With the 2016 season behind us, it’s time to knock out some offseason chores. Since I began hunting a decade ago, a staple of my Februarys has always been making deer sausage with my family. It’s an incredibly satisfying day, turning a freezer of roasts into a freezer of sausage, but one thing about the process has always irked me – the heavy reliance on pork fat.
It’s no secret that venison on its own is super lean. To compensate, most butchers...

Growing up, I ate a decent amount of venison – but for whatever reason, we never ate heart. With that being the case, when I started killing and processing deer for my own home, the heart was just something I never kept. I had no context for what to do with it or if it was even worth trying. But recently I was inspired to change that.
With hopes of finally trying one of the “wobbly bits” of a deer, this past week I killed a...