Years ago we used to grind and blend a huge percentage of our animals. A friend of mine said he and his family didn’t grind anything during butchering. He would cut all the roasts and good steaks the way they liked them and everything else got chunked and frozen. They would thaw a package of trim meat and run it through the grinder attachment on the KitchenAid that sat on the counter. His reasoning was that it was easier and more versatile, you can make fajitas or grind for a burger with chunks of meat but you can’t reconstitute burger to make a pan of fajitas.

We started doing it that way and really prefer it. We rarely eat a burger and have come to prefer tacos, soups, and dishes like stroganoff with small cubes of meat as opposed to ground.

Of course I did get the grinder out and grind almost an entire deer this year. My wife shot a 9 year old buck that was leather tough so I made pastrami out of the loins and we ground the remainder. The steaks the boy and I tried off the loin were as tough as anything I’ve ever chewed on so it was the exception for us.

Last edited by TheKid; 12/19/23.