider a post-fermentation hold at 128°F for an hour, or make the cooked version — which has a real kill step this one does not. I still make these. I make them knowing this rather than believing the stack is complete.

My honest position: I would make this with venison from an animal I took and handled myself, with commercially sourced pork fat, and I would not skip the pH meter. If any of that is not true for you, make the cooked version and take it to 160°F. That is not a lesser sausage, it is a different and perfectly good one — Sausage, Landjäger is the cooked method.

Why venison suits this sausage

Deer is lean, dense, and mildly gamy in a way that a long acid-and-smoke cure flatters rather than fights. The 40% fatty pork is not a compromise — a dry-cured sausage needs fat to carry flavor and to keep the texture from going to leather, and venison brings none of its own worth using. Deer fat in particular tastes waxy and goes rancid fast; trim it off and use pork.

The allspice is the seasoning that makes this version its own thing. It is a traditional venison partner across northern Europe and it survives a month of drying better than most warm spices.

Variations

This works with essentially any red game — elk, moose, antelope. Bear needs a much harder think, because bear is the classic trichinae carrier and the freeze-resistance problem is at its worst there; I would not make a raw never-cooked bear sausage. Goose and wild turkey are a different proposition again — poultry in a raw dry-cured stick brings its own concerns and I have not worked that out yet.

A German home recipe I looked at while writing these had a commenter report making Landjäger with wild game to general delight — Sausage, Landjäger (Home Smokehouse, Pork-Forward) is that formula, and its warmer ginger-and-nutmeg spicing would suit venison too.

Sourcing and gear

Buy your pork fat rather than saving it off a deer. Back fat or a fatty belly, firm and cold.

The 0.01 g scale and a meat pH meter are the two purchases that make this recipe honest rather than hopeful. Everything else you can improvise.

Still open

I have not verified the exact freeze parameters for Trichinella in whitetail specifically — most of the freeze-resistance literature is on bear and wild boar, and whitetail is a much less common vector. That is a gap in my knowledge, not a reason to relax the rule.

And I want to try this with goose. That is a genuinely different bird-fat problem and I do not yet know how it behaves in a raw cure.