I started to worry that my kitchenaid grinder was causing a bit of fat smear, so I decided to upgrade my grinder. I was tempted to get the $160 STX grinder, but was turned off by the fact that it has lower power than this one and nonstandard plates.
It's priced at $99, but it looks like it has a $10 coupon right now. So in case anyone else was looking for a cheap grinder, I figured I'd post my thoughts since I'm pretty happy with it. Here's a link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYSS1ZKT
It comes with a bunch of useless attachments, which I verified that they were indeed useless with a quick sausage grind test. It just shredded it and clogged up. Then after reading the instructions, it says it can't slice/shred cheese of meat. That's all I'm interested in slicing/shredding, so in the trash it goes. It also includes a stuffer attachment, which we all know won't work well. In the trash.
I tested it with semi-frozen brisket strips and chunks:
It did a coarse grind just fine, but slightly preferred the chunks over the strip:
I then did a second pass with a medium grind (after refreezing a portion of the coarse grind a little bit), and I was quite happy with the results. I tried bunching it up into balls, and it still needed a push from the rod to grind. However, if I just dropped a few coarse bits in at a time, I didn't need to use the rod at all. Nice!
Initial meat was 2.09lb, and after grind it was 1.98lb. So I only lost about 0.11lb to the process, which wasn't too bad. Cleaning was easy, however, I wasn't quite sure how to clean the parts since it said it can't go in the dishwasher. So I gave em a quick boil in PBW, a rinse and sanitize, and sprayed the moving parts with food safe silicone spray.
How do you all clean your grinders?
In any case, I was rather happy with it and figured I'd leave a review here in case it helps anyone.
It's priced at $99, but it looks like it has a $10 coupon right now. So in case anyone else was looking for a cheap grinder, I figured I'd post my thoughts since I'm pretty happy with it. Here's a link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BYSS1ZKT
It comes with a bunch of useless attachments, which I verified that they were indeed useless with a quick sausage grind test. It just shredded it and clogged up. Then after reading the instructions, it says it can't slice/shred cheese of meat. That's all I'm interested in slicing/shredding, so in the trash it goes. It also includes a stuffer attachment, which we all know won't work well. In the trash.
I tested it with semi-frozen brisket strips and chunks:
It did a coarse grind just fine, but slightly preferred the chunks over the strip:
I then did a second pass with a medium grind (after refreezing a portion of the coarse grind a little bit), and I was quite happy with the results. I tried bunching it up into balls, and it still needed a push from the rod to grind. However, if I just dropped a few coarse bits in at a time, I didn't need to use the rod at all. Nice!
Initial meat was 2.09lb, and after grind it was 1.98lb. So I only lost about 0.11lb to the process, which wasn't too bad. Cleaning was easy, however, I wasn't quite sure how to clean the parts since it said it can't go in the dishwasher. So I gave em a quick boil in PBW, a rinse and sanitize, and sprayed the moving parts with food safe silicone spray.
How do you all clean your grinders?
In any case, I was rather happy with it and figured I'd leave a review here in case it helps anyone.
