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The best burgers and sausages start here.
, purchasing a food grinder attachment is the best option. The meat-grinding attachment akes advantage of a stand mixer’s powerful motor, and its performance will satisfy the meat-grinding needs of most home cooks without taking up a lot of storage space.
The large food tray makes it easier to grind bigger batches at once.You can grind your meat directly into the stand mixer bowl.The height of the grinder mouth in relation to your counter can make sausage-stuffing unwieldy.The Best Electric Meat Grinder: Weston #5 Electric Meat Grinder & Sausage StufferThis entry-level electric grinder features a compact design and delivers solid results at a very reasonable price.There's a reverse function.The machine only offers one speed and it’s a little too lively, particularly for stuffing sausage.Sausagemaker #12 TSM 8-Speed Electric Meat Grinder This is a professional-quality grinder with multiple speeds and plenty of additional features, like an auto-reverse function. Of all the grinders tested, this one produced the best, most consistently ground meat.There are multiple speeds with a reverse function.Its bulky size takes up a lot of counter and storage space. The user manual isn't very comprehensive. If you’re new to meat-grinding, you’ll have to look elsewhere for how-tos.Chop-Rite Model 5 Clamp-Down Meat Grinder A manual meat grinder is as old-school and no-frills as it gets. This model excels at its job and is built to last.The motorless design allows for a very compact footprint and quiet operation, and you won’t run into electric or wiring issues.Manual grinding requires some physical dexterity and strength; it's not a viable option for all people. The grinder can’t be mounted on all counters and the height of the counter can affect how easy it is to operate it.There isn't much clearance between the mouth of the grinder and the counter.A good meat grinder will work through pounds of meat in minutes, extruding uniform cylinders of ground meat that have clearly distinct bits of ground lean muscle and fat, at a steady clip. It should be easy to set up, use, and clean, so that you look forward to using it.Sturdy construction with a compact footprint. A grinder should be able to process pounds of meat easily, without causing the machine or the person operating it any undue stress. The grinder should run smoothly without being too loud. And because it’s a piece of equipment that home cooks won’t be using every day, it shouldn’t be so bulky that it eats up lots of storage and counter space, or be so cumbersome that it makes people think twice about pulling it out of their cabinets when they do have a chance to use it.Keeping meat cold is of utmost importance during the grinding process, in order to avoid fat-smearing. A big part of the temperature control equation is ensuring that the main components of the grinder don’t overheat when operating, and this is easier to manage when the hopper and screw are made of metal rather than plastic. Metal parts can be chilled in the freezer prior to grinding , and they don’t get as slick as plastic ones when smudged with fat, so they are easier to take apart and clean. Whether you're using a motorized or old-fashioned manual model, a good meat grinder should operate smoothly and at a steady clip as pieces of meat are worked through the machine. An electric motor or hand-crank is responsible for powering the screw, which pushes meat through the chamber toward the blade and plate, and therefore the speed of grinding. Strong motors and easy-to-operate hand cranks allow you to grind at a consistent speed and with fewer jamming issues, which in turn produces high quality ground meat with a consistent grind size and no fat smear.None of the qualities mentioned above matter much if the grinder’s blade and plates are dull; the smearing that you diligently worked to avoid is just delayed until the last second as meat is mashed into a paste by the dull blade and pushed through the die. As with, grinder blades should be sharp right out of the box, and with moderate use they should need to be sharpened once a year at most. Most grinders come with at least two plates , for coarse and fine grinds. For this review, we tested both motorized and hand-cranked meat grinders. Electric grinders don’t require much effort on the part of the user: Turn on the machine, feed meat into the food tray and hopper, and other than having to coax more meat down through the hopper with a pusher, the motor takes care of the rest. Sure, if the meat isn’t well-trimmed before grinding, you may encounter the occasional jam if sinew gets caught on the screw or blade. But that’s generally an easy fix, especially for electric grinders that have a reverse function, which should undo a jam without you having to disassemble the grinder. Because they don’t require any elbow grease to operate, electric grinders get the job done faster and at a more easily controlled speed than manual models, especially if you are grinding large batches at a time. They’re also the best option for anyone with limited mobility. A motor takes care of most of the grunt work of meat grinding, but it also takes up space, draws power, and makes noise. Stand-alone electric grinders are bulky unitaskers that often end up gathering dust in the depths of above-refrigerator cabinets. Before purchasing a niche countertop kitchen appliance, it’s always worth making an honest assessment of your cooking needs. For this reason, we have long recommended the grinder attachment for people who already own a stand mixer; you get the core qualities of an electric grinder, without having to find room for a big, new piece of equipment. However, hand-cranked grinders shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. With no motor to house, they have a much smaller footprint, and they're consequently easier to store when not in use; they are also much quieter when operating. They’re easy to set up—our