First Grinder and Ground Venison!

[polishshooter]

Gosh I wish I had known it was this easy, to think of all the "wasted" meat I threw away from the 20 or 25 deer I have killed and processed....


Saturday after I got my doe my wife bought me an early Xmas present, a $99 "Guide Series" .2HP #5 Meatgrinder, from Gander Mountain...

I had NEVER ground any venison before, because my wife had never liked "Deer Burgers" growing up when she HAD to eat a lot of venison, and I too had never cared for them myself when we had it as a kid. My Dad NEVER ground any venison eoither, just steaks, roasts and stew meat....

But my buddy who "taught" me how to cut up deer after I moved to Indiana (And convinced my wife you HAD to have a liter and a half bottle of Jim Beam open on the cutting board too....starting a family Deer Season TRADITION....) went in with his brothers on a used commercial grinder, which is like $3k new, and they grind a LOT of deer, virtually anything NOT a "prime" steak cut...and then use it for EVERYTHING they would normally use ground beef for...chili, meatballs, sloppy joes, BarBQ etc etc etc...and over the years when we were at theri house we many times would say, "You know THAT ground venison wasn't half bad....."


THEN he made us some summer sausage, which is kinda neat, caseless and baked, but tastes just like REAL summer sausage, adnd my wife started saying "Boy I wish we could make some summer sausage out of this one like Bob's..." to which I would always reply "Buy me a Grinder and we'll talk about it...."


One year, I stole my Mom and Dad's old hand crank grinder she never uses anymore just to try and make some sausage, and ground about half a pound in 2 hours and gave up....


But even after reading the literature on it Sunday after I got home...."cut meat into 1 inch cubes" "If grinder clogs, cease grinding and clean tendons from knife and cutters...." "works best with meat with little or no fat or tendons....) I was skeptical...."meat with little or no fat or tendons" is STEAK meat,. or at least nice ROASTS...I wanted to grind up the tough ARM roasts I can never figure out how to use but hate to waste and scraps and stuff that WASN'T "prime" meat....


So I was careful with my trimming when I cut up the doe on Sunday...the Arm roasts went into the grind pile, but it was taking too long to cut into "1 inch cubes" so I just started throwing in complete arm roasts...and any other scraps that were MOSTLY meat.....scraps with a lot of FAT or gristle went into the "Dog Treat" pile....I ended up with about 13 pounds of miscellaneous meat for grinding in a big stainless mixing bowl in the fridge...after wrapping and freezing all the rest.....



Tonight (OK, I'll be truthful, since today was a "Rehab" day, and according to my schedule was a "Laptop/office Day" at home...TODAY....) I put the grinder together after washing all the parts thoroughly and decided to grind a "little " meat on the coarse setting to see how it worked....

It was actually FUN!

It NEVER clogged no matter HOW hard I shoved the rammer thingie down the tube....and after I got all the smaller stuff ground up, and ended up with the arm roasts, I just cut them into long strips, getting bigger all the time until they barely fit down into the 1 1/2" stuffer tube, and they pushed down into the auger with NO problem...before I knew it I had the whole MESS of meat ground up...

So what the heck, I'll switch to the MEDIUM plates, and grind it AGAIN!

Once I got the "Rhythm" down, and the proper tools (after finding out bare HANDS doesn't cut it....) I got the whole 13 pounds or so ground up AGAIN in about 1O minutes!

When I cleaned it up, I found MINIMAL "tendons" and stringie stuff wrapped around the shafts and auger...and the stuff I cleaned out of the auger and tubes that I didn't know was in there and found during cleanup made 4 cute little "burgers" that I micro-nuked for the dogs and they GOBBLED up....



Right now, 5 pounds of the stuff has been mixed up with the spices from my buddy's 5 day Summer Sausage recipe and is in the fridge, the rest is wrapped and in the freezer....and while I was in the freezer I was looking covetously at the neck roasts, and some other minor roasts, and HECK, as good as it worked, maybe even the DOG MEAT packages to maybe grind up as well....

But I got to thinking...about all the "extra" meat, like between the ribs ( we tried BarBQ venison ribs before and it wasn't nearly as good as pig....), flank and belly (bacon) and odd scraps I threw away before..or heck, even some of the DOG scraps I've trimmed before...that went to waste....


I betcha if I had this grinder 20 years ago, I would have salvaged at LEAST 10 pounds of edible meat from EACH deer on average.....


I HEARTILY recommend the "Guide Series" ".2HP #5" Meat Grinder from Gander Mountain, if you are like me, a guy who processes one or two deer per year....



Although tonight when my wife got home and saw the nice looking deer burger in the big SSmixing bowl in the fridge, said, "HHHmmmm, you know we could start buying decent beef roasts on sale and grind our own lean burger that would be better for us to eat than the ground beef from the store..."


...I may have to give you ANOTHER report on it later after it's got some mileage on it...I MAY have to "upgrade....."

[Crpdeth]

Mike

I'm glad you are no longer wasting meat!

Like you say, ground venison is good (better) in any recipe that you use ground beef in... Another thing I like to do is mix it with wild pork, now that is the best sausage I've ever made.

Ground pork isn't bad either and makes a really mean chili... I once took a nice sized sow and after taking the straps out I ground the rest of her up, roasts, steaks, everything. Of course I had plenty of all that other stuff in the freezer too.


Thanks for sharing your story with us!


Crpdeth