The Day I Finally Bought a Meat Grinder

For thirty years I ground beef for the burger special at a diner on Detroit Avenue in Toledo, six days a week, by the case. When I retired at fifty five, I figured I was done with grinders for good. Carol and I would just buy what we needed at the store like everybody else. That lasted about two years, until my grandson Tyler talked me into the ALTRA LIFE Electric Meat Grinder sitting on my counter right now.

What got me first was the price of ground chuck. I would stand in the meat aisle at the Kroger on Reynolds Road watching the number on that little sticker climb every few months, and I would think about the trim I used to turn into burger for pennies a pound back at the diner. Carol noticed I was grumbling about it every Sunday before our grocery run, and she is not a woman who lets me grumble for long without doing something about it.

Tyler is twenty two now and works at an auto parts warehouse. He had started grinding his own venison after deer season and would not shut up about how much better it tasted than anything from a store case. He sent me a link to that same ALTRA LIFE grinder, the 2300 watt one with the black housing, and said, Grandpa, you ground meat for three decades, you know exactly what you are looking at.

So I looked it over the way I would look over a piece of equipment for the diner. Two stainless blades, three grinding plates for coarse, medium, and fine, a sausage stuffer tube and a kubbe attachment I did not even know the name of until I looked it up. Forty nine dollars and change felt low for something with that motor size, and I will admit I was skeptical. Cheap grinders used to jam on me at the restaurant and I did not want that fight at home, not after thirty years of dealing with equipment that quit halfway through a Saturday rush.

Carol ordered the ALTRA LIFE grinder before I could talk myself out of it. It showed up on a Tuesday, and I had it out of the box and on the counter by Wednesday, right next to where the old stand mixer used to live.

Thirty years of doing this by hand at the restaurant, and here was a machine the size of a bread box doing it better in my own kitchen.

First thing I ran through it was a three pound chuck roast I had cut into strips and half frozen the way I used to for the diner, it grinds cleaner when the meat has got a little stiffness to it. The ALTRA LIFE motor did not bog down once, not even on the coarse plate with all that connective tissue. Took me maybe six minutes start to finish, including cleanup of the auger, and cleanup is where a lot of grinders lose me, because I am not spending twenty minutes with a toothbrush picking fat out of a housing.

Since then it has not left the counter more than a week at a time. I grind chuck roast into burger for Carol and me most Sundays, I have done venison for Tyler twice, and I made my first batch of Italian sausage in March using the ALTRA LIFE stuffer tube, fennel seed, a little red pepper, casings from the butcher counter. Carol said it tasted better than the ones we used to buy from Manny's on the west side, and Manny's has been in business since before I was born.

I will not tell you it is the same machine I used at the restaurant, it is not, that one cost more than my truck. But for a home kitchen it has held up through probably forty pounds of meat a month for going on eight months now, and the only thing I have replaced is one of the plastic stuffer tubes that cracked when Tyler dropped it on the tile. ALTRA LIFE sent a replacement without much of a fuss, which counts for something in my book.

The math is what got me though. We used to spend close to nine dollars a pound on good ground chuck at the store. Buying whole chuck roast on sale and grinding it ourselves with the ALTRA LIFE, we are closer to five, five fifty a pound. Over eight months that has added up to real money, more than the grinder cost about six weeks in, and I have not touched a tube of store bought ground beef since Easter.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you asked me over coffee whether it is worth it, I would tell you the truth, same as I would tell anybody sitting at my kitchen table. It is not going to turn you into a butcher overnight, and you will probably ruin your first batch or two figuring out how cold the meat needs to be and how hard to push it through. But if you are already buying ground meat every week and wincing at the price, or if you just want to know what is actually going into what you are feeding your family, the ALTRA LIFE grinder paid for itself faster than I expected. I am not going back to the meat case for ground beef, not when I have got Carol's grandkids coming over expecting real Sunday sauce.