5 Best Meat Grinders to Save Money and Eat Better

Have you ever thought about the cost of ground beef and sausage while you’re at the grocery store? Pound for pound, there’s a big markup on ground meats compared to the whole cuts they’re taken from.

Or maybe you’ve been unimpressed by the quality of the ground meat and sausage you get from the store. How fresh are those meats, anyway? Unless you have a personal relationship with your butcher, you can never know.

But whether you’re interested in saving money or eating better, there’s one solution: A home model meat grinder. They’re a surprisingly versatile tool for the home kitchen, and a great way to take control of what you’re eating.

I’ve used meat grinders both at home and in professional kitchens for years, so I’m hoping to pass on some of that experience to you. In this article, I’ll share the best meat grinders for home chefs, with options for a wide range of budgets and purposes.

Without further ado, let’s get right into the best meat grinders for at-home use. I’ll cover what makes each one great, as well as what type of home chef would find it most useful.

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1. Best Overall: STX Turboforce 3000 Electric Meat Grinder

If you’re serious about getting into grinding your meat at home, the STX Turboforce 3000 will give you everything you need. Its 5-in-1 design is surprisingly powerful for a home-use model, especially given its relatively low price. Add in a large meat hopper capacity and a great warranty, and you have one heck of a home meat grinder.

Equipped with a super powerful 3000-watt motor, the Turboforce is capable of grinding around 200 pounds of meat per hour. Combined with an extra large three-pound hopper, this gives it the best grinding performance available at this price. That’s the major difference between this grinder and the others featured here: It’s large enough and powerful enough to handle any grinding project you want to undertake – whether you need a sausage stuffer for homemade sausage, minced meat, deer meat grinder, etc. It’s a heavy-duty meat grinder.

Three different sizes of grinding plates (as well as a sausage-making plate) give the Turboforce 3000 a wider range of textures and consistencies. It’ll let you craft whatever specific recipe you want, from simple ground beef for hamburgers to coarse grind pork for sausage to a fine grind for aged charcuterie.

Overall, the only real downside to the Turboforce is its size and weight. It’s larger and heavier than almost any other home meat grinder, and therefore not a great choice for small kitchens. But if you have the space for it, this meat grinder gives incredible bang for the buck you’ll spend on it.

2. Best Value: Cuisinart Electric Meat Grinder

Kitchenware giant Cuisinart is one of the most reliable sources for low-cost, high-quality kitchen equipment. Their electric grinder follows suit, offering excellent meat grinding performance for under $100 — with the only drawback being that it’s quite small. If you’re looking for a meat grinder for casual use, the Cuisinart Electric Meat Grinder is a great starter model.

If you looked at my first recommendation and thought “That’ll never fit in my kitchen” or “What am I going to do with all those attachments?”, then Cuisinart’s meat grinder is a perfect alternative.

Though its 300-watt motor may look small in comparison to the other meat grinders featured here, the real trick is in how much torque the Cuisinart’s motor has. It’s capable of grinding meat of up to 3 pounds per minute (or 150-180 pounds per hour), more than enough to satisfy any at-home chef.

What I like most about the Cuisinart Electric Meat Grinder, though, is its simplicity: It’s easy to use and easy to clean. And for the casual home kitchen, those are big positives.

3. Perfect for Some: KitchenAid KSMMGA Metal Food Grinder Attachment

KitchenAid’s stand mixers are almost legendary among home chefs and bakers, owing to the tremendous range of attachments combined with their unbeatable durability. If you’re a proud owner of a KitchenAid stand mixer — or thinking of becoming one — their Metal Food Grinder Attachment is a worthwhile investment.

The Food Grinder attachment connects to a KitchenAid stand mixer to power through any sort of food you might want to grind. That means ground meats and sausages are on the menu, but so are ground spices, flours, and nuts. There’s no need for a separate sausage attachment. This makes it the most versatile grinder on this list and also the most specific to the products you need to use it.

Is this meat grinder attachment for everyone? No. But it’s small and lightweight enough — while remaining powerful through its attachment to the stand mixer — that it’s worth considering for your kitchen.

4. Best Upgrade: LEM Products Mighty Bite Electric Meat Grinder

Home cooks with a larger budget for kitchen equipment should turn towards the Mighty Bite for their meat grinding needs. It packs a lot of power into a compact and well-designed frame, offering the best in performance and easy portability.

The Mighty Bite represents a substantial price increase over the Cuisinart grinder recommended earlier. But what you’re paying for is its power: A big 1000-watt motor with incredible torque that can power through any meat-grinding project.

