Additional attachments in meat grinders: necessary or not?

Electric meat grinders have become real multifunctional devices today. They not only grind meat, but also allow you to cook sausages and kebbe (these are meat dishes, for those who don’t know). In addition, they can cut, shred and grate vegetables, as well as squeeze juice — there are special accessories for this. You can often hear the opinion that all these additional functions and accessories are unnecessary bells and whistles and just a marketing ploy. But we, as testers, strive to find out whether this is really so.

Kebbeh, kubeh or kibbah is a popular dish in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. It is an elongated patty made of minced meat with the addition of cereals and filling (meat, cereal, vegetables and other variations). These tubes can be prepared in various ways: fried, baked, grilled, and served with salads or yogurt. Kebbeh can be prepared manually by rolling out the minced meat, for which you will need a meat grinder with the smallest grate. Alternatively, you can use a special plastic attachment.

Almost every meat grinder has a kebbe attachment, although we rarely cook this dish ourselves during the testing process, preferring something simpler, like regular sausages. Nevertheless, we decided to try kebbe on the Panasonic MK-GM1701 meat grinder and are ready to share the results so that you can decide whether it is worth doing. For the dough, we used 600 g of beef (in the East, lamb is more often used), 200 g of bulgur (in Eastern recipes, bulgur of the finest grind is usually taken), 400 g of champignons, one onion and a little cheese (for the filling, we chose a slightly Europeanized version). Bulgur was soaked for a couple of hours, then the meat was minced. We combined the minced meat with squeezed bulgur and spices, passed the mass through the meat grinder again and mixed thoroughly until a dense dough was obtained. Hollow cylinders were formed from this dough, which were then stuffed with mushrooms fried with onions. The formed tubes were fried in oil, having previously sealed the ends. Our little tip: it is better to freeze the dough from meat and bulgur a little before forming the tubes, this makes the process easier.

Making kebbe is fun and delicious, but the process takes time. Many people prefer to make the kebbe top by hand, arguing that the attachment needs to be installed and thin tubes are difficult to stuff. Instead, they make less neat, but easier and faster to prepare forms. We also came to this conclusion when we tested the Polaris PMG 2292AL Silent silent meat grinder and tried to make chicken kebbe. It is not for those looking for an easy way, but the result is really impressive.

However, the kebbe attachment is not just a marketing gimmick. Although these are just two pieces of plastic, they do not take up much storage space and do not increase the cost of the device, but allow those who love to cook to try new recipes.

Interestingly, some manufacturers do not always explain the use of the kebbe attachment in detail in the instructions. Sometimes the instructions simply mention that the attachment is designed for «cooking lula kebab and sausages» (spelling preserved).

The meat grinder kit may include one or two tube attachments of different diameters. Meat grinder manuals often recommend using natural casings, such as intestines, to stuff sausages, which may put off some users. In our tests, we used natural collagen casings, which is much more convenient. We conducted tests on various models of meat grinders, such as Gemlux GL-MG5 Pro, Moulinex HV8 Pro ME687832, Redmond RMG-1216-8, Redmond RMG-1244-6, HT-976-005, Garlyn MG-2000, Garlyn MG-3000, Lex LX-4001-1 and others. Sausages and hot dogs always turned out, although sometimes this requires the help of a second person, since the process can be inconvenient alone.

Homemade sausages, prepared with your own hands, are made quickly and are incomparable with store-bought semi-finished products. They can be cooked in a variety of ways: pan-fried or grilled, baked, or sous-vided.

The only disappointment that may arise is that some of the mince remains on the auger and does not fit into the casing. In one of the last tests, we had 110 grams of mince left. Despite this, we still consider the sausage stuffing function to be very successful. It is especially useful when you need to prepare a large amount of mince, for example, for homemade semi-finished products.

For this, metal drum attachments with different shapes and sizes of holes are used, or (less often) discs with knives, like in food processors. We tested these functions on various products, such as radishes, cucumbers, carrots, apples and cabbage. The results may vary depending on the correct speed of the meat grinder, the quality, hardness, juiciness or looseness of the product, as well as the quality of the attachments themselves.

Sometimes, when doing quality slicing and grating, there is a lot of waste (like with the Garlyn Grind Pro), and apple peels often get stuck in the drums. These attachments are most useful when processing large quantities of food: for preserves or if you need to feed a lot of guests.

Sometimes the chopping is fast, but the attachments get clogged with pieces of vegetables (for example, as with the Redmond RMG-1216-8 model), which get between the grater and the vegetable cutting unit. This reduces the efficiency of the graters, and you have to regularly remove and clean the attachment, which takes time. Therefore, in such devices, large volumes of chopping can be tedious, but processing several carrots to save time and effort is quite justified.

What type of vegetable cutter will be included with the meat grinder often remains a mystery, and it is better to focus on reviews and overviews. For example, multifunctional meat grinders from Garlyn (MG-5000, Grind Pro, NLO 2.0), Redmond (RMG-1216-8, RMG-M1250-8), Polaris (PMG 2585 RUS), as well as Lex kitchen machines (LXMX 4101) and other models can offer different options.

Dough attachments are usually included with kitchen machines, as it is easier to prepare dough, for example for pasta, in the bowl of such a machine or in a planetary mixer. We have tested attachments such as the Lex LXMX 410 and can confirm that homemade spaghetti is prepared quickly and without problems, and the dough residue is only about twenty grams.

But we didn’t like using the cookie-making attachment in one of the meat grinders we tested – we could have done just as well and possibly faster without it (model Kitfort KT-2110-1).

The process of using dough attachments can be complicated and inconvenient: a lot of time is spent picking out stuck dough, rolling and cutting it, and then washing the attachment itself. Our conclusion: this labor-intensive process is not worth it.

In addition, the instructions often offer a dough recipe that can lead to tasteless results, as in our case — the cookies turned out hard, too sweet and tasteless due to insufficient oil. Although such problems can vary depending on the model of the meat grinder, you should not choose a device just for the presence of a dough attachment.

Most often, these are auger juicers, which, we remind you, are not designed for loading whole fruit or very large pieces and which are not suitable for preparing large quantities of juice.

Our tests showed that the auger juicer attachment in the meat grinder does not always achieve the same level of juice extraction quality as specialized auger juicers, which are capable of extracting juice from almost any fruit and vegetable. For example, the instructions often warn about the impossibility of squeezing juice from hard vegetables, such as carrots. We conducted a stress test and tried to do this, but the auger creaked, captured small pieces of root vegetables, and the front locking part cracked at the first drops of juice. However, the same device (Garlyn Grind Pro) coped with apples and oranges without problems.

Other models of meat grinders from this brand (Garlyn) showed different results when using a juicer attachment. For example, the Garlyn NLO 2.0 model squeezed 410 grams of juice from a kilogram of carrots, leaving the pulp slightly damp and minimizing the amount of unprocessed waste. At the same time, the Garlyn MG-5000 model did a little worse: in 4 minutes 29 seconds it was possible to get 300 grams of juice, while it was necessary to actively tamp the vegetables with a pusher, which was tiring. As before, it is important to test a specific model and carefully read the instructions before buying.

As for squeezing juice from citrus fruits in a screw juicer, we liked the results in various tests. However, it is worth considering that it is better to remove the seeds before use, as they can crush and clog the nozzle. In contrast, such problems do not arise when using a citrus press.

It is not so common to come across models that grind potatoes (and carrots) into mush instead of shavings (for example, Garlyn NLO 2.0 and Garlyn MG-5000). We tested this function by mixing the mush with large shavings of potatoes and carrots, also obtained from the same meat grinder. The results were excellent: there was almost no waste, the time for one operation was less than two minutes, and the consistency of the potato pancakes was very tender.

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When testing additional attachments for meat grinders, we encountered mixed results: some worked great, others were mediocre, and some did not live up to expectations at all. There were cases when attachments worked, but with the understanding that we would not want to use them again. We also found that the same attachments can work differently in different models, but general trends also appear, and we tried to identify them.