Meat Grinder Uses

A multi-purpose mechanism

Although, as Americans, we tend to buy most of our meat pre-packaged from grocery stores, many people still use old-style meat grinders in their homes. Meat grinders are oftentimes used to create various meat ingredients for sausages and other types of meat dishes. However, they can also be used for grinding different types of ingredients or seasonings used in foods.

Meat grinder design

The basic design of most meat grinders has not changed much over the years. Manually operated meat grinders, since their inception, have been manufactured mainly from cast iron. There are various meat grinder parts such as the clamp, which is much like one you would see on a workman's bench and which are used to affix the meat grinder to a table or counter. The meat grinder plates are electro-plated with a smooth finish and feature a hand crank that is designed to grind up to two to three pounds of meat per minute. Typical, hand-operated designs include cutting plates rotating against a cutting knife. This will produce small or large bits of ground food usually between 3/16 of an inch to 1/2 an inch.

Grinding foods

Meat grinders are perfect for all kinds of meats, including pork, beef, veal, turkey, chicken, duck, venison, and even vegetables. The food items are hand fed into the grinder through a funnel that is located on the top of the grinder. A spiral auger is used to drive the food into the cutting blades and then into the meat grinder plates.

Electric meat grinders

Although electric meat grinders are a bit more complex in their design than manual meat grinders, they still serve basically the same function. Automatic meat grinders are equipped with two to three different sized meat grinder plates.

For example, an electric meat grinder might have a 3/16 inch, a 1/4 inch, and a 1/2 inch meat grinder plate for a range of grind sizes. Some automatic meat grinders even come with pushing tools and extrusion tubes that aid with fitting your sausage meat into its sausage casings.

When the meat jams or becomes too clogged up to operate, automatic meat grinders have a function that allows you to reverse the direction of the motor in order to clear the clog. Automatic meat grinders are much faster than manually operated meat grinders allowing you to process a larger amount of food in a shorter amount of time and with much greater ease.

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