Grinding meat might sound like a dull and lame excuse for a culinary art, but it could not be any more of a great cooking skill than it already is. First, you must know your cut of meat and type of meat before you begin to grind.

How fine or thick of a texture you want and what you are ultimately after in what you’re making prior to ever grinding anything will also play a vital role. Once you have all these bases covered, you will have mastered a meat grinder with these tips and tricks to help you around the kitchen.

Keeping Ice Cold

If there is anything anyone learning how to grind meat should take with them as far as pertinent knowledge is concerned, it’s that this art should be practiced at very cold temperatures. That means that things should be maintained at a cold temperature from beginning to end.

This means keeping the equipment of your commercial stainless steel meat grinder below freezing and keeping your meat at the lowest temperature before freezing as you possibly can. This will ensure the most accurate cuts happen when grinding your meat. It will also allow you to grind multiple times over, as where you couldn’t do this at higher temperatures.

Don’t Strip the Fat

To make an acceptable grind, you also need to understand that there is more that goes into grinding meat than just the grind itself. You will need a basic understanding of how to utilize meat for the dishes that you are willing to prepare.

This means that you will have to know how to season and render your meat so that it tastes accurate and palatable to what you’re trying to create. Alongside understanding taste, you should know that fat that comes with your meat naturally gives the meat flavoring on its own.

Most people pass this up to trim it off and throw it away for health concerns or the fear of it making the meat too greasy, but this could not be further from the truth.

The First Pass

In many instances, going with the first pass or first grind will be just enough for the dish that you might be serving—especially if it calls for coarsely ground meat. However, if you’re trying to really blend your meat well for something like sausage or burgers, then you will want a few more passes through the grinder. This is to achieve the right consistency between fat and meat so that you can get the right texture and flavor that you’re ultimately looking for.

Grind Multiple Times

When you’re grinding meat, the acceptable number that is usually consistent with most grinds is three times to get the desired grind for something moldable yet still slightly chunky and texturized. Anything more than that will render something akin to potted meat or a spread of some kind.

There are uses for grinds of this kind with specialty dishes, but in most cases, three is the standard. If the meat is tougher than beef, like venison, then you might want to go with four passes, but more than that might make it too brittle when it comes out.

The reasoning behind this is that wild game like venison doesn’t usually have large fat deposits to add to the grind, which means that you end up with something like a mound of meat pellets instead of a proper grind. One way of getting around this is if you add egg and flour or bread after you make your grind to pull all the meat back together so that you can then use it as a grind as you had initially intended.

Waterfowl Rules

Because fowl, in general, is a leaner and more delicate meat, you will have to treat it as such. This means that, no matter how much of it you decide to grind for your culinary purposes, you will want to have one clean pass through and leave it at that, unless you want something that has no texture that will not mold, as a sort of meat paste.

Waterfowl and wildfowl of any kind need to have a very easy and light tenderizing to get them prepared for cooking. It might also be a good idea to go with one piece at a time and really let the grinder expel all the meat as you pass it through, so you’re not left with excess that is overly ground somewhere in the middle or toward the end of the grind.

Keep Clean

If you haven’t heard it already, you’re hearing it now. You should always keep your workspace clean. This is not just for sanitary purposes but for reasons of safety.

Anything can happen in the kitchen as you’re constantly moving around, and accidents are prone to happen, which is why it is always best practice to keep your work area clean. The best way to master this is to remember to clean as you go.

This literally translates to clean your space as you cook. If you get something out to cook with and you only need a portion of it, measure out your portion and put it back.

If you use a knife, clean it, and put it back in the rack. These little things will preserve your health and the potential for a massive headache after you’re done cooking as you look around a littered kitchen.

On the contrary, by cleaning while you work, you will have already multi-tasked and finished what you were after. This way, when it’s over, it’s truly over, and you can sit back and relish in your accomplishments.

Cleaning and Storage

The most important of all things is that you learn to clean and inspect your grinder. To do this, you will want to completely strip it down of all its mechanical parts and scrub it down to the best of your ability. You should also let it soak in hot water afterward.

Once you have done this, you will have cleaned most of the meat off and out of the grinder. When you store your grinder, you will want to reassemble it, but make sure you dry it thoroughly so you will get anything leftover that might have made it through the rinse.

Once you have done this, seal up your meat by wrapping it in plastic wrap or a storage container and freeze until you cook with it again.

Meat grinding is not a typical skill that everyone knows, but an important one to familiarize yourself with if you’re cooking for yourself at home. Even though it is somewhat of a process to put together and keep preserved, grinding your own meat is a treat for anyone who has ever tried it for themselves.

By experience alone, you will have mastered how to grind meat with these tips and tricks to help you along in your meat preparation and storage for your cooking needs.