Grinding meat at home will be difficult, especially if you are a beginner and do not know what meat to choose and how to process it. In cases like this, a food processor can be your bestie. Isn’t this something everybody loves?
We find using a food processor to grind meat so fascinating. With technology advancing, food processors are advancing too!! They have the best-perforated blades to get a perfect texture and moisture for ground meat.
Grinding your own meat will make you feel a little professional. However, you can also save money and protect your health without using store-bought meat. Be it a ribeye or leftover chicken from lunch, you can easily process it using the steps to get textured ground meat.
You’ll first need to clean, cut, and freeze your fresh or leftover meat to grind meat. Frozen meat is easy to process and will slide through a food processor’s blades without friction.
Cut the meat into cubes and freeze them until they have a hard outer layer. This will hardly take over 20 mins; meat freezes real quick. Do not make it rock solid. Blades will find it hard to move through them if it is hard.
Remove after the meat’s outer layer gets a little hard and put them in batches into the food processor blending jar and pulse it. Adjust the speed level and time until you get your desired texture.
Food processors can grind all types of meat; it should be boneless. For example, you can grind the meat from beef to duck for your hamburgers or sausages. You can even grind shrimp for shrimp pastes, halibut or scallops, etc.
If you are working on different meats at a time, clean the jar after completing the processing of one meat and switch to the other. If you are working on cooked and fresh chicken, mixing them will not be a wise choice. Instead, adjust the fat and meat ratio to get the best flavor and texture.
Grinding your meat gives you ultimate control over the fat-to-meat ratio, which is highly required to maintain a good flavor and texture to ground meat. Instead of buying it from a supermarket just go to the local farm and get the best healthy chicken you can get.
- Choose the right type of meat
You can only grind boneless and skinless meat in a food processor. So if you have store-bought meat remove the bones if they are still there, and if you are using fresh farm meat, ask your butcher to do it for you.
If the meat is cold and frozen, it will have an easy, smooth glide on the blades, ensuring a clean and neat texture. In addition, freezing will protect the natural texture of the meat.
- Do not over-process the meat
Keep a check on the texture of the meat inside the blending jar after every pulse because the tender chicken will grind sooner than other parts. So over-processing the meat will turn it into a paste which will not be useful for hamburgers or sausages.
- Do not dump the blending bowl of the food processor
You should only fill the blending bowl of the food processor halfway. Then, leave room for the meat cubes to rotate and grind properly. Usually, frozen meat will occupy less space; work in batches to avoid spilling and bursting.
- Clean the blending bowl as soon as possible
The kitchen gets easily contaminated. To avoid any food poisoning or illness, clean the things and equipment used to prepare the dish as soon as you finish cooking. For example, raw meat is highly contagious and gets contaminated very easily.
If you are storing the extra ground meat, store it in separate zip lock bags, divided into potions. This will ensure the meat is not spoiling completely. Then, use it for 4 days after freezing.
Grinding meat can be an effortless process using a food processor. However, sometimes store-bought ground has so much grease and water in the packaging. This is because of not having a proper ratio of fat and meat. Even the preserving process might affect the texture of ground meat. If you want to freeze your meat, do not add water or any liquids while grinding it. Instead, season it with a little salt and oil and freeze it using a freezer bag.
2. https://agrilifefoodsafety.tamu.edu/files/2011/03/Ground_Beef_and_Food_Safety.pdf