Must Have Tools for Home Meat Processing
By Leigh Hauck
Dec 31, 2024
Home processing is a staple December activity in my house. About a month after our seasons close here in Alberta, that 10-14 day period around Christmas and New Years where real life seems to pause becomes a busy time for us! The house smells of hardwood smoke, and the freezer quickly goes from full of bags of ‘need-to-be-dealt-with’ trim meat to hundreds (if we had a good season) brown paper packages of delicious sausage, jerky, and the finest steak cuts of wild game.
Since making the investment and committing to home processing about 4 years ago, there are a few tools in my home processing arsenal that I truly couldn’t go without. Here are my top must-have tools for home processing your wild game.
You need a good grinder
My dad always did his own trimming and grinding, and would bring ground meat to the butcher to have them make sausage. He always used a $25 Walmart meat grinder that needed constant breaks and unclogging every few minutes.
Grinding up a deer was a serious chore and hassle, but I never thought much of it. When I moved out and was truly on my own, I needed a grinder for myself. I didn’t skimp, and I went with a popular 1HP model that honestly seemed like more than I would need at the time. Man, that was money well spent.
A good grinder allows you to pass larger pieces of meat through, it can handle more of those connective tissues (which are actually really healthy to leave in your grind if your grinder can handle it), and it does the job incredibly fast with little effort.
I can run a full 25lb batch of rough cut deer meat through my grinder without giving it a rest, and without pausing to remove silver skin from the grinding plate. It just eats everything I put through it. Those extremely tough pieces of meat from the shank that are completely surrounded in silver skin? No problem, just throw them in! A good grinder won’t even notice.
A large smoker is a game changer
I am a huge fan of smokers. I have owned pretty well every type and am maybe Alberta’s biggest fan of Weber Kettles. For a few years, I was so committed to my Weber Kettle lifestyle that I would use it for all of my sausage smoking.
Yup, I put a couple hundred pounds of game sausage through my 22” kettle every year, one batch at a time. Of course, a 25lb batch of sausage would take all day, and constant tending of the fire because a kettle is not designed to hold commercial amounts of meat. Finally, this year was the year to upgrade.
On Black Friday I got a 34” pellet grill. Despite my belief in charcoal BBQ’s for the true smoking of things like briskets and ribs, you cannot deny the power and simplicity of a good pellet grill for something like sausage smoking.
When you are doing large batches and want a consistent product, a pellet grill is the way to go. I can fit 25lbs of sausage on my pellet grill, set it to smoke at 180 degrees for about 3 hours and then 225 for the last hour or so, and never worry about a thing. As I write this on New Years Eve, I have put 100lbs of sausage through my pellet grill since Christmas.
What a game changer!

This is what 25lbs of caribou sausage looks like on a 34” pellet grill. If you look closely, there is a third row of sausage at the back, under the upper rack. As they smoke and dehydrate, space opens up between each sausage nicely, and I barely had to make any adjustments throughout the cook.
P.S. – if you live in a cold climate like myself, consider a thermal cover for your pellet grill. It cuts my pellet consumption almost in half on those seriously cold days, and will certainly extend the life of the smoker.
A quality kitchen scale will become your right-hand man
On sausage days, my kitchen scale gets used very heavily. A good one will have a large platform, a high weight limit (12lbs or so is considered high), and sensitivity to the tenth of a gram. When it comes to measuring your spices and especially if you are using cure, you cannot afford wrong measurements or shotty estimates with a soup spoon from your drawer.
I use my kitchen scale for weighing meat, fat, spices, cure, water additions, and that’s just on sausage making days. Much like my pellet smoker will, my kitchen scale gets used on a very regular basis in my day-to-day cooking.
An electric stuffer would really make my life easy!
This is one that is on my wish list! My current stuffer holds 7lbs of meat and uses a hand crank. That means I have to refill it 4 times throughout a 25lb batch and have a helping hand create coils and poke air holes as I am stuffing. If I were to upgrade to a larger electric stuffer, I could run 25lbs of meat through it in a single go and handle the coiling and poking on my own with my now-free hand (thank you foot pedal!)
It is certainly the next upgrade I am looking at in my home processing arsenal!
It isn’t just about saving money.
I’ve done the math, and every 25lb batch of sausage that I do saves me right around $100. The gear pays for itself very quickly, but upgrades certainly hurt the payback period! While I am all for saving money, my biggest reasons for home processing revolve around the DIY spirit of it, and knowing that I truly took my animal from field to table all by myself. T
here is a massive sense of pride in producing better than butcher shop quality meats, from animals that you shot and packed out, all on your own! Having the right equipment is necessary in making that happen, and while I will always be a budget conscious butcher, having quality tools makes the job more fun, gives you a better product, and is just another way to honor those animals who give their lives for us to eat.
It is up to you to decide how much you want to put into your setup. Some home butchers – like my dad – get a thrill out of doing things as low cost as possible. Some get their kicks out of having commercial level gear to work with.
I find a balance in the two ends of the spectrum, and wherever you stand is the perfect place to be! If you are processing your own game even with the most basic equipment, you are already miles ahead of the game!
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