Using Cold Meat During Processing

When making any type of meat product, whether it is a cured or fresh sausage, jerky or bratwurst it is very important to ensure that you are avoiding the danger zone, which are temperatures between 41 and 140 F. During any step of the process including grinding, mixing, or stuffing, keeping the temperature of meat as close to 30 F is vital. It will keep your meat safe for consumption and give you a better finished product with a longer shelf-life.

When making any type of meat product, whether it is a cured or fresh sausage, jerky or bratwurst it is very important to ensure that you are avoiding the danger zone, which are temperatures between 41 and 140 F. During any step of the process including grinding, mixing, or stuffing, keeping the temperature of meat as close to 30 F is vital. It will keep your meat safe for consumption and give you a better finished product with a longer shelf-life.

What are ways to Avoid the Temperature Danger Zone?

Before grinding store the meat in a freezer, when you start the grind the meat should be almost or partially frozen. Remember, meat freezes at 27° F to 29° F, not 32°F like water. You might want to consider returning the meat to the freezer for a short period of time between the first and second grind, especially if your meat has been out in the open for longer than anticipated. Though it might take 20 minutes to get it back down to below 30°F this can actually speed up your process as the meat will grind much better. After grinding the second time store the meat in the cooler while you are preparing to mix and stuffing. When the meat temperature is between 41° F and 140° F, bacteria can duplicate in 20 minutes, meaning a single cell of bacteria can replicate to over 1,000,000 in just over 8 hours. (Note, there is not a bacteria in the world that can tell the difference between 40° and 41°F, this is done because these temperatures are set based on Celsius)

Like mentioned above, the freezing point for meat is not 32° F, it is lower at 27° F to 29° F. Besides keeping the meat from reaching the Danger Zone it also has other benifits to processing. Working with pertially meat makes the meat move down the throat of the grinder and pass through the fnife and plate easier and faster. This puts less strain on your equipment and your meat.

What are the Benifits of Freezing Meat during processsing?

As the meat warms up and the fat becomes stickier it becomes more difficult to move down thr throat and to pass through the knife and plate of the grinder. Freezing the meat before grinding also prevents the fat from smearing avoiding more difficult protein extraction and better texture to the end product.  

What is an Acceptable Grinding/Stuffing Speed?

The difference between higher and lower temperatures of meat when grinding is substantial. When grinding at 39 F meat temperature, the grind took about 43 secs to grind 4.2 lbs of meat or about 1 lb per 10 secs. When the temperature of meat was dropped to 31 degrees the grind time decreased to about 21 secs for 4.5 lbs of meat or about 5 secs per pound. This makes a huge difference when processing large batches. The lower temperature of the meat is more efficient on the second grind.

Because the ground product is being fed into the throat, knife, and plate, there is more chance for the meat to get stuck to the sides and not feed through th auger properly. The colder temperautre meat will help avoid these issues. When stuffing using frozen meat helps speed up the stuffing process, especially when stuffing snacks sticks or using high-fat content meat blocks.