A local meat cutter shop has done our grinding and made custom sausage for my family for years. Good outfit, but they made a mistake in my last batch.
If we have 40 lbs. of meat to grind they do not mix it with anyone else’s meat. So we are careful to have hamburger, sausage etc. done in 40 lb. batches and combine with other family members to get that right. We do NOT want our meat mixed with others, who may not take the care we do in keeping it clean, fresh, etc. We know the unfrozen age, care and cleanliness of the meat we bring in.
I noticed on their bulletin board that they make several unusual kinds of sausage, in minimum batches of 25 lbs. I ordered a 25 lb. batch of Thuringer, and we weighed out 25 lbs. of frozen venison. In late spring I phoned to ask the status of my Thuringer, and was told they had no record of it. He checked around and said that they had 50 lbs. of Thuringer ready in the name of my daughter-in-law. She didn’t know anything about it. OK, mix up of some kind but I paid for it and picked it up.
It is good but… three times now I have tasted fine grit or sand in the sausage. The second time it dawned on me that the grit came from someone’s venison that they mixed in with ours. I am FANATICAL about having no mineral dirt or grit on meat. Moss, leaves, evergreen needles and even hair I can clean off and be OK but no grit. That’s not all my deer meat in the sausage.
They are a good outfit handling a a lot of meat in small batches and have done good service for us. I will mention it and take more precaution next time around.
That would ruin the whole batch for me, no grit! I would take the whole batch back and demand a refund.
Yikes. :holdon:
May have been some new help doing something they they weren't aware of also. :shrug:
And that is the reason I bought a grinder when I was hunting.
I have not been out deer hunting in a few years but like Jerry, all the cuts and grinding were done by our daughter. She is pretty efficient in "designing" custom sausage and has come up with some good tasting "stuff". Bought her an electric grinder before last year's deer season.
Batch will be ruined for me, I can't even stand it when I'm eating eggs and bite into an egg shell :puke:
Yep, it messes with my mind.
OTOH, it is a small town, no others offer this service, and I don't want to burn any bridges. It was tiny bit of problem in two of the sausage logs so far, of at least a dozen eaten. The shop has been really good for decades and at least 11 of my extended family have them do our hamburger and sausage. I will talk to them, haven't yet.
I have a half horse Cabelas grinder and prefer the finished hamburger I grind myself. But the lazy me finds it easier to have it ground, wrapped and frozen. Next time I'd buy one horse grinder or bigger, though this one chews through a deer rapidly. On an elk or if we grind a whole deer, we have to stop and let it cool a time or two.
I bet somebody dropped a whetstone into the grinder accidentally :innocentwhistle: