Grinding your own beef burger with a food processor: a tutorial

A few weeks ago, a regular reader that I admire a lot (Alison Fowler, check out her work), mentioned to me that she was curious about grinding her own meat but didn't have a meat grinder of her own. I insisted that she didn't need a meat grinder to share in the joy of home-ground meat, and that a good-quality food processor does the trick. For condo dwellers like yours truly, items like barbeques and stand mixers take up precious real estate where coffee makers and deck furniture need to go, so you do with what you have.

I managed to squeeze all necessary instructions to Alison within a single tweet but since then I've had a few other inquiries about the method, so I decided to devote a post to it. After the break, I've put up a tutorial in pictures on how to successfully grind your own meat.

Now, why bother doing this when good ground beef is readily available? Two reasons. First, the texture is amazing, a serious improvement over store-ground meat. Grocery stores are aiming for the typical consumer, which they believe likes a finer grind. I use a very coarse grind, and it's won over everyone I've cooked them for. Second, you can play around with the cuts that you want to experiment in protein and fat content as you like, mix meats together or add in smoked products such as bacon. It doesn't take very long either; from steak to dinner time took a total of one hour and five minutes.

Today I ground up a piece of sirloin acquired from my go-to butcher, Saslove's Meat Market on Wellington street in Hintonburg. This meat was as left-wing as you get: local, grass-fed, growth hormone-free, antibiotic-free, sang kumbaya and ate roses (a lie), all the good stuff that despite my jokes I believe in. But Mike, you exclaim, I thought you're against using sirloin as burger meat! Well, fine readers, you are absolutely right. I did rail against the practice a couple of months ago right here on this blog. However, I am also experimenting with every cut a bovine has to offer to see what are the optimal cuts to use, balancing available fat, protein and cost. Also, as you'll see in a moment, my food processor burgers aren't exactly your run-of-the-mill mush.

Remember when working with meat to regularly wash your hands and work surfaces, and don't contaminate the utensils used to cut non-meat ingredients with your raw meat-slicin' knives. Raw beef won't kill ya - in fact it's darn tasty - but as you grind meat you increase the available surface area for errant bacteria to grow, so it's better to practice good food hygiene than not!

So grind on, burgerventurers!

Body Parts

The blog and Twitter account have been quiet for the last few days on account of Eastover celebrations and familial cheer. We're clearing our way through leftovers in the Mike L. Burger household and ready to return to burger mania in short order. For now, a piece on body parts.

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend about beef - this is not as rare as you would think - and he told me a curious tale. He told me of a steakhouse in Toronto without a standard burger on its menu, but that would gladly take any cut you wish from their selection of aged steak and grind it up to your specifications for the Monica Belucci of burger fantasies. It sounds delightful at first, but on second sober thought I feel that this is a choice of gleeful excess over rational appreciation of a cow's body parts.

While I say time and time again that burgers can be made from essentially anything - meat or vegetable or even fruit - many people do envisage beef when they think of burgers. It is therefore important to have a conversation about the parts of a cow, and what I feel is or is not suitable to use for burger meat. As I embarked upon this blogging adventure, my education of the noble beef-side was high on my to-do list. I'm not getting into breeding here, just cuts; for breeding I'll take a trip out to a rancher for a good conversation about the best beef breeds.

I won't go into gory detail, but if any discussion about animal body parts makes you squeamish, you should probably reconsider eating meat altogether.

More after the break.