How to get started with meat grinding and sausage stuffing?

BeerOtter · 4 months

Start with this book. It is great jumping off point.

austincook63 · 4 months

If you just want to do small-scale grinding and sausage stuffing at home - in other words, you just want to do a few pounds of meat, not an entire pig - the best all-around, most versatile appliance would be the KitchenAid with grinder and stuffer attachments.

Granted, a dedicated grinder is better, but the KitchenAid is fine for doing, say, a Boston butt or a packer brisket, and it's extremely useful for all sorts of other tasks. With the KA, you can make your sausages and burger patties, the buns to put them in, and a tub of homemade mayonnaise.

KitchenAid Professional 5 Plus Series - 450 watt, $300
KitchenAid Food Grinder Attachment and Sausage Stuffer Kit: $45.25 total. (Don't get the $100 Attachment Pack that also comes with the dinky grater/slicer. Use the fifty bucks to get a quality food processor, instead.)

If you just went into sticker shock over the $350 price tag, you can always go old school and buy the LEM Products #10 Stainless Steel Clamp-on Hand Grinder for $78.71. They aren't shown in the photo, but it does come with three sausage tubes.

The hand-cranked units are more laborious, but you do get some pretty good bragging rights and Popeye arms out of using them. :) Some people also prefer them because you have better control over the grinding speed, which helps to keep the meat and grinder from getting too warm. And let's not forget that people happily used them for hundreds of years before electricity came along.

Either way you go, be sure to get the excellent book Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Chef Brian Polcyn. It's really all you need to get started, imo, and they gear the book towards people using the KitchenAid or similar appliance.

StewHo · 4 months

Let me be the first to tell you it's a pretty big pool you're dipping your toes in. Processing your own meat is a lot of fun, especially because you can play with different fat/meat mixtures and seasonings and what have you. I just started grinding my own meat at the beginning of deer season and I absolutely love it. I make mostly deerburgers, but I have also done some pretty good venison breakfast sausage and a huge batch of elk link sausage. You really have to commit to it, but I promise it's worth it. This is the grinder I have, and while it is expensive and bulky, it's well worth it. It comes with a sausage stuffing aperture and three different stuffing tubes, so I can grind the meat, season it, add cheese/jalapeños/whatever, and then change attachments and go straight to stuffing. If you decide to drop the cash on a high-quality electric grinder, there's no way you'll decide that maybe you don't want to do your own precessing anymore. Plus, kill a few deer and save the 130 bucks or so you'd spend on processing for each one and it pays for itself in a single season.

Grinding is no sweat, but making sausage is a little more involved. You'll want to set aside an entire day for grinding and stuffing, and probably another for smoking (if smoked sausage is what you're after). A major resource that's helped me out a lot is lets-make-sausage. This guy knows his shit, and if you follow his advice and recipes you'll be the hit of every cookout in no time. Any questions you have about meat grinding/sausage making, don't hesitate to contact me.

LordTwinkie · 4 months

i grind my own meat using my kitchen aid stand mixer with grinder attachment. never made sausages though.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD5OXtndNn0

DovGoldbery · 4 months

Sometimes it's the potatoes that make the meat.

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