favorite manual grinder uses a clamp mechanism similar to that of a manual pasta roller—and straightforward to use and clean. A good hand-cranked grinder doesn’t require much strength to use. Grinding meat for four burgers is a breeze, and can be done faster than with an electric grinder once you factor in set-up and cleanup time.Yes and no. On one hand, a motor is only as good as the money you pay for it. Cheap electric grinders perform similarly to a stand mixer fitted with a grinding attachment, which is more than enough juice for the needs of most home cooks. The benefits of a more powerful and expensive machine really only pay off for dedicated hunters or charcuterie enthusiasts who do a lot of grinding frequently.Being able to adjust the speed of grinding is a plus, but not a must. For grinding, consistent speed is more important than variability. Multiple speeds are more helpful for sausage-stuffing, which requires a good amount of force to push a mix into casings. A reverse function is useful for resolving minor jams during grinding, saving you time as you won’t have to disassemble the grinder every time a piece of troublesome meat gets caught on the blade. Most stand-alone electric grinders come with a reverse function, and with a hand-crank grinder you can reverse course just by turning the crank in the opposite direction.Meat grinders are made for grinding meat, not stuffing sausage. Grinders often come with sausage-stuffing attachments that work in a pinch, but are far from ideal. You end up having to feed a seasoned ground sausage mix back through the hopper, and it gets pushed through the grinder by the screw and into a length of casing fitted over a plastic attachment that is fitted onto the mouth of the grinder in place of the blade and plate. Even for grinders with adjustable speeds, this process takes a lot longer than it would with a piston-based sausage stuffer. People who make a lot of cased sausages should invest in a sausage stuffer. The good news for everyone else is that uncased sausage patties taste just as good as links.We have been using meat grinders for years, both in restaurant kitchens and in the Serious Eats test kitchen. We’ve come up with various methods for grinding meat at home, from using food processors to chopping meat by hand. We’ve run experiments with meat grinders, developed recipes with them, andThe TestingIf given the choice of a single cut of beef to grind for burgers, chuck is the way to go. It’s affordable, has great flavor, and has a natural distribution of lean meat to fat that comes very close to the 80:20 gold standard ratio for juicy burgers. For this test we cut chuck into two sizes for grinding: 1 1/2-inch cubes and 1- by 3-inch strips. The meat was chilled in the fridge and the grinder parts were chilled in the freezer for one hour prior to grinding. We then ran 1-pound batches of both the cubes and strips of beef through the medium plate of each grinder, noting speed and ease of operation, consistency of grind, and overall quality of the grind, paying particular attention to any fat smearing.Every single grinder performed acceptably here, producing ground beef that we’d be happy to use for burgers, meatballs, or meatloaf, but some grinders were much more pleasant to use than others. The Sausage Maker had the most consistent grind, easily cranking through the pound and putting out ground beef that looked like it came from a well-run meat counter. The hand-cranked Chop-Rite produced ground beef that was charmingly rustic in comparison , but took only a minute longer than The Sausage Maker to grind from start to finish. Meanwhile, the LEM #8 575 Watt Countertop Grinder was serviceable in this test but loud and clunky in a manner that didn’t encourage future meat-grinding sessions.is another well-marbled cut of meat, with an approximate 75:25 lean meat-to-fat ratio, that makes it a popular choice for grinding for fresh and cured sausages. It also features a good amount of connective tissue and sinew, both of which can cause jams during the grinding process if they wind themselves around the blade or auger. Basically it’s the perfect cut for testing the mettle of a meat grinder. As with the beef chuck, we trimmed the meat into 1 1/2-inch cubes and 1- by 3-inch strips and chilled them in the fridge. Grinder parts were chilled in the freezer for one hour. This test separated the contenders from the pretenders. A few grinders struggled with speed, and jammed during this test, which led to the dreaded fat smear. The heat from the friction of the jammed grinder caused fat to to render, producing a soft, squishy paste rather than the ground meat we were looking for. Along with these poor results, the jams that couldn’t be resolved by hitting a reverse button also forced us to take apart the grinders, in order to pick out the offending bits of sinew, and then put them back together. This is a messy and frustrating process that could easily turn people off of grinding their own meat.While grinders are essentially unitaskers, they can be used to grind more than just meat . They can be used to grind sourdough into breadcrumbs, chickpeas for falafel, or mirepoix for soffritto. In light of these other uses, we ran a vegetable grinding test, passing onions, carrots, and celery through each grinder, using all the available sizes of grinding plates. Fibrous vegetables gave some of the grinders a heavy workout, but none of them jammed. This test was easier to carry out with electric grinders with food trays that don’t require you to constantly feed ingredients into the hopper by hand. The logistics of this test proved more difficult with hand-cranked grinders that keep both of your hands occupied at all times, making it harder to troubleshoot any issues during the grinding process. If you need to have a lot of finely chopped mirepoix and your grinder is handy, it makes quick work of the task, so you can do things like grind veg and meat for classic
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