KitchenAid KSMFGA Food Grinder Attachment, White

I have had a KA grinder attachment for many years, but due to a few moves I was left with only one grinding plate, and the housing had begun to crack (where it connects to the mixer) from use, so I thought “why not just buy a new one?”I unpacked the new unit and put the old one up on the shelf (fortunately I didn’t toss it), and my first surprise was the new (improved?) design of the pusher. As shown in the picture, the old pusher was a nice, smooth, tubular unit, while the new one was basically a flat piece with a clumsy cutout for your hand, and a round disk at the bottom for pushing the food. I not only found this to be odd-looking and clumsy to use, but the worst part is that the food easily works its way around the small disk and accumulates to the thinner shaft so that after pushing, you lift it to add more food, and some of the clinging bits then fall off and land in various places. I put up with this for maybe 10 minutes, then cleaned it, tossed it in the drawer and grabbed the pusher from my old unit.The second surprise was the redesigned cutting blade, as part of the draw for buying a new unit was to have a nice, new, SHARP blade. As I have tried to show in the photos, the old blade appears to be a part that may have started as cast iron, then machined as needed, whereas the new blade (albeit nice and shiny) appears to be stamped from a piece of metal (assuming steel). I didn’t think this would be a problem, but I could not have been more wrong.I have bought boneless lamb legs to make my own ground lamb for years, and have never had a problem till now. I know what I am doing, and I cut the lamb into the usual pieces, roughly 3/4” square. Shortly into the process it not only became difficult to push, but what was coming out was more like mush and could not be easily pulled off the grinding plate. I unscrewed the retainer and found that bits of sinew had wound all around the prongs of the blade, and also around numerous holes in the disk, and it took several minutes to clean before I could resume. Again I stress that I have done this numerous times with the old unit and never had this problem!Unfortunately I had purchased this 5 to 6 weeks before my first use. Had I used it sooner it would have been returned, but now I am stuck with it. Fortunately I kept the old unit, so I have at least salvaged the pusher, the blade, and the cutting disc on the old unit was also different than the two that came with the new one, so I now have three discs to use. But shame on KitchenAid for cutting quality on what WAS an outstanding attachment!

I initially purchased this meat grinder attachment to grind my own sausage however, I ended up using it after a hunting trip to grind up some elk. While I didn’t fully anticipate that the grinder would make it through the grinding process given how much meat we needed to grind (roughly 40lbs), I was pleasantly surprised that the grinder held up and seems like it is ready for more. I have listed a few pros and cons for the product below:Pros:1) While the product is plastic, the material quality is exceptional and is very durable.2) Having two grind sizes was very beneficial, I did a double grind (large first, then the smaller size) and the quality of the ground meat was as good if not better than the store.3) The attachment was very easy to take apart and clean. The product material cleaned very easily and all of the mechanical pieces were easy to remove and reassemble.Cons:1) This grinder had a very hard time grinding fat. As we processes the elk meat, we added beef fat to accommodate for the lean meat and the fat caked to the inside of the grinder and auger forcing me to take the grinder apart and clean it every few pounds of grinding making it very time consuming. I was able to work around this by grinding all the meat on the larger grinder setting without fat and when I came back to do the finer grind, I added the fat and it didn’t bind up as much. With that said, this would concern me if I were grinding up even a few pounds of fatty beef or pork.2) The cutter needed to be cleaned throughout the grinding process to remove gristle that would tend to wrap around the cutter, which would add resistance to the grinder making it so that I had to push pretty hard to get the meat to grind.3) The plunger seemed a little flimsy and wasn’t very comfortable to push the meat into the grinder. it could start to hurt your hand after a while.All in all, I was very satisfied that with the product especially considering the cost compared to standalone meat grinders. I don’t believe that the product is intended to grind 40 lbs of meat in one shot however, for general use at home a few pounds at a time, this is a great product and I would certainly buy it again.

I am surprised this hasn’t been recalled. Every single time I have used this to grind meat, after a few minutes, some of the meat comes out with a dark grey substance. I ended up tracing it back to the center of the plate. The two metal components (blade and plate) are rubbing up against each other during the grinding process, and metal shavings are getting mixed into the meat. I am pretty sure that if you were to do a blood taste after eating this meat, there’d be high levels of METAL found in your results even if you were to remove as much of the grey substance as you can. I am shocked that this has such a high review. It is dangerous to be using this.

Got this product a month ago and finally decided to put it to use. It’s great, it does take a little time to grind the meat. But the issue, sometimes there will be black liquid that oozes out and is mixed into the grinded meat, I had to stop and pick it out and wipe the liquid and restart. After everything was done and I started to clean it… to my surprise, the washers in the back disintegrated from the friction and turning, that was the issue with the black liquid and spots. The pics show that one of the washer is totally destroyed, and what ever remained is stuck there and in the gap, there was supposed to be another washer but that is totally disintegrated.In the end… I had to throw out the meat that i have grinded…..

OK so it is a little tricky making sausages. There must be a knack to adopt so that one person can do it but we haven’t managed it yet but the benefits of making your own sausages cannot be over-stated so it is well worth the effort. It is also quite enjoyable and satisfying.

No matter how hard the retaining collar is tightened, it unwinds itself and becomes loose. I have complained twice to Kitchenaid but they have ignored both emails.

Fits perfectly but a bit disappointed about the amount of plastic. I did expect the body to be metal bearing in mind the machine it fits into!Some Chinese copies claim to be alloy.