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A cutter in Kansas City asked why I trim silverskin before grinding and now I'm second guessing 12 years of habit
I always trim silverskin off my grind meat because that's how I was taught back in 2012 by an old butcher named Ray who ran a shop off Truman Road. Last Thursday a young cutter from a shop over in Kansas City asked me why I bother, saying he just runs it all through a 3/16 plate twice and nobody complains. So I ran a side by side test with 5 pounds of chuck each way and the difference was not subtle. The double ground silverskin batch came out gummy and it clogged my grinder twice, which cost me about 8 minutes and a lot of cursing. My patties also held together way worse on the flat top, they wanted to crumble at the edges when I flipped them. I get that labor is money and silverskin is annoying, but skipping it to save 10 minutes on a 50 pound batch is a trade I will not make. Am I being stubborn here or does anyone else think silverskin belongs in the trim bucket no matter what the clock says?
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the_holly4d ago
Temperature is the angle nobody talks about. Silverskin gets way harder and more elastic once the meat drops below about 40 degrees, so if that young cutter is pulling trim straight from a cold walk-in, running it twice is basically grinding rubber bands and that's where the gummy bite comes from. Let your trim sit and warm up a bit before the second pass and even stubborn silver breaks down more than you'd expect. Still not saying skip the trim, but a lot of the "double grind fixes it" crowd is really just fighting cold meat and never figuring out why. And clogging your grinder twice on a five pound test tells you plenty about what it's doing to the plates on a real run.
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