This $75 KitchenAid meat grinder attachment is easy to set up and clean - and it's helped me make sausages and burgers from scratch at home

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KitchenAid

• KitchenAid stand mixers have become a bit of a status symbol for bakers in kitchens across America.
• Thanks to the broad range of attachments made for the mixer, you can use your KitchenAid to do much more than craft doughs or batters.
• Recently, KitchenAid released a metal meat grinder attachment that utilizes the mixer's power hub to produce affordable ground meats and sausages.
• If you already own a KitchenAid stand mixer, the meat grinder attachment is relatively affordable (currently $75 on Amazon), and it's built to last and easy to clean.

As someone who mainly focused on cooking savory meals and avoided making sweets, I didn't know much about the wonders of the KitchenAid stand mixer until I married one. Well, I married my wife, and she had the Professional 5 mixer. When we were looking for ways to save money, I started making bread from scratch every week. With the ice cream attachment, I could make hard-to-find ice cream flavors. There's a reason the KitchenAid mixer gets comments when people see it sitting on your counter: Home chefs know it's an awesome appliance.

KitchenAid recently contacted me to see if I wanted to try out their new Metal Meat Grinder Attachment. Here are my experiences with it.

My first experiences with the KitchenAid Meat Grinder Attachment

The KSMMGA, the model number for this product, is not the first meat grinder attachment put out by KitchenAid. The company has a popular "Food Grinder Attachment" (model FGA), which currently sells for about $33 on Amazon. The big differences are that the new model is made entirely of metal, it comes with plates and stuffer tubes, and the food tray is larger.

The grinder comes in a convenient hard Styrofoam case where you can fit all of the implements that it come with:

• Fine (3 mm), medium (4.5 mm), and coarse (8 mm) grinding plates
• A sausage stuffer plate
• Small (9.5 mm) and large (19 mm) sausage stuffer tubes
• Cleaning brush
• Food pusher

The package includes the main housing, a grind screw, a blade, and a removable food tray.

Out of the box, the grinder feels heavy duty and durable. It weighs about two and a half pounds. After doing a little research, I found it's best to put it in the freezer a few hours before you plan to use it for sanitary purposes. This decreases the chance of bacteria growth from an increase in meat temperature. Consequently, instead of storing my grinder in the nice Styrofoam case, I keep it in my freezer.

How the KitchenAid Meat Grinder Attachment performed

I mainly used the KitchenAid Meat Grinder Attachment to grind large slabs of meat and to create my own twisted concoctions. For example, one of the first dishes I made was a half beef, half bacon burger. I used black Angus top sirloin and pork jowl bacon. The results were delicious but incredibly salty. I'd recommend a 75% beef to 25% bacon ratio.

Using the attachment is simple. You choose the grinding plate size you want (I mainly used the coarse plate, which is recommended for burgers and chili meat), and then you insert the grinding screw into the main housing and cap it with the blade and grinding plate. Next, secure them with the collar, and turn the mixer to four and start feeding your meat through the hole in the food tray. You're supposed to cut the meat into one-inch cubes or smaller, but I didn't have any trouble feeding in long one-inch strips.

As a hamburger addict, I was impressed with the flavor of the burgers produced by grinding my own beef. I like figuring out ways to make cheap cuts of beef taste great. If it's lean, I put it in the sous vide for a long time. If it's fatty, I grind it up for burgers. And, compared to buying ground beef at the store, my cost-effective, home-ground patties were much more flavorful.

KitchenAid

My wife liked that we were able to make fairly lean beer brats, too. We ground up a London broil roast and pork tenderloin, mixed the meat with plenty of seasonings and a can of beer, and let it mellow overnight. The next day, we used the sausage plate and stuffer to make our own "healthy" bratwurst.

Overall, the grinder elements are easy to clean if you rinse visible debris off immediately after you are done grinding. Unfortunately, there were a couple times when I was in a hurry and didn't have time to rinse the housing, grinding screw, et al., and it was much harder to get the little bits of ground meat off. The cleaning brush was useful in these instances. The plastic parts - the food pusher and sausage making accessories - are dishwasher safe.

Some concerns about the attachment

My biggest issue with the KitchenAid Metal Meat Grinder Attachment is that there's usually a one-ounce chunk of meat left over at the end between the blade and the grinding plate. This goes to waste unless you're on the ball enough to freeze the chunks after each grinding job and maybe make a stew sometime down the road. This is only a minor gripe.

Making sausage wasn't as simple as I wanted it to be, but I can't really blame the attachment. This was my first time making sausage, and the casings kept breaking. Even with two people working on it, I was frustrated. Regardless, the actual meat was delicious, and I will likely give sausage-making another shake in the near future.

Overall, there wasn't much not to love. I suppose a wider feeding mouth would have been nice when stuffing in sausage. With a wider mouth, I also wouldn't have to cut the pieces of meat as small and could have allowed the KitchenAid to do more of the work.

The bottom line

If you own a KitchenAid stand mixer and like to eat ground meat and sausages, this attachment is a must. It's intuitive to use, gives you the freedom to make unique concoctions, and it cleans up easily. And at $75, the KitchenAid KSMMGA Metal Food Grinder Attachment is much less expensive than a dedicated meat grinder and takes up less space.

Buy the KitchenAid KSMMGA Metal Food Grinder Attachment on Amazon for $75

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