The design of the Mighty Bite is my favorite of all the grinders in this review. It builds on the simplicity of the Cuisinart and reinforces it with more power and weight to keep the grinder stable while you’re using it. And with three different sizes of grinding plates and a sausage stuffing plate, you’ll be totally prepared for any recipe you want to make.

Overall, I say that the Mighty Bite is worth the extra investment for someone who wants a meat grinder that will last for decades.

How to Choose the Best Meat Grinder for Home Use

With those products in mind, how can you know which one is right for you? In this section, I’ll cover the qualities that I look for when I’m recommending a meat grinder to a friend. Read through them and ask yourself a few questions, and you’ll be able to narrow down your choices to find the perfect fit.

Size

The biggest difference between home and commercial-use meat grinders is their size, followed by their power (more on that in a moment).

When you’re looking for the best meat grinder for home use, I’d encourage you to ask: How much space do you have to store it? And how much counter space do you have?

Limitations of size and kitchen space will be the biggest determinant of which meat grinder to get. For example: My “best overall” recommendation is a fantastic machine for the price, but it’s also quite large — maybe too large for your kitchen. But something like the Cuisinart Electric Meat Grinder takes up so little space that it can be used in almost any kitchen.

If you’re not sure quite how much space you have, I’d encourage you to take measurements in your kitchen. Then, compare those measurements to the dimensions of the products that you’re looking at.

Power

The main thing you’re paying for when you buy any meat grinder is its motor. The housing of any given meat grinder will use about the same amount of metal and cost roughly the same. But the motor can range from a small 300 Watts to a massive 3000 — and the price changes to reflect that.

Of course, the more powerful the motor, the faster and more efficiently a meat grinder will work. But how much power do you need in a home meat grinder? That depends on how much you plan to be using it.

If you’re mainly looking to make your sausages, breakfast patties, and burgers (i.e., you’ve got some good burger seasonings), a less powerful motor won’t hold you back. Even a 300-watt motor is more than capable of handling a few pounds of meat at a time.

But if you’re a hunter who’s looking to grind and freeze their seasonal catches, a more powerful meat grinder will be a tremendous time saver.

Basically, if you’re trying to make more ground meat than you’ll use in a single sitting, I recommend investing in a more powerful grinder. It will save you a lot of time and hassle in the long run. Learn more about electric meat grinders here.

Attachments

The other place where you’ll end up paying more for a meat grinder is in its attachments. The simplest grinders feature little more than a meat tray and a single extruder. This makes them fast and easy to use but limits the textures you can achieve with your ground meat.

More elaborate meat grinder setups will include an array of disks and extruder tubes. These will let you fine-tune the texture of your ground meats, and make it easier to craft flawless sausages from scratch.

In general, I trend towards simplicity in my kitchen equipment. You can always buy more accessories for a good base product. But if you have specific recipe ideas in mind — or just like the idea of customizing your equipment — go for a meat grinder with a lot of attachments.

Care and Maintenance

There’s a hidden cost to every meat grinder, too: The cost of your time and attention during cleanup! Because you’ll be working with raw meat, it’s absolutely vital that any meat grinder you buy be easy to clean. If a meat grinder has any hard-to-reach nooks and crannies, it’s a bacterial disaster waiting to happen.

Suffice to say, this is the area where I disqualify a lot of meat grinders from my consideration. Look closely at the design of any meat grinder you’re considering buying. Does it have anywhere that looks hard to clean? How easy is it to disassemble?

Having had experience with many meat grinders, my four choices (listed above) all pass the test for easy cleanup. I can thoroughly recommend them based on this alone.

Price

Last but certainly not least: How big is your kitchen budget? Once you’ve considered each other category, you’ll need to compare what you want with what you can afford. Smaller meat grinders are generally less expensive, as are less powerful ones. For casual home use, these will suit most chefs’ purposes.

Larger and more powerful meat grinders are more expensive, but they’ll allow you to work faster and more efficiently. If you’ll be grinding large quantities of meat, they’re a worthwhile investment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can You Save Money Grinding Your Own Meat?

With a little bit of ingenuity, you absolutely can save money by grinding your own meat. But especially if you’re comparing the quality of the meat you grind at home versus what you can get in a store, the difference is night and day.

Looking for meat that’s on sale is a great start for saving money. So is asking butchers for “off cuts” at a discount. Most chain grocery stores will have sales on their whole meat at least once a month; keep a lookout in your local flyers, or sign up for email coupons at your local grocery stores.

How Heavy Is A Meat Grinder?

Most home meat grinders weigh in a range from 8 to 15 pounds. The more powerful the motor, the heavier the meat grinder will be.

It’s important to note here that you don’t want to go for the lightest meat grinder you can find. A heavier base is a more stable base, and it will make your grinding faster, safer, and easier.