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As someone who mainly focused on cooking savory meals and avoided making sweets, I didn't know much about the wonders of the best stand mixers until I married one. Well, I married my wife, and she had one of the best KitchenAids. Grinder Sausage
Over the years, I've learned how versatile this machine is, especially when used with the best KitchenAid attachments. These add-ons make use of the mixer's torque and power to perform a whole repertoire of tasks. There's an attachment for spiralizing vegetables, sheeting homemade pasta, and even one for chopping vegetables like a food processor.
My favorite attachment is the meat grinder, which lets me make my own sausages and ground meats. Here are my experiences with it.
KitchenAid has two grinder attachments, and the main difference is that one (model FGA) is plastic and the other (model KSMMGA) is made entirely of metal. We prefer the metal grinder, which is why it is the subject of this review. The grinder comes in a convenient hard Styrofoam case where you can use to store all the included implements.
Out of the box, the grinder feels heavy duty and durable. It weighs about two and a half pounds. After doing a little research, I found it's best to put it in the freezer a few hours before you plan to use it for sanitary purposes. This decreases the chance of bacteria growth from an increase in meat temperature. Consequently, instead of storing my grinder in the nice Styrofoam case, I keep it in my freezer.
I mainly used the KitchenAid Meat Grinder Attachment to grind large slabs of meat and to create my own concoctions. For example, one of the first dishes I made was a half beef, half bacon burger. I used black Angus top sirloin and pork jowl bacon. As a hamburger lover, I was impressed with the flavor of the burgers produced by grinding my own beef.
Using the attachment is simple. You choose the grinding plate size you want (I mainly used the coarse plate, which is recommended for burgers and chili meat), and then you insert the grinding screw into the main housing and cap it with the blade and grinding plate. Next, secure them with the collar, and turn the mixer to four and start feeding your meat through the hole in the food tray. You're supposed to cut the meat into one-inch cubes or smaller, but I didn't have any trouble feeding in long one-inch strips.
My wife liked that we were able to make fairly lean beer brats, too. We ground up a London broil roast and pork tenderloin, mixed the meat with plenty of seasonings and a can of beer, and let it mellow overnight. The next day, we used the sausage plate and stuffer to make our own "healthy" bratwurst.
Overall, the grinder elements are easy to clean if you rinse visible debris off immediately after you are done grinding. Unfortunately, there were a couple times when I was in a hurry and didn't have time to rinse the housing, grinding screw, et al., and it was much harder to get the little bits of ground meat off. The cleaning brush was useful in these instances. The plastic parts — the food pusher and sausage making accessories — are dishwasher safe.
My biggest issue with the KitchenAid Metal Meat Grinder Attachment is that there's usually a one-ounce chunk of meat left over at the end between the blade and the grinding plate. This goes to waste unless you're on the ball enough to freeze the chunks after each grinding job and maybe make a stew sometime down the road.
Making sausage wasn't as simple as I wanted it to be, but I can't really blame the attachment since it was my first time attempting the process. I also suppose a wider feeding mouth would have been nice when stuffing in sausage. With a wider mouth, I also wouldn't have to cut the pieces of meat as small and could have allowed the KitchenAid to do more of the work.
If you own a KitchenAid stand mixer and like to eat ground meat and sausages, this attachment is a must. It's intuitive to use, gives you the freedom to make unique concoctions, and it cleans up easily. And at $100, the KitchenAid KSMMGA Metal Food Grinder Attachment is much less expensive than a dedicated meat grinder and takes up less space.
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