The Home-Ground Bacony Brisket Burger

A few months ago I bought the Food Grinder attachment for my KitchenAid Stand Mixer. Ever since I bought it, the grinder has been sitting in its box tucked away into the corner. I bought it because I have visions of making my own sausages. Since we haven’t reached that moment in Charcutepalooza the grinder hadn’t been used.

The other day I had a craving for burgers. Shortly thereafter I saw a tweet from The Only On King where they mentioned that they would be serving a burger that night made with part bacon and part brisket. That’s when I got the brilliant idea to replicate this burger by grinding my own meat.

I already had some of my homemade bacon in my freezer so I went out and got me a small piece of brisket with a good deal of fat on it for grinding. The actual grinding process was really easy. I put the individual parts in the freezer so that they would be cold. When the time came I quickly assembled the contraption and ran everything through the grinder twice. Clean up was even super easy. I ended up using a ratio of 1:2 ratio of bacon to beef.

Perhaps my favourite thing about grinding my own meat is knowing how many animals went into the making of my burger. Since I made my bacon from a full piece of belly I know that there was only 1 pig involved. And since the piece of brisket was also whole, we’re talking one cow. When I think about ground beef too long I get freaked out knowing that one burger could potentially contain hundreds or thousands of cows. Totally gross!

This was a pretty darned good burger if I do say so myself. Imagine a really fresh burger with the smokey goodness of bacon infused throughout. Because the brisket had a good deal of fat and of course because of the fat in the bacon, my burger was not dry at all.

Now that I know that grinding my own meat is so easy, I think I’ll be doing a lot more of it. I like being able to control the types of meat in my ground beef and also knowing just how fresh it is. I can’t wait to experiment grinding my own chicken and turkey.