Yesterday I decided to try making ground beef myself using an old electric
meat grinder I inherited. I believe the grinder is about 40 years old. It
belonged to my grandmother, who passed away in 1973, and then my father, who
passed away in 2003. I don't know how much my grandmother used it, but I
know my father only used it once, around 1980, and then gave up on it. I
felt about the same way yesterday, frustrated and about to give up too!

I bought a bottom round roast, cut it up into chunks, and began. I'm sure it
helps if you read the instructions, but they were long gone. There were two
disks with holes, one with large, pie slice shaped holes, and one with small
round holes. For some reason, I thought the disk with the small round holes
was the one to use (probably faded memories of such a disk on the meat
grinder at the butcher years ago).

It didn't take too long for the grinder to get all clogged up with white
connective tissue. At this point I decided the disk with the large holes was
probably the one I should be using. So I took the small holed disk off,
cleaned things up a bit, and put the large holed disk on. I started grinding
again, but still ran into major clogging problems. I kept taking the disk
off and cleaning it, and finally finished running all the meat through once.
The results weren't the greatest... what a pain... this just isn't worth the
trouble!

Since the meat wasn't ground to my satisfaction in one pass, I ran it
through again. Part way through this second pass, I discovered the source of
my problems. When I changed disks from the small holed one to the large
holed one, the grinder "knife" fell into my output bowl. I found it in the
ground meat on my second pass. I was trying to grind with no knife in the
grinder. No wonder it wasn't working so well! ;-)

I put the knife back into the grinder where it belonged, what a difference
it made. The grinding went very smoothly with the large holed disk and the
knife installed. Too bad I didn't figure this out earlier, and too bad I
didn't start with the large holed disk.

But I'm still not sure what the correct method is, with how screwed up my
efforts were. Do you grind once and only once, with the large holed disk? Or
two passes, both with the large holed disk, or two passes, first with the
large holed disk and then with the small holed disk? I'm looking for a
result similar in texture to packaged ground beef at the supermarket.

This particular batch of ground beef went into stuffed green peppers... the
classic recipe with a ground beef and rice filling, with tomato sauce. That
came out very good in spite of my grinding errors. I couldn't resist making
them... green peppers were on sale quite cheap this week (as was the bottom
round roast).

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