Huh, never made them. I thought they were cubed, and that grinder was fancy enough, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a setting that’s suitable.
I bought one of these cheap Chinese dealies, and it works great. (I actually have the 1800W, 2.4 HP model). It’s been working a hell of a lot better than the Kitchen Aid attachment, which we wore out after one use. (Well, we fucked up the motor on the mixer somehow–we overworked it.)
No such problems with this guy. It just chews through meat in what feels like a tenth of the time of the Kitchen Aid.
Oh, and if you do end up doing sausage, get yourself one of these vertical stuffers. (Unless you plan on doing a hell of a lot of sausage, in which case you’d want the 25lb version.) While the grinder linked to above does have adaptors for stuffing sausages, they really don’t work all that well; it really mushes up the meat and the fat unnecessarily and the texture of the sausage suffers. With the vertical stuffer, you can do five pounds at a time, and you just push the meat through. Takes about two or three minutes to stuff five pounds of sausage.
Update: did a batch of breakfast sausage this morning, and didn’t freeze the meat quite as much as I did yesterday. Same issue as the Kitchenaid, but not quite as bad - the grind was slightly mushy. This was after putting the cubed meat in the freezer for an hour.
So the key to a good grind regardless of machine is the meat must be almost frozen before grinding.
I see that other people downthread (though I haven’t read all of the posts yet) have said this, but I’ll chime in anyway.
I have one of these. Got it at a yard sale for $5, but it didn’t have any attachments. Just the grinder. I don’t eat ground beef often enough to grind my own, so I only use it for making shepherd’s pie after I’ve roasted a leg-o-lamb. It’s perfectly adequate for that, and less trouble than hauling out the Kitchen-Aid (if I had a grinder attachment). I assume it’s no harder to clean than a Kitchen-Aid attachment. After cleaning, I bake the cast-iron grinder disc in the oven to make sure it’s dry so as to prevent rusting.
Let me preface this: I don’t have a grinder and I don’t grind my own meat.
That said, I’ve heard (probably here), that this is the easiest way to clean your grinder: After you finish grinding everything, run a few slices of bread through the grinder. It soaks up the fat and cleans off the grease better than just a simple wash (which you’ll still need to do after, probably). Others who know more than me will have better tips for cleaning it.
Perhaps the reviewers just weren’t diligent in their cleaning.
I haven’t done this myself as I haven’t used a meat grinder in years, but chef Thomas Keller (French Laundry, Ad Hoc, per se) says to run some plastic wrap through the grinder. He says the plastic won’t get cut and it forces all the bits of meat out.
I generally put my cubed meat in a single layer in a casserole dish in the freezer for about an hour or so before grinding. I don’t get it quite to an almost frozen stage, but I get it to where the outside starts to harden and freeze. This definitely helps in keeping the fat and meat separate and the resulting ground meat from turning into mush.