How to Make the Best Venison Burgers

In this video, Don and Dave Knetter show viewers what they consider the best way to create excellent venison burger from your deer, using nothing more than meat from your critter, some beef suet, and a grinder.

Why beef suet? Because with beef, you can cook yourself a rare burger without worrying about the sorts of things you get from undercooked pork. If you mix pork fat with your venison, you need to make sure you cook the stuff well done before you eat it.

Son Dave is a bit wordy at times. Seems like his father Don just wants to get down to brass tacks and start building some burger. I like Don.

The venison is trimmed up and cut into nice small hunks that will work well in their grinder, then they mix the meat & beef fat at a 4:1 ratio. 4 cups of meat and 1 cup of suet go into a nice bit stainless steel mixing bowl. Hand-mix the stuff in the big bowl, run it through the grinder, and then do it again until you’ve ground up all your venison.

Dave mentions running meat through the grinder twice, and that’s a good tip. I have never had a commercial type grinder, and on my smaller “homeowner models” I learned to run the meat through the coarse plate twice. With the finer plate, it just gets clogged way too often.

I never did mix my meat with fat when I ground it at home, but when I have a deer processed I always have them add beef fat. It makes for a much nicer product, in my opinion.

Another cool tip from Don — a professional meat cutter — is to run some crackers through the grinder at the end, to get most of the meat out of the grinder before you break it down for cleaning. Nice.

At the end, you can watch three young Knetters packing the meat into 5-pound bags for storage. Nice to get the whole family involved in hunting and the end product of that hunt.

Chili, burgers, spaghetti sauce, and tacos! Mmmmm, tacos.

Enjoy.

Russ Chastain

Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started toting his own gun in the woods at age nine and he's pursued deer with rifles since 1982, so his hunting knowledge has been growing for more than three and a half decades. His desire and ability to share this knowledge with others has also grown, and Russ has been professionally writing and editing original hunting & shooting content since 1998. Russ Chastain has a passion for sharing accurate, honest, interesting hunting & shooting knowledge and stories with people of all skill levels.