Grinding deer is not the same job as grinding a few pounds of chuck. The meat is far leaner, so it carries almost no fat to lubricate the auger; it is threaded with silverskin, which is the connective tissue that wraps around a grinder’s knife and stops it cutting; and the work arrives all at once, because you are processing an animal, not a dinner. Those three facts decide which grinder to buy and how to use it.
Silverskin is the actual problem
A meat grinder cuts when a rotating knife shears meat against the holes of a fixed plate. Silverskin does not shear — it is elastic, so it stretches, wraps around the knife, and then everything behind it stops cutting and starts being pushed. That is what people mean when they say a grinder “smeared” the meat: the knife stopped cutting a while ago.
No machine fixes this. Trimming does. Take the silverskin off before it reaches the grinder, and the difference between a good grind and a paste is largely made before you switch anything on. A sharp boning knife and a pair of good kitchen shears do most of that work.
The two grinders
The LEM Big Bite #5 Electric Meat Grinder (0.35 HP)is the pick for anyone processing whole animals. LEM publishes a 0.35 HP motor with the Big Bite auger, in a stainless head and housing with metal gears. The Big Bite design takes a larger bite of meat per rotation, which means it feeds faster and is less prone to bridging — the thing that happens when meat packs at the throat and stops descending. It is the grinder serious hunters and home butchers use, and it costs accordingly.
The STX Turboforce 3000 Electric Meat Grinderis the right buy for most people, most seasons. It ships with three cutting plates (fine, medium, coarse), sausage stuffing tubes and a kubbe attachment, and it will grind your own beef, pork and poultry as well as game. Its own honest weakness matters here: the gears are plastic by design, as a sacrificial part if you overload it. On a deer, “overload” usually means feeding it untrimmed sinew or pushing warm meat, both of which are avoidable.
Keep everything cold. This is the rule.Warm fat smears rather than cuts, and smeared fat coats the plate and turns the grind to mush. Put the grinder head, auger, knife and plate in the freezer for half an hour before you start, and hold the cubed meat at near-freezing — firm at the edges, not frozen solid. If the grind starts looking pasty mid-batch, stop and put everything back in the cold. It is not the machine.
Fat, and why venison needs it
Deer is extremely lean, and straight ground venison makes dry burgers and crumbly sausage. The standard answer is to add pork fat or beef fat at grinding time — commonly somewhere around 10–20% for burger and higher for sausage, depending on the recipe you are following. Trim deer fat off rather than grinding it in; it carries much of the strong flavor people associate with gamey meat and it does not render the way pork fat does.
Cube the fat and the meat separately, chill both hard, and alternate them into the throat so the mix is even rather than striped.
Plates, and the two-grind method
Both machines here come with multiple plates, and the plate is what sets texture. A coarse plate for the first pass, a fine plate for the second, is the standard method for burger and sausage: the first grind breaks the muscle down, the second makes it uniform. Chill the meat again between passes.
If you are only doing one pass, use the coarse plate for chili and the medium for burger. Fine alone, on a single pass through untrimmed venison, is the fastest route to the paste problem above.
How they compare for game
| Grinder | Published motor | Build | Best for |
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| LEM Big Bite #5 Electric Meat Grinder (0.35 HP) | 0.35 HP, Big Bite auger | Stainless head, metal gears | Whole animals, season after season |
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| STX Turboforce 3000 Electric Meat Grinder | Electric, 5-in-1 | 3 plates, sausage tubes; plastic gears | A deer a year, plus everyday grinding |
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Which one to buy
Buy the LEM Big Bite #5 Electric Meat Grinder (0.35 HP) if you take game most years, process it yourself, and want a machine that will still be doing this in a decade. The metal gears and the faster auger are exactly what a whole-animal weekend asks for.
Buy the STX Turboforce 3000 Electric Meat Grinder if a deer a season is the extent of it, or if you also want to grind your own beef and make sausage through the year. It is a lot of grinder for the money, and the sausage tubes are included rather than extra. Our main meat grinder roundup compares the two on general home use.
And if you grind once a year, consider not buying one at all. A food processor will grind meat adequately for small batches with the right technique, and a processor is a machine you will use every week.
