Is it worth for me to invest in a meat grinder?

To determine this you have to answer a few other questions.

• Are you frequently cooking at home?
• Do you want to save money?
• Are you a hunter and process your own meat?
• Do you want to control what goes into your food?
• Are you interested to try different meals?
• Are you willing to do 15 minutes extra work, including clean up, once in a while?

If you answer yes to a couple of these questions, keep on reading, as buying a meat grinder might be right for you!

To control what goes into your ground beef. Buying beef roasts on sale, cutting them up and grinding them will assure you that you know exactly what is in your ground beef, but unless you get a very good deal on the meat, it will, in general, not save you much money.
I am a stickler when my family wants some Steak Tartar and do not trust many meat markets to grind it for me, so I will buy a whole Beef Sirloin Tip, seam it out, cut the meat I need to grind for my Tartar and cut the rest into pieces for Beef Stroganoff, Senffleisch, Goulash or Stew and, after using my Jaccarder, into pieces for Shish-Kebobs. This drastically limits contamination of the meat that we eat raw.

On the other hand, did you ever add ground pork to your ground beef? It is worth a try. It will make the consistency of your hamburger more delicate, refines the taste and saves you money.
We mix 50% ground beef with 50% ground pork to improve many dishes like stuffed peppers, stuffed cabbage, meatloaf, meatballs, Salisbury steak and even hamburger patties, we even make our own “Hamburger Helper” dishes out of ground pork. Many older meatloaf recipes actually call for a meat mixture of Beef, Pork and Veal.
Now buying ground pork at the market is almost even in price with ground beef and will just enhance your ground meat experience.
On the other hand places like Gordon Food Service sells two boneless Pork Boston Shoulder Butts in a vacuum package at today’s prices for $1.29 with the total weight of 16 to 18 pounds. (This is a 2021 update: You still can find pork shoulder butts on sale for a very decent price, so if you find them you can still save quite a bit of money, if you compare it to the ground pork price in the meat counters.)

If you have a way of processing these at home you could save a nice amount of money!
Read my post on what you can use this piece of meat for.
Consider also that boneless pork loins are nowadays frequently on sale for $1.69 in our local supermarkets or warehouse stores, so grinding even these will save you over $1.00 per pound to ground beef.

Meat Grinders come in many forms and sizes, manual or electric or as accessories to other machines. In my consideration many of these smaller machines or accessories are toys.

After selling my meat store I still wanted to play around with meat somewhat, after all if you are in the business most of your life it is in your blood. So with the help of this wonderful world wide web I researched this topic and as I did not know how deep I wanted to immerse myself into this “hobby”, I decided to start on a smaller scale and buy the meat grinder on the left.

This machine has no problem to grind 20 pounds for one of my regular meat sessions. So a lot slower and less powerful than the machines I was used to in the store it is still adequate for this job.

Grinding 2 Pork Butts, which I do about every two month, is usually enough for 4 rolls of Lunch Meat with some taste variations some ground pork to blend with ground beef and to mix up a couple of pounds of Pork Sausage Patties. In the end this let’s us have some excellent lunches and meals and keeps over $50.00 in my pocket every time I do it. Spending less than 1 hour on it, including cleaning the grinder and a couple of stainless steel bowls. Within two sessions the money I spend on the grinder was recovered.

As a hunter you will be able to grind your meat together with some fatter pork and make your own chili meat or Sausage Patties, just make sure that all meat is cut small enough and completely thawed. There is a stuffing horn with it, but in my opinion you are better of with a dedicated meat stuffer for this job. Please read my post on Sausage Making Equipment.

The equipment featured here is the equipment we use.
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