Those look good. The Chicago variety of hot dogs stay a lot moister. Turn them with a pincher instead of poking them. I just fixed some regular hot dogs the other day and have two in the fridge for snacking tomorrow while Ma’s away.
One more question. When you are finding twice, once through the coarse plate and once through the fine, why? Can’t you just do it through the fine once and have the same thing? Pretty green at this yet! Ha ha!!! My book should be here today to keep me in line from here out!
One more question. When you are finding twice, once through the coarse plate and once through the fine, why? Can’t you just do it through the fine once and have the same thing? Pretty green at this yet! Ha ha!!! My book should be here today to keep me in line from here out!
Two reasons, IMO:
To make sure you’re getting a uniform grind size/texture
To make sure you’re getting everything thoroughly mixed
To each their own but IMO sending it through twice will produce a better, more consistent product for all your recipes. Hope this helps, good luck.
Makes sense. When we did the brats, we coarse ground once and then seasoned and mixed. Today, I coarse ground, seasoned and mixed and then fine ground and then a final mix. The batch today came together a lot quicker and with less overall mixing. I’ll gladly grind twice to keep my paws out of that cold meat as much as possible.
One more question. When you are finding twice, once through the coarse plate and once through the fine, why? Can’t you just do it through the fine once and have the same thing? Pretty green at this yet! Ha ha!!! My book should be here today to keep me in line from here out!
Its virtually impossible to get the silver skin and tendon sheath out of pork plus the soft fat found on pork is a bear unless its darned near froze hard. If you’re grinding venison shank meat it too will or can bind in the grinder on the first grind using a small holed plate. Using the coarse plate for the first quickly reduces these issues to where they’ll be handled when using the small holed plate.
Small holed plates can plug and the meat will back up in the funnel along the auger. This stuff will turn to mush since it cannot get cut properly and this mush will flow to the outside edge of the plate where the knife doesn’t make contact and squirt out as burger. Its actually the consistency of starter baby cereal.
When a plate is blocked, your feed rate will fall off and you’ll notice you need to use more force pushing food with the tamper. Another “tell” can be the body of the grinder head that houses the auger getting quite warm. I check the grinder head often just by wrapping a couple fingers around it near the exit end. If its warm, I stop and check the plate for any blockage.
By making sure the meat to be ground up is in small enough chunks , 3/4″ to 1″ square pieces, you can almost eliminate these hassles. When cutting meat with a lot of silver skin, tendons and tendon sheath, slightly freeze it then cut it across its length in 1/2″ pieces and you’ll be good to go. When cubing your pork from butts if you come across any of the lacey, stringy, webbed fat between muscle layers just peel it out and toss it as there’s zero fat value to it and it WILL wrap up on the auger ahead of the knife and you’ll be cleaning it out.
Of course making sure the knife is sharp goes a long way to happy grinding. My suggestion, and this has been brought up in other threads, is to buy plates and knives that you can match and keep together for use exclusively with each other. Plates and knives develop wear patterns that are not necessarily the same from one knife or plate to another knife or plate so if you use three plates buy three new ones and three new knives. Bag each as a set and always keep them as such. The off season is a great time to be doing this.
Ok. We did the brats today. Double ground once through each plate. The 2nd grind we struggled on both grinders. I think putting the meat back in the freezer for a bit prior to the second grind would have helped. Letting the grinder cool might have helped also as would have putting the grinder components in the freezer for a bit. Still learning, but the finished product has been good so far. Today the plug from the cheddar brat were a hit!
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