Summer is officially here
Well school is out and the vacations are planned; which means it’s time for some awesome summer barbecues! Here are some of our all-time favorite wild game recipes to help you up your barbecue game.
Sausage
1. For those of you who like to embrace the heat these Venison cheddar- jalapeno summer sausages are absolutely fantastic. We recommend using a natural casing for these which you can get online as well as in places like your local butcher or Cabelas. These don’t necessarily need added fat (the cheese does a great job of taking care of that), but if you’d like adding in a bit or pork rounds out the flavor nicely and gives a little more added fat. Like venison summer sausage, but don’t like spicy? Try Gramp’s Venison Summer Sausage; though for this recipe we do recommend adding some pork in to add in a bit of fat and flavor.
BBQ
2. We love us some bbq and these bbq duck sandwiches from wide open spaces were the perfect addition to our family picnic. The lemon pepper seasoning is mild, but gives a nice added flavor profile. We did decide that these were best on potato buns; but since that happens to be our favorite type of bun for just about anything we might be just a bit biased. You can also find a few more summer bbq recipes in this article, but we haven’t given those a shot yet. If you give them a try, make sure to let us know what you think!
Burgers
3. We can’t make a list of our favorite summer recipes without mentioning venison and elk burgers. You can never go wrong with grilling up these babies, and when done right they can be the star of your summer get together. For these, you definitely don’t want to over-cook the meat; so remember to aim for either medium-rare or medium when cooking. That will guarantee a juicy burger, because no one likes a dry patty. There are tons of recipes for venison burgers on the internet (this one from Allrecipes.com is awesome, as are these by Wide Open Spaces), but no matter what recipe you use we recommend using bacon fat or bacon inside the patty to give it a delicious flavor as well as enough fat to make it nice and juicy.
Brats
4. Last, but certainly not least, we have to have a good recipe for brats. Hot dogs are good and all, but as far as we are concerned brats are the way to go. This recipe for beer brats made our stomachs sing happy songs. This one is especially useful because you can put any wild game meat you’d like in and the recipe still tastes amazing. We generally have used venison, as that is what we have on hand most often, but also made it with turkey and they came out perfect as well. This recipe does call for Cold Smoke Scotch Ale, and we have found this gives the best overall flavor. However, we’ve also used a few other amber beers we’ve had on hand (like O’Dells Levity) and the brats still tasted pretty darned good.
Well folks, that about sums up our favorite recipes. This year we have tons of wild game to use up thanks to our awesome Pro-Tracker tracking system, so if we find any more recipes we will definitely share. Have you got a favorite recipe? Let us know, so we can give it a try!
