Camp Griddle Wild Game Burgers with Sausage and Peppers
Ground venison patties on a fire grate, buried under smoked sausage, onions, and peppers.
- calories
- 780
- weight
- 13 oz
- cal / oz
- 60
- protein
- 48 g
- serves
- 3, scales
- prep
- 20 min
- cook
- 30 min
- total time
- 50 min
- water
- none
- cost
- $$
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Dinner
- Campfire coals
- Grill grate
- Liquid fuel
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- Nut free
- Real dishes
- Grab and go
- Needs a cooler
- Basic
Ingredients
| Ground wild game | 1 lb | nilgai, venison, elk, or antelope; beef works |
|---|---|---|
| Salt and pepper | to taste | |
| Olive oil | 2 tbsp | |
| Smoked sausage | 8 oz | fully cooked, sliced on the bias |
| Yellow onions | 2 medium | sliced thin |
| Bell peppers | 2 | seeded and sliced |
| Provolone | 3 slices | |
| Buns | 3 |
Method
- Get a bed of coals going and set the grate a few inches above it, or run a two-burner stove on medium.
- Form the ground game into three patties a little wider than the buns. They shrink less than beef but they also dry out faster, so keep them thick. Salt and pepper both sides.
- Put a skillet on the grate with the oil. Cook the sausage slices until the edges brown, then push them aside and add the onions and peppers. Cook until the onions go soft and take some color, about 15 minutes. Pull the skillet off and cover it.
- Lay the patties straight on the grate. Wild game has almost no fat, so cook to medium at most and flip once. Four or five minutes a side over live coals.
- Put a slice of provolone on each patty in the last minute and let the residual heat take it down.
- Toast the buns cut-side down on the grate for thirty seconds. Build the burger and pile the sausage and peppers on top.
Wild game is lean enough that a straight burger goes dry and crumbly before it goes done. Two things fix that here. The patties get cooked to medium and no further, and the sausage-pepper-onion mix on top brings back the fat and moisture the meat does not have. The smoked sausage is doing most of that work; a plain grilled onion would not.
This is a cooler recipe, not a pack recipe. Nothing in it is shelf-stable and the meat has to stay cold, so it belongs at a trailhead camp or a hunting camp with a truck nearby. Frozen patties buy you a day or two of cooler life and keep everything else around them cold in the meantime.
Packing
Grind and patty the meat at home, stack with parchment between, and freeze it solid. It doubles as an ice block for the first day of the cooler. Slice the onions and peppers at home too and bag them; that is the twenty minutes of prep you skip in camp.
Variations
- No skillet: wrap the sausage, onions, and peppers in a double foil packet with the oil and set it in the coals for 20 minutes.
- Swap provolone for any hard cheese that survived the cooler. Pepper jack is the other good answer.
- Cut the ground game with a few ounces of ground pork if it is very lean and keeps falling apart.
https://realtree.com/timber-2-table/recipes/nilgai-antelope-burgers-with-sausage-peppers-and-onions