LEM Moose Breakfast Sausage

Moose breakfast sausage is a hearty, flavorful way to make the most of your harvest. A simple blend of ground moose and pork shoulder, seasoned and portioned for the freezer, means your freezer is stocked with a breakfast your family will ask for again and again.

Recipe By Marcus Weiner

My four boys love moose breakfast sausage, and it’s been a staple in our breakfast menu for the last decade. We like the seasoning made by LEM and use their Backwoods Breakfast Fresh Sausage Seasoning. It’s available in three different size packages depending on batch size: 5 pounds, 25 pounds, or 100 pounds. It’s a mild spice mix that is savory with a little bit of sweet. Here’s a rundown on how we make moose breakfast sausage.

Ingredients (makes 25 lbs):

• 17 lbs moose roast
• 8 lbs pork shoulder
• 5 packets LEM Backwoods Breakfast Fresh Sausage Seasoning (5 lb batch size)
• 25 oz cold water

Moose Breakfast Sausage Instructions:

Step 1: Grind your meat

I use a ratio of 2/3 moose to 1/3 pork shoulder. For this recipe, I ground 25 total pounds of meat. I bought 8 pounds of pork shoulder and took 17 pounds of moose roast out of the freezer. After the moose thawed, I trimmed fat, silver skin and connective tissue off the moose. Then I cut it, and the pork, into chunks that will fit through the throat of the grinder.

Next, I turned the grinder on and begin to feed in chunks of meat. I alternate between two pieces of moose, then a chunk of pork. You’ll be mixing the grind by hand when you add the seasoning slurry, so don’t be too concerned if the ground meat isn’t thoroughly mixed. For this recipe, I used a #32 LEM Big Bite Grinder, which made fast work of grinding the 25 pounds, and I caught the grind in a LEM Heavy Duty Meat Lug.

Step 2: Mix your seasoning slurry into the grind

I bought enough seasoning to make 25 pounds of sausage, then mixed it with the correct amount of cold water to make a slurry. I wasn’t able to find a 25-pound-batch package, so I bought 5 packets of the 5-pound batch. Each packet requires 5 ounces of water, so the total amount of cold water needed was 25 ounces. I added all 5 packets to the 25 ounces of water and mixed the slurry together.

Next, I added the slurry to the ground meat, mixed it thoroughly in the meat lug, placed the lid on it, and put it into the refrigerator. It will remain in the refrigerator for 24 hours. After six hours, I took it out of the refrigerator and mixed it again by hand. I did the same thing six hours after that. My goal in the two extra mixings is to evenly incorporate the sausage seasoning into the meat.

Step 3: Portion your sausage

I like to portion the sausage into 1-pound packages. That’s the right amount for five of us to eat in one sitting, or enough for two meals if it’s just me and my twins. My normal procedure is to take a plastic container that fits one pound of meat and use that as my portioning device. Then I will encase the portioned sausage in plastic wrap, then finish by wrapping each pound of plastic-wrapped sausage in butcher paper. I find this combination of plastic wrap and butcher paper eliminates freezer burn, and keeps my sausage in good shape for at least a year.

Finish the job by labeling each package using a Sharpie. I color code the label based on what game animal it is. Blue is for deer, black is for moose, and red is for elk. I use S for sausage (BS is for backstrap or I’d consider using that to delineate from other types of sausage). I made a bunch of smaller batches of different sausage types last fall as well, but by far and away, breakfast sausage is the one we make and eat the most, so that product gets the S designation for expediency of labeling.

LEM

LEM makes various products to allow you to pack, store, and freeze your sausage. Their Wild Game Meat Bags come in one-pound and two-pound models, and they allow you to store ground meat or sausage in two-mil bags. Bags can then be sealed with tape or hog rings. I intend to use their Wild Game Meat Bags this year to see if the system saves time. Since you can use the grinder with an attachment to load the sausage or burger directly into the bags, I can see this being a time-saving improvement to my process.

You’ll have lots of meat if you are lucky enough to harvest a moose. If you aren’t already making breakfast sausage, consider trying out the recipe outlined above. I think you’ll find that LEM makes excellent products, and both their tools and seasonings are the best in the business.

Moose breakfast sausage is a mild, savory wild game staple that your family will put on the breakfast table again and again.

For more recipes like this, check out the Hunt Alaska recipe library.