Wednesday, July 29, 2009

KitchenAid SSA Sausage Stuffer Kit Attachment for Food Grinder

Use these lightweight plastic tubes to stuff your home-ground meats into natural casings for hand-made sausages. The small tube shoots out breakfast-sausage-size links; the larger one is great for boudin blanc, Italian sausage, and more. Each works in conjunction with KitchenAid's food grinder attachment, and the set comes with instructions for handling and stuffing casings. Tubes are dishwasher-safe. --Betsy Danheim
Customer Review: Poor excuse for a sausage stuffer
KitchenAid typically makes great attachments. I love the food grinder but this add-on is virtually worthless. It relies on the auger to pull the ground, seasoned meat from the small, shallow upper holding tray out into casings. There is way too much resistance in the meat path for this design to be effective. You can press firmly and get the meat to move a little. I think I would actually be more successful pushing the meat past the auger than relying on it to move anything itself. I might try it again with the auger removed and the motor of my KitchenAid off and see how I do! It works just OK when you are working with freshly seasoned, coarsley ground sausage and are using the larger bore stuffing tube. That is its only, marginal application. It is completely useless if you want to make finely ground sausage, emulsified sausage (like hot dogs), or if you make salami where the meat turns much stickier. Oh, and the small bore tube should just be thrown away on arrival. The auger simply cannot and does not pull many types of sausage through this attachment. Or if it does it is very inefficient. I have the old style wooden plunger and the meat still comes right up the sides of the feed tube as you apply pressure. Then, when you pull out the plunger, meat comes up with it and then when you press down again huge air bubbles surge into your casings. You end up with a mess, a tension headache, and casings stuffed with air. It is a bad design that is really only offered to make the grinder attachment marketable as a sausage making system. It is...kinda, I guess. If you are serious about making anything other than sausage patties then skip this and buy a vertical sausage stuffer which uses a piston to press the prepared sausage out into casings. Sausage making should be fun and it simply isn't with this.
Customer Review: Great beginner sausage stuffer
It's just a tube, but it seemed to work pretty good. Used my left hand to push the meat into the stuffer and the right hand to guide the sausage. Didn't have any problems stuffing. Hint: bought collagen casings from Bass Pro store. It was a little bit difficult to twist (it kept coming undone). Collagen is supposed to be much easier to deal with than natural and not too much of a taste compromise.


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