Costco's eye of rounds are pretty cheap, cube it and alternate running it through a grinder with eye of round. Good quality ground beef that way.
That is a great idea! Get the least expensive beef that is also super lean and add the pure beef fat to get your 80/20 meat to fat ratio!
Do you mean for beef franks?
What phrogpilot suggests is what I would do to make all beef franks. I would buy the least expensive beef per pound I could get my hands on and eye of round seems like one good option. Eye of round seems to be roughly 7% fat.
The
ACCURATE calculation for how much pure fat to add to make 20 pounds of sausage is
NOT intuitive, meaning 20 pounds of eye or round x 20% will NOT give you the correct beef fat number you need and is a
common calculation error. For simplicity and accuracy I have done the math for what it takes to make 20 pounds of sausage using eye of round that contains 7% fat and the extra 13% of pure beef fat need to get an 80% meat 20% fat ratio of beef sausage :)
Lets convert to grams so we aren't dealing with pesky pounds and fractions of pounds which are not the same as ounces (.2 pounds does NOT = 2 ounces but is really 3.2 ounces :eek::confused: )
20 pounds sausage is 9071.85 grams (g)
9071.85g of sausage =
7892.5095 eye of round (which has 7% fat included) +
1179.3405 pure beef fat (13% extra fat)
A simple and
ACCURATE set of formulas to use going forward when you want to make sausage using eye of round (that contains 7% fat) and pure beef fat to get a sausage of 80% meat and 20% fat ratio is the following:
- #total amount of sausage in grams = ? (meaning figure out how much sausage you want, 5, 10, 15, etc. pounds and convert that to grams)
- eye of round in grams = #total amount of sausage in grams x .87
- pure beef fat needed in grams = #total amount of sausage in grams x .13
- #total amount of sausage in grams = eye of round in grams
+ pure beef fat needed in grams
Example:
I want
20 pounds of sausage which is 9071.85g, so...
eye of round in grams = 9071.85g x .87 =
7892.5095g of eye or round (17.4000049869 pounds = 17 pounds 6.4oz )
pure beef fat needed in grams = 9071.85g x .13 =
1179.3405g of beef fat (2.6 pounds = 2 pounds 9.6 ounces)
So 17 pounds 6.4 oz (7892.5095g)
+ 2 pounds 9.6 oz (1179.3405)
=
20 pounds of sausage (9071.85g)!
I know the math lesson is more than people bargained for but I wanted to ensure things were accurate and backed up hahaha.
So I hope this helps explain what you can do to make all beef franks with your saved beef fat :)