alan fitzby | Wednesday, July 15, 2009
It will take some time to trust the Rival 2275-WN Electric Food Grinder. It growls and groans and wobbles and whines and squeaks and strains as it grinds the meat to perfection!
The grinder is only 200 watts, so I'm not going to overload it. It likes totally defrosted meat, rather than slightly frozen. With meat cut to 3/4" x 3/4" x 2", the machine seems most happy, making the least amount of racket.
I ground some chuck steak first using the fine attachment, which was a mistake because it quickly became clogged, so I switched to the coarse attachment and it was best. I will save the fine attachment for a second pass if I need the meat ground really fine.
The coarse grind came through looking marbled, so I made a small burger and the texture was very pleasant, without that McD's dry sandpaper feel. A second coarse pass certainly came out as a more uniform mixture, but the slightly rough and bumpy texture was thankfully still there.
Tendons and ligaments collected around the spring and cutter, so that needs watching. It looks like the inner ring of holes stop producing when the trash wraps around the spring. Grinding four pounds of lamb without cleaning caused no problem, but the 2.5lbs. of chuck required a cleaning halfway through.
The casing did not warm up much to the touch, but the shaft was quite hot, meaning the motor must be hot too, though too hot, I don't know...