Thursday, October 25, 2012

Ground Beef

I started with my little moulinex multipurpose grinder/shredder.
I think I wore it out.

Then I moved onto the new meat saw grinder.  I broke it.  

Two days old, and kaput.  Not happy.  Dad ripped it apart and fixed it.  Shoddy craftsmanship.  Probably made in China.  It's not likely to break again any time soon though!
After Dad's repair job it works better than before I bought it.  It zips through everything.  I am very pleased.

I don't usually do ground beef, preferring stew.  Ground beef is pretty cheap at the grocery store, however,  the sheer size of this job was daunting.  Doing ground beef was much less time consuming than trimming all of the fat for stew.

We decided to skip the ribs- we aren't fans anyway, and instead trimmed off all the meat for ground.  Along with the shanks, the flank that didn't get used for jerky, and bits of trim here and there, it really added up!

I have one quarter left to do today, and then tallow and stock to finish.

4 comments:

  1. Ooooo, Nice meat saw. Love it! That whould be handy. Thank goodness your Dad could fix it. Do you run your ground thru twice or 3 times?

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    1. Thanks.

      I started out running it through the little one three times, progressively getting smaller. With the big one, twice seems to be sufficient.

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  2. Wendy,
    I like stew meat and did buy it for soup with loads of vegetables. My kids had to be watched and forced to eat the few, tiny chunks of tender meat in their bowl. One day, I found I only had ground beef. I used that and the children preferred it. So, I never cooked the stew meat again.

    Actually, when I discovered that stew meat was just scraps, I started cutting my own chunks. That was much cheaper.

    It's great you dad could fix your machine! I am so out of luck if anything breaks!

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    1. Scraps, lol. Sorry. There isn't an inch of that cow that I'd call 'scraps', but yes, stew and ground are generally made from the cheaper, tougher cuts, like the legs. Being lazy, I'm making my stew from the roast trimmings, where I don't have to cut off so much fat and sinew.

      Well, it was only two days old, so definitely should have been returnable, but we probably would have ended up with the same problem. It was really a design flaw. Dad is amazing with all sorts of mechanical stuff.

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