Our yearly Texas hunt was a huge success and we came back with 11 white tails (2-10's, 3-8's, 6 does). Cut out all me roast, steaks, and other nice chunks of meat. I had 6 out of the 11 deer. I had some set aside to send to butcher to make sausage and about a 65 qt yeti of de-boned meat for me to deal with. After cutting out as much roast and other cut of meat, I was still left with a ton. And that is not counting the meat set aside to go to butcher. I trimmed all the meat and had right at 50 lbs of cubed meat for burger. I was using my buddies Cabelas 1 hp #22 Carnivore grinder. I picked up the LEM bags and tape kit (works fantastic) and a couple of plastic totes for the meat.
I decided to place the meat in the freezer to let it firm up some for about 2 hours. This was advice from my neighbor and it worked exactly like he mentioned. The question came into whether or not to grind twice for simple burger and such that will be placed into the meat bags. So I began, and it went without a hitch. His grinder went through that 50 lbs of meat on the 1st pass about as fast as I could feed it. No issues and nice looking meat. I decided to take the larger plate off and install the finer plate, just to see for the second run. I placed the 1st pass meat in back into the freezer for about 30 min or so, just to get it a nice chill. Took it out, loaded the hopper and started the 2nd pass through the smaller plate. Very very slow. Gristle and such kept plugging and getting hung up on the blade. After fighting with it, I decided to just run it a 2nd time back through the larger plate. Which still looked like a good grind. I decided to kill 2 birds with 1 stone and installed the fill tube along with the grinder plate and blade. Went very nicely and a good pace. I was able to grind 2nd time and fill my 47 LEM 1 lb game bags, tape them and in freezer in about 30 min.
So my questions are:
Did I do something wrong on the 2nd grind with the smaller plate?
Do you really need to run it through twice?
Can you just simply run it through once through the smaller plate and be done with it?
We use our ground meat mostly for chili, spaghetti, taco meat, and just about anything that most folks would use ground beef for, we use venison. I want to get use to this process so i can try and make my own sausage. My sausage bill from the butcher was $552. No I did have approx 130 lbs of sausage, but still. he charges 3 lb for the pork, I can get family packs of Boston butts here on sale for $1 / lb. Sure there is a lot of work involved in making the sausage, but that's the fun part. And it seems that this will be a yearly family trip for us, so the equipment could pay for itself in the first year.
