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KitchenAid stand mixer meat grinder attachment
After several bad experiences lately, I am interested in grinding meat at home. Does anyone have experience in this practice? I have a KitchenAid stand mixer and after some research, I am interested in buying the meat grinder attachment. However, there are literally dozens of weird Chinese brands on Amazon purporting to sell an identical set for much less. AliExpress is even cheaper.
Has anyone bought and used the KitchenAid version? Has anyone tried a cheaper version?
Thank you for your advice.
I'd suggest that when it comes to an item that will be in direct contact with your food, purchasing from a company whose products are tested and reviewed by an American food safety organization and who you could sue in the case of something going seriously wrong would be a good choice. The Chinese brands on Amazon or AliExpress might be selling the same thing from the same factories, but you'd have to trust that there aren't any concerning differences regarding metal fragility or toxic metals. I wouldn't make that choice.
My wife and I have used both the cheaper models and the more expensive KitchenAid brand models of the meat grinder. The TL;DR; is that we didn't have great experiences with either, but YMMV.
The cheaper unofficial grinder that we bought was from some home good chain (probably something like TJ Maxx or equivalent) and was all plastic. It worked "OK", but it felt cheap like it was going to break under use so we looked around to find the official attachment.
The official attachment was all metal and felt substantial, great! Well not so much, because we found that meat that was ground with it start coming out with odd dark flakes of something in it. We had thoroughly cleaned it before use, and we did so again and tried it more with the same result. We could not figure out the how or why of this, but we never felt comfortable eating the meat that was ground with it.
This doesn't mean that all these attachments are junk, but I wanted to share my experience here. And I'll not that this was something like eight years ago, so the selection you see now may differ substantially from we got.
Also, I'll make a note that properly clearing these things is not fun or quick, but I stress that you should not skimp on the cleaning.
Ok, yet another note, both grinder attachments were perfectly capable of grinding chicken and turkey, which I feel are strangely overpriced in supermarkets, so if you get your attachment working, it could save a lot of money if you buy whole turkeys on ssale at the holidays or boneless chicken in bulk at places like CostCo, Sam's Club, or Aldi (obviously these are US stores, I don't know where you live).
I have the official one, probably at least 30 years old now, that was used by my stepfather and now by me. He used it to grind his home grown meat and also to grind candied citron for his "fish food cookie" recipe. I've only used it for the cookies. I'd say the one I have has definitely stood the test of time; not sure how the new ones stack up. Might be worth looking for a used one on Ebay or something like that-- I also inherited his old, probably 40-50 year-old stand mixer, which I find superior to mine from the '90s. I think their old stuff is worth looking for. The old bowls are made of thicker steel, and I've never chipped the old paddle, but the new one chipped pretty quick.
The official one works well for us. We also tried a cheaper version, but it was harder to use and clearly inferior quality. My biggest tip would be throw all the parts in the freezer before you use them to reduce meat stickage and melting!