Half a million hunters take to Minnesota’s woods each fall, looking for a whitetail deer that suits their fancy. Some are looking for a trophy for the wall but all who notch tags, whether with a bow, rifle, slug gun or muzzleloader, will be eating venison or sharing it with others.

For some, this means a trip to the butcher shop, with tagged carcass or lean trimmings. For others, the ritual of preparing venison is an activity in and of itself, a meeting of friends and family. Preparing meat can be as much of an activity as the deer hunt.

The old cliche heard from political reporters on the topic of omnibus bills and blatant pork barrel legislation is that law making is like sausage making – it is best not to see what goes in or how it is done. With regard to sausage making, such statements may have rung true in turn of the 20th century Chicago meatpacking plants. But for today’s hunters, locavores and meat-making do-it-yourselfers, sausage-making products and processes will not leave you wincing.

Bruce Neubarth is checking his watch. It’s nearly time to empty and restock his homemade smoker. Neubarth’s career as a grocer dovetails finely with his enjoyment of the outdoors. You can find him managing the bakery at the Hutchinson Cash Wise Foods and in November you’ll find him orange-clad and awaiting a deer in south-central Minnesota. Deer hunting is a family affair, as brothers-in-law and sons join him in camp. When the season closes and the deer have been hung, quartered, and de-boned, the real work begins.

Once he was interested in preparing his own venison products, Neubarth went about acquiring stainless steel tables, meat grinders and sausage stuffers. Some of the equipment acquired came from Neubarth’s late father-in-law, a retired manager at the Bernadotte Cold Storage Locker Plant.

“I wish he was still with us, there are so many more things I would have liked to ask him,” lamented Neubarth on the topic of making sausage.

As the years passed, Neubarth tested recipes and curing mixes, played with the flavors, and dabbled with wood chip smoking. And through it all, he kept notes what he used, how long it was smoked, and what everyone’s favorites were. Through trial and error, he has his favorite mixes and additives and very tasty products.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “We get everybody together around Thanksgiving, grind everything up, put in the work together, and I do the smoking.”

Summer sausage, Italian sausage, breakfast sausage, cheddar bratwurst, wieners, snack sticks, and ring bologna are popular. High temperature cheddar cheese, jalapenos, garlic, cracked pepper, and mustard seeds are a select few special ingredients in different mixes, each batch just a little different from each other because of mixes, moisture and smoking.

What are the things someone interested in doing their own venison processing needs, I ask.

“A metal grinder sufficient for the pounds of meat you’ll handle, a heavy duty sausage stuffer with a few different sized tips, a smoker, casings and your cures, mixes and add-ins,” Neubarth tells me.

So what is next year’s big addition? An old swingset frame will become enclosed, insulated and its wood heat-treated to form a new and larger smoker so Neubarth’s watch-checking and batch changing won’t have to be so frequent.