This was around March of 2022.

Getting ground meat from the store makes life easy. Then I started questioning the meat. How fresh is the meat they use to create the ground meat? By my understanding, ground meat is usually something that’s made from the left over cuts of meat that either don’t form a whole cut or that didn’t sell and are close to expiring so the stores try to get rid of it by mixing it in with other meat.

That’s why I wanted to get some fresh meat and grind it my self. I’ll talk about a few basic things, and mistakes that I made along the way.

Mistake number one, (really I think this was the only mistake) was letting the meat completely thaw before putting it through the grinder. The meat should be somewhere between frozen and thawed. The reason the meat should be this way is due to what happens if you try to grind the meat when it’s soft and juicy. Those juices and up shooting out of the grinder as they’re going through the machine and end up all over your shirt, or the surrounding area.

That’s why it’s important to use meat that’s still partially frozen. Something that you can cut into, but that isn’t super soft is the right texture according to my experience.

So getting to the actual grinder; the one that I’m using is a KitchenAid meat grinding attachment that combines with their mixer. I’d say it worked really well. It comes with a set of different output screens? With holes that have different diameters depending on how find you want your ground meat to be, as well as a sausage casing filling attachment (which I have yet to use maybe I should make some boudin?) My parents like their meat on the chunkier side, I tend to be more on the side of medium ground.

After grinding the meat I ended up making some beef kotlet, which is essentially just a fried up seasoned meat patty. I paired it with some buttered rice and sweet peas. For the seasoning I added some minced onion, garlic powder, salt, pepper, then mixed everything together while adding an egg. In case someone doesn’t know, if you don’t add egg into your ground meat, it will tend to fall apart when cooking. The egg acts like a glue holding the meat together.

As a side note, I’d like to talk about the different types of ground meat that we see in the store. Usually you see the ground meat and it has some percentage number next to it. That percentage number is an indicator of how much lean meat there is in the ground meat, compare to the amount of fat. A higher percentage here means that there is more protein (it’s leaner) compared to a lower percentage which means there’s more fat.

That’s about it for this post. Hopefully you enjoyed reading!

I’ll probably post the recipe for my meat patties at a later time. I’m thinking of having separate posts for recipes that way if someone wants to go through my recipes it will be easy to find without having to read through my stories haha. I actually also ended up making some burgers by combining the brioche bread that I made, as well as the freshly ground meat.

As always, thank